We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mark Emery. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mark below.

Mark, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

We are a tiny company, my wife Mary and I began working on wildlife films in 1989. We have worked many times for National Geographic television, BBC, Discovery channel, Disney Plus, Nature on PBS and many others. The mission is simple to share the wonders of nature through natural history filmmaking. Through films we have made and others we have worked on collectively, we have connected globally through television, the internet, streaming services, magazine articles, books, photography and music. We have multiple won Emmys, The Chris award, film festival awards and nominations etc. for our work but far more satisfying are the many thousands of folks with whom we have shared our films.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My wife and I have led an adventure-filled life. I started working at Silver Springs in Florida. At the time it was home to one of the largest reptile exhibits in the world. We would do 5, 1 hour shows daily, wrestling smaller alligators, putting them to sleep and explaining their life history to crowds that were often from out of state. We would also walk into a show area with 50 to 100 rattlesnakes on the floor, tails buzzing loudly. We caught a snake by hand and then milked the venom from these large, dangerous reptiles. We would have the snakes strike balloons out of our hands while explaining their place in nature and their value to the ecosystem. This was all developed by the original croc hunter Ross Allen. Ross was our mentor and hero for educating the public as a great storyteller while being one of the first advocates for dangerous wildlife. He was regular visitor to the Jack Parr and Johnny Carson show and traveled the world catching and importing species of note to his reptile institute. After working there, I lived on a large cattle ranch in a house on stilts far back in a Florida swamp, six or seven miles up a spring-fed creek. The land owners wanted to keep a presence there to help slow down poachers on their land. I stayed 9 months having many adventures catching dozens of wild hogs, rattlesnakes and alligators. After that, I ended up working for the man who invented underwater cinematography with Jaques Cousteau, Jordan Klein, Sr. He created the first underwater housings for cinema cameras. Soon Hollywood came calling and he started on the only underwater drama of the time, “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” He filmed for Flipper, Gentle Ben, James Bond’s “Thunderball” (1965), “Never Say Never Again” (1983) and “Jaws: The Revenge” (1987), “Splash,” “Cocoon” and many others. He wond the lifetime achievement award for inventing underwater cinematography. For 18 years I worked off and on with Jordan Sr. and his son Jordy in all phases of filmmaking. At that time I was also working half the year in Alaska in the remote village of King Salmon 300 mile from the nearest connecting road. I was gradually getting film jobs of my own and working on shark shows with the Kleins for The Discovery Channel. I have filmed rattlesnakes and alligators for National Geographic Television and later bears and salmon in Alaska both underwater and above. We have worked on many multi-year projects on all kinds of films, my first was “The Valley of Ten Thousands Smokes” for National Geographic Television. It told the story of a volcano in Alaska that exploded in 1912. Its ash cloud lowered the mean temperature of the northern hemisphere by two degrees for two years. To film, we walked this lunar landscape with 300 to 700 feet of ash for two years highlighting the massive destruction and eventual recovery of wildlife around this enormous volcano. The volcano, Novarupta, produced steam vents that inspired National Geographic to lobby the U.S. Congress to make it a National Monument and later a National Park. Now Katmai National Park has some of the largest sockeye salmon runs in the world and arguably the largest brown bear population as well. I was featured in the film and was the field producer and a partnership was born with National Geographic Television and others. We worked on a film with Olivia Newton-John for The Discovery Channel about Alaskan bears, “Seasons of the Salmon,” “Moose, Titans of the North,” “Wild Alaska” and many others. Both of my parents were classical musicians and as you can imagine I began playing piano at an early age but eventually being a rebellious youth playing jazz and rock n’ roll. Yes this all connects! Early in my filmmaking career I connected with arranger and composer Tracy Collins and together we wrote the music for over 320 television shows and many commercials including for some of our shows for National Geographic Television. As far as I know I was the only filmmaker that also wrote the soundtrack for my shows and for others. We wrote the music for the first two American-made shark shows for The Discovery Channel mixing hip hop beats with shark danger music. It went well. One of them aired for many years on the early version of shark week. While working on wildlife shows I was contacted by a friend and legendary Hall of Fame fisherman Shaw Grigsby to write the music for his shows and direct half of his shows while I was in Florida. The show took off and Tracy and I wrote fresh soundtrack music for each show for 20 years. At one time we had seven different series running our music. We wrote the opening music for Miami dolphin superstar “Larry Csonka’s North To Alaska,” “In-Fisherman TV show,” Larry Dahlberg’s “Hunt for Big Fish” and many others. I filmed at night with Navy Seals for a Navy Commercial with a live alligator and real live active Navy Seals. Quite a combo. We filmed fish and manatee inside NASA, underwater next to the shuttle launch site. While there we flew in helicopters with the pilots that rescued the astronauts after their space flights. We also filmed lions in Botswana in Africa that were killing elephants at night, tigerfish which is a ten-pound African version of a piranha, crocs feeding on a cape buffalo carcass and hippos that came up under our boat and threatened to flip us into the rather dangerous drink. We filmed deer for Nature on PBS for “The Private Life of Deer” and “Wild Florida,” a rare look at the incredible wildlife across the sunshine state for Nature on PBS. We ( my wife has been involved behind the scene on many shoots) won two Emmys for Cinematography for National Geographic Television’s “Great Migrations” and “Untamed America” and an Emmy nomination 2023 for “America The Beautiful” for Best Wildlife Documentary. I spent 55 days in blinds for a recent film trying to get a wild alligator attack on a Florida whitetail deer in the wild. I was lucky enough to get two close calls of alligators lunging at deer, one attack was an 8-foot horizontal leap shot in slow motion. A recent project of ours, “The Silver River Story” was designed to honor the friends who helped me get my start at Silver Springs in a cinema show. This film features a mostly African American crew that were Glass Bottom Boat guides. These patient and inventive drivers shared wildlife with roughly 12 million people for over 50 years each. This film was shown in theaters. Sometimes the boat drivers were there to answer questions after the film aired. We showed it in crowded theaters until Covid stopped that train. We just finished with a film that features a full symphony and a story about a river that was an important part of my youth. The piece was written first as a programatic symphony about the Ocklawaha River. It relates a father’s tales told to his son as they boated up and camped on the Ocklawaha River in the early sixties. Based on a true story it is a unique film that gracefully moves between a full symphony performing and the father and son as they experience a wild and free river and its later conflicts and challenges. Seminole Indian Daniel Tommie and his daughter Shawnee came up from the Everglades to work on the film as did many other local talent. “Ocklawaha Tales my Father Told” has aired locally in theaters and can be seen on You Tube and on local PBS in Florida. Veteran narrator Peter Coyote did the honors with the narration. Currently we have located properties in northern Florida that have Florida panthers. This will be the most difficult animal to photograph but hopefully it will prove this endangered species has a component in our part of Florida and has a fair chance of receiving protection on these cattle ranches. It’s been an incredible ride and we aren’t done yet.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

First I am very much in love with my wife, she is my business partner and love of my life. She has been with me through medical emergencies, an airplane crash in Alaska, lyme disease, hunting for the most dangerous croc in the world in the swamps of Cuba, from mud huts in Africa, to Ak 47 ‘s pointed at us in Venezuela after Chaves took over. She has been there and there is much much more.

To have the freedom to be who you are and have someone believe in you and reaching goals together while absolutely ignoring attempts and failures to persist and make it work. That is the reward. Often early in my life I was a lone wolf but as a creative person I knew I needed my Mary and we found each. She is the most rewarding aspect of being me, doing what we both love and loving where are as long as we are together.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We had tried to film bears feeding on a dead whale. In Alaska the tides are extreme. On our river on certain full moons it is a 28 foot change. Whales that are sick or have been attacked by killer whales will float up on high tide. It happens most summers but to find one that is in area we can film safely, chances narrow down significantly. We needed to land a plane on wheels on a relatively flat landing strip. We had a 2 year window, I thought no problem. We put the word out to bush pilots in our area which is roughly 1500 square miles. I got a call once a week from the supervising producers assistant asking if we had found a location yet. Every week I had to say no. On the second year I doubled down but still had no luck. I was filming other portions of the story still but that shot had eluded us. It was the end of the season, I had been in a small village on Illiamna lake. A storm was brewing that they predicted would produce 90 mile an hour winds. So I called friends at Clark air to get me out before it hit. After a wild ride to Lake Clark bouncing off invisible speed bumps we landed on a small strip. I hopped out and talked to the head pilot Glen Alsworth and asked for a ride to Anchorage three hundred miles from my summer home. On the airplane I sat in the back wondering how I was going to pull a rabbit out of the hat. I struck up a conversation with two sport fishermen in the row in front of me. As luck would have it the sportsmen lived and worked in a town close to where we winter in Florida. They asked me what I was doing here and as I did all summer, I told them I was looking for a whale on the beach with bears. They lit up and told me they had just seen that and I got the name of their guide, called him from Anchorage after landing. The guide gave me the GPS numbers for the whale. This was a long shot, the 90 mph winds and high tides could certainly take the carcass back to sea. I called Nat Geo Television and they sent a wonderful producer named Kelly Sweet. She brought a fine High Definition camera and long lens with her. The next day we hired an extremely qualified bush pilot ( flies for the Deadliest catch in winter ) and flew to the beach 100 miles or so from our town. The whale carcass had moved some from the numbers but we found it. What a relief there were 25 plus bears rolling in its fat and eating all the semi rotten whale meat they could stand. We shot it for two days and called a friend with a helicopter and a Cineflex camera and he also filmed it from the air. The final film was called Untamed America and was awarded the Emmy Award for best Cinematography.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://markemery.artstorefronts.com/
• Instagram: mark@markemeryfilms.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/memerym
• Linkedin: markemeryfilms.com

Image Credits
Calvin Hall, Jeff Morales, Alicia Decina, Neil Rettig, Robert Wooten, Laura beth Lancaster, Jim Killion