ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
On the fictional island of Carpathia, if you go into the forests at night, you might sense that you're being watched. And if you peer into the trees, you may just spot an elusive primate called the ochi.
ISAIAH SAXON: Ochi is simply the word they use for eyes, which is all they ever see of them when they shine their flashlights.
SHAPIRO: Isaiah Saxon is the writer and director of the new adventure movie "The Legend of Ochi."
SAXON: The rest of the world thinks the ochi are nothing more than a myth, but the people who live amongst them in remote villages come in contact with them. And that's where conflict arises because they are a threat to their way of life.
SHAPIRO: In the movie, a little girl resolves to reunite a stranded baby ochi with its family, rejecting her own family's tradition of demonizing and hunting the animals.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LEGEND OF OCHI")
HELENA ZENGEL: (As Yuri) But he's my friend.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) We can't be friends with them. They can't be our pets. We have turned a wolf into a lapdog.
SHAPIRO: Filmmaker Isaiah Saxon told me he wanted to tap into his own childhood fascination with a mysterious primate.
SAXON: Growing up, I feel like I was always chasing the mysteries of nature. So I grew up in the mountains around Santa Cruz County. It was all redwood forest and oak forest, and, you know, I would just get lost. And I grew up around a lot of people who really did believe in Sasquatch. It wasn't, like, a silly thing, like Bigfoot. It was like, there's a North American great ape, and it's out there.
SHAPIRO: I grew up in Oregon, so I share that experience.
SAXON: (Laughter) Exactly, yeah. When that's kind of your -the world you grew up in and you're out there in the forest alone, you think that you're seeing things. You think that you're encountering things. And you think that you might always be one step away from, you know, the great magical experience.
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
SAXON: And so because of that kind of luminous feeling, being out in the forest, it feels real to you.
SHAPIRO: The ochi is not a Sasquatch. It does not resemble...
SAXON: No.
SHAPIRO: ...A Sasquatch. Will you describe these creatures for us?
SAXON: Yeah. The ochi are an elusive, fictional primate species indigenous to a fictional island in the Black Sea called the island of Carpathia. And they communicate with a whistled animal language that is musical in nature.
(SOUNDBITE OF OCHI WHISTLING)
SHAPIRO: When I was a kid, I wrote a paper on an animal called a tarsier. And when I watched this movie, I was like, oh, they look...
SAXON: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...A lot like tarsiers.
SAXON: Absolutely. Yeah. So when I was trying to invent a fictional primate, the goal was really to make an animal that could reasonably be misunderstood by the audience - and especially kids - as an actual species. Like, maybe you just hadn't yet seen the BBC Nature documentary on...
SHAPIRO: Yeah (laughter).
SAXON: ...These new primates, you know, 'cause we still are discovering new primates. So I was - I really wanted to draw from existing patterns in nature when I was designing these creatures. So I was looking a lot at the Chinese golden snub-nosed monkey, which is an endangered primate in remote China.
SHAPIRO: And it has kind of a blue face and golden fur surrounding it.
SAXON: Exactly. Yeah. They've become kind of charismatic stars recently. You've probably seen them around.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
SAXON: And as well as - you named it - the tarsiers, for their hands...
SHAPIRO: Wait - so I was right? That was actually one of the inspirations?
SAXON: 100%.
SHAPIRO: Amazing.
SAXON: No, I was looking - yeah.
SHAPIRO: Amazing.
SAXON: There's a video....
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
SAXON: I found this video of a tarsier looking...
SHAPIRO: They have such huge eyes.
SAXON: Yeah, exactly. It's the eyes and the hands, too.
SHAPIRO: Yeah. Yeah.
SAXON: The hands are like - they're almost like these amphibious...
SHAPIRO: Little suction-cup fingers. Yeah.
SAXON: ...Yeah (laughter), like, long fingers, which also kind of reminded me of the hands that ET had, that kind of, like, were lodged in my brain.
SHAPIRO: To me, the ochi - the animals in this movie - had almost like a Jim Henson feel. It reminded me of "Fraggle Rock"...
SAXON: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...Or "The Dark Crystal." The baby ochi is a puppet and the older ones are inhabited by human puppeteers - performers, actors. At a time when CGI is everywhere, why did you decide to go that route?
SAXON: I think there's something so ancient about puppeteering that you immediately accept as alive. Even if I am staring at the puppeteer, you know, I can...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
SAXON: ...See the puppet and the puppeteer all in one, my mind can even remove that puppeteer, and I can completely accept this thing as a living being in front of me.
SHAPIRO: And so it's not whether it looks...
SAXON: And so...
SHAPIRO: ....Realistic in the way that CGI might look realistic.
SAXON: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: You're talking about tapping into something evolutionary.
SAXON: Yeah. It's more on an unconscious level - do we accept something is alive? And so - and that - as you point out, that's different than realism. Realism has to do with, like, how many little details that are technically correct can we add? But often, that's a losing game. And so I think I knew it had to be a puppet and the adult ochi had to be suit performers. And part of the puppetry and the magic of it is also animatronics. So this is essentially just compact, robotic faces that are remote-controlled. Like...
SHAPIRO: Do you remember the first time you saw the ochi puppet - how you reacted?
SAXON: The very first prototype was just this naked, hairless puppet that had no facial movement whatsoever. And the day I arrived in London to meet all the puppeteers, they started showing me what it could do. And I was just immediately overjoyed. This was real. This is...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
SAXON: This creature is real. And it's in front of me, and it doesn't even have a moving face yet or hair on it, or anything. And - yeah, so that's when I knew the approach was going to work. And then I remember later, after we were greenlit, I got to work with them in the studio as they were working on the face. And the face was just, like, mounted to, you know, a desk. And it was just the front of it. There's no - you know, there's no back, there's no ears - anything. And just seeing the movement on it and the life in its face, you know, I couldn't help but, like, reach out and touch it, and it bit my finger.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
SAXON: And I was just like...
SHAPIRO: Oh, my God. That's so great.
SAXON: Yeah. At that point. I was like, Karl, I'm going to kiss you - like, the wonderful animatronics designer.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
SAXON: So - yeah.
SHAPIRO: I'm thinking about you saying that as a kid, you were always chasing the mysteries of nature, and now you've made this film about this kind of wondrous experience in nature. And I hope it's OK for me to ask this. You recently lost your home in the horrible Southern California wildfires. How do you feel about nature now, today?
SAXON: Oh, my respect only deepens, you know? It's like - I feel like the sense of awe is really the sense of being small and OK with your smallness. And as I've now experienced, like, a direct smallness in the face of nature, you know, I can only offer more respect to nature. Yeah. And I also think that, like, the more you lose, the bigger your heart gets. And so nature has grown my heart one more notch.
SHAPIRO: Isaiah Saxon, thank you so much for talking with us.
SAXON: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
SHAPIRO: He's the writer and director of "The Legend Of Ochi," which is in theaters now.
(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID LONGSTRETH'S "THE POND") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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