Filming monitor lizards in Bangkok – a shoot full of surprises
By Seth Daood, Researcher
You would never guess that Bangkok, one of the most world’s most visited cities, was once a swamp. But perhaps that makes sense when you realise it’s still home to dragons.
...it’s still home to dragons.
On most wildlife shoots, you get used to the wilderness, the quiet, and a lot of sitting and waiting. Bangkok was the entire opposite. Working in a city that never sleeps added a new layer of complexity I would have never predicted, and this shoot rapidly became the most exhausting of my career – and yet it was also my favourite.
Lumphini Park is large park in the heart of Bangkok: over a hundred acres of landscaped greenery. Even at 4:30 in the morning, we were greeted by runners utilising this open space. The nature of this shoot was incredibly dynamic – there was no sitting and waiting, instead the crew took more of a hunting and gathering approach. With a walkie-talkie communications system, the whole team knew at any moment they could receive a call to relocate within the park. We used three trolleys to help us move all our heavy gear around as quickly as possible.
We were split into three teams, with two long-lens cameras, one stabilised camera rig, and one very small bicycle shared between us. On this shoot you could never expect to stay in one place very long. I spent hours cycling around the park, often being chased by park wardens telling me I wasn’t allowed to cycle, until I showed our filming permit, which gave us permission to do so. I would criss-cross the park, searching for lizards doing absolutely anything other than sleeping and basking, which they spend an extraordinary amount of time doing. But finding energised monitor lizards was only the first challenge we had to face.
...and we had to go back to square one.
As soon as I came across any lizards with any semblance of energy, I radioed the other teams, sent over my coordinates, and waited anxiously, as they rapidly unbuilt their kit, put it back in the trolleys and started lugging it over to my location. This was the most anxious part of the shoot – having identified action, tension, or behaviour, that could rapidly turn into a vital shot we needed for our story.
Running with trolleys through a park full of joggers is not the assault course most wildlife film crews expected to be managing, but we certainly rose to the challenge. With real-time live updates coming through the walkie-talkies, the timer had been set. More often that I would have liked, the action evaporated, as lizards that had been poised to fight quickly went back to basking, and we had to go back to square one.
Despite being based in the heart of the city, we weren’t safe from wild weather. We had to contest with scorching heat, powerful rainstorms, and violent thunder. More than once we saw a tree set ablaze after being struck by lightning, and many an afternoon was rained off, sending us scuttling for the shelter of a leaky marquee, often joined by a monitor lizard or two. Sometimes the rain was so bad we abandoned filming altogether.
I would never have guessed that the shoot that connected me most with nature would be the one that took place in the heart of a megacity.
As the final days of the shoot approached, we still hadn’t captured a complete story about the dragons of Bangkok, even with all the cycling and moving kit around. Then, on what seemed like my three hundredth lap around the park, I saw six monitor lizards rapidly swimming towards each other in the middle of the park’s lake, one holding a colossal catfish in its mouth. I called the team on the radio, and we spent the next six hours filming a host of feeding behaviours – just what we needed.
Before arriving in Thailand we had been told that many locals do not like the monitor lizards – to the extent that their nickname is entirely unrepeatable in English. But speaking to people in the park, this did not seem to be the case at all, and everyone seemed fond, and even proud of the lizards, wishing us the best with telling their story. We were supported not only by our local team, but by the joggers who came to know us – every day letting us know where they had seen large monitor lizards. Local wildlife enthusiasts who had spent years observing the lizards let us know where their hotspots were, and even the park rangers were a source of knowledge, once they eventually stopped chasing me down on my bike.
I have had the privilege of traveling to many different locations whilst working on Asia, from the Mediterranean all the way across to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I would never have guessed that the shoot that connected me most with nature would be the one that took place in the heart of a megacity.
