W: I know you mentioned the A&E movie.

GB: Yeah.

W: Have you seen it?

GB: Yeah.

W: What did you think?

GB: I think it was a great effort, I think it's a good film. I think they made one major mistake, if not two. They shot in Greenland, instead of the Antarctic, and I think you tell. And...what I have also discovered, because I've been to thirty film festivals with The Endurance and I've spoken in twenty other cities, like Atlanta, opening the film. Wherever I talk with the film, the audience's questions always address only the expedition. People are not interested in Shackleton raising money, or speaking to his wife or not speaking to his wife. The audience for this story is...it begins in Grytviken in 1914, it goes through the ice and then it comes back to Grytviken. That's it. And I think that Channel Four, who produced the A&E special, miscalculated with all the backstory in Shackleton. You don't need ninety minutes of Shackleton raising money to get into the story. I also believe that the A&E film kind of treats it like a Hollywood story and you never really believe those guys are suffering in the film. And...I'm actually talking to a production company in England, a major company, about directing the big Shackleton film with Liam Neeson playing Shackleton. I would make the movie like Das Boot. You know, very very sort of tough, highly confined, I would limit it to pain and suffering. And I would really show how difficult the voyage was, so at the end of the story, you would say, "Yes. A miracle took place. Because there's no way the men could have gone through the story." And that's exactly what The Endurance does. We focus, as you'll notice, on the Endurance expedition.

W: While I was watching Endurance, I didn't know all the details at the time--the trek across the island, 870 miles over open ocean--I knew it was a true story, but part of me was thinking, "Somebody made this up." Because this is a preposterous story...and yet it's true. When you were making these four films, did you ever just sit there and think, "This is crazy. How could this possibly have happened?"

GB: I'm going to be at a screening of the film tonight. And I'm going to get up and tell the audience that I've been to all of the Shackleton locations, and it is physically impossible for twenty-eight men to survive for 635 days essentially living on icebergs in the Antarctic. Can't be done. Can't live for a week down there. And if anyone from the CBS [show Survivor] were sent to Elephant Island, they'd die the first night. And it's literally true. The sort of talisman for the question...or the talisman that explains the question you're asking...I always refer to the fact that when the Museum of Natural History opened the exhibition in New York, they took out a full page ad in Time magazine, and the essential copy said: "It is rare that a scientific institution will acknowledge the possibility of a miracle, but in the case of the Shackleton story, the miracle actually took place." That's why the fourth man part of this story is interesting. Despite the fact that I did not step forward to do this--we just won an award as one of the best religious movies of the year. Because it's a story about a miracle. And I didn't set out to make a religious film, but it does have a very spiritual side to it, or a spiritual explanation, because there's no other way you can...I've been to all those locations. You can't live on Elephant Island for six months. You can't live on ice for six months. You can't make that famous voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia and survive--it. Can't. Be. Done. But that's why this story is so fascinating, and it really grips people these days...it really ah...it really...defies--there's something in contemporary people's minds which is a yearning for a story like this, which I can't quite explain. It got a tremendous ride off the interest in survival stories, and then it got a second wave of interest because of 9/11--because the Shackleton story is the perfect way of taking a disaster and turning it into an unmitigated success. Which is what happened in New York, and what's going on in New York right now. And then there's been a kind of third wave of interest, which is: for one reason or another, businesses all over America are fascinated by the Shackleton story. And that's why Morgan Stanley's interest in this story has been so helpful to me as a filmmaker, because no major U.S. corporation has ever sponsored a movie by an independent filmmaker like The Endurance. Morgan Stanley's money allowed me to go to the Antarctic, and then Tyco and Monster.com--they're both Fortune 400 companies--came in with post-production money to allow me to get great music and stuff like that. And so, the business community's interest in the film has been a tremendous help to me.

W: You had mentioned the other three versions of the film. One is the IMAX version, which is narrated by Kevin Spacey, is that right?

GB: Yeah.

W: What are the other two versions? I know you said there was one that aired in Britain...

GB: That's a two-hour European TV special, which is quite different from The Endurance.

W: Are there any plans to release it domestically, on video or anything like that?

GB: Now I also directed a two-hour PBS special which is the Nova film, which appeared on April 26th.

W: One last question, to wrap up: now that you've got all of the Endurance stuff, and you've got the four films, and you're looking at making the fifth film...do you have any plans for what comes after?

GB: Yeah, absolutely. I'd love...it's the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Pumping Iron, as we said earlier. I'd love to do another sports film, and I'm looking into two. I've spent a lot of time with Bobby Bowden, the coach of the FSU Seminoles. He's about to become the most winning coach in college history. I see him as a sort of Will Rogers kind of character. And he...he's extraordinarily charming, they play great college football, and it's very colorful American stuff. No one's made a college football film the way I think I could. Nike wants to back it and I'm working on it actively right now. I also had a meeting yesterday which has opened up a possibility of doing a film on Mike Krzyzewski and Duke. So I'll do one of those two or maybe both. The other bigger project I've got is that NASA has been talking to me about the possibility of doing an IMAX on the next mission to Mars. And...it's a fascinating prospect because they're gonna have IMAX quality cameras on Mars. So I've been spending a lot of time at Cape Kennedy and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking at that. And there's the English production of Endurance...I've also--if you're a director and you're independent, you've always got to have six balls in the air. I've got another movie that's set in Jamaica which is a love story, a dark love story, which I'd love to do. And, you know, there are a couple of other projects which might or might not go. But any film that I'd do would have an exotic nature to it. I don't know how you make Duke and Krzyzewski exotic, but I'd figure out a way to do it. Bobby Bowden is exotic just by definition. I have seen things in Tallahassee that are just wonderful.

Many thanks to Mr. Butler for taking the time out to talk with us. For the official site of The Endurance documentary, click here. For our review of the film, click here.