Colin Butfield will be the keynote speaker at BOAT International's Ocean Talks 2025, taking place at The Magazine, the Serpentine North Gallery in London on 12 June. Ahead of the event, Lucy Dunn sat down with him to talk about his latest project, the film Ocean With David Attenborough and the accompanying book Ocean: Earth's Last Wilderness, released this month.
Colin Butfield is the co-founder and director of Open Planet Studios, a production company dedicated to conservation storytelling. A longtime collaborator of Sir David Attenborough, his documentary credits include the BBC’s Earthshot, Netflix’s A Life on Our Planet and Breaking Boundaries, as well as his latest work, Ocean with David Attenborough. He also founded openplanet.org, a non-profit platform providing free, open-source environmental footage to help global storytellers share local climate narratives in their own voices.
With over 15 years of experience, Butfield has produced and scripted major international events, often alongside Attenborough. These include the landmark COP26 opening speech, keynote sessions at Davos (2019, 2020) and engagements for the World Bank, IMF, G8 and UN Security Council. He is also the co-author of Earthshot with Jonnie Hughes and HRH Prince William.
Butfield is now fulfilling a lifelong dream, recalling how his career has come full circle. “Watching David [Attenborough] with my parents when I was a child sparked my fascination with nature and the wonders of the natural world,” he says.
That passion morphed into a successful nature filming career and years later, he got to meet and work with his TV hero, whom he describes as "still incredibly hands-on". Butfield's latest project with the venerable presenter, Ocean With David Attenborough and accompanying book Ocean: Earth's Last Wilderness, is perhaps their most significant collaboration - indeed, Attenborough calls it "the most important project of his career".
Released on his 99th birthday, the timing for the film is perhaps telling: Attenborough has chosen the ocean as one of his final missions, describing it as “our greatest ally” in the fight against climate change."The ocean can draw a huge amount of carbon from the atmosphere," says Butfield. "David calls it an ally and I think it's the right word."
In the film, alongside incredible scenes of power and beauty beneath the waves, threats to it by humankind are exposed in a way few people have seen before. Thanks to his team and many others in the conservation sector, this message is starting to finally filter down to the general public, he says: "In the last few years, there has been a lot of investigation into the ocean, they've started to find more species, go further into the deep and really understand how the habitats fit together. At the same time, filming technology has become so much better. Filming the ocean has always been the most expensive thing you can do, but now it's much more affordable."
Up to recently, most people also just thought of the ocean as a big homogenous blue mass, as this is how it has always been depicted on the map, Butfield says, but that doesn't show its many diverse seascapes, underwater regions or yet-to-be-discovered marine life that comes with them. And while most people know about microplastics, melting and coral bleaching, they're less aware of the myriad of other threats, including those of overfishing and destructive fishing methods, issues Butfield and his team chose to highlight in the film.
One of Ocean's most powerful moments was footage of an industrial trawler dredging the bottom of the sea, killing and catching everything in its wake, from fish to mammals, obliterating the marine landscape. It was the first time a documentary camera team had captured such shocking footage. "[This way of fishing] is absolutely devastating the ocean," Butfield says.
While it is easy to show destruction and convey the urgency of conserving our oceans, it is much harder to enlist people into action - to sign petitions, write to their MPs and spread the word. And that's where Butfield's skill as a storyteller comes in. By conveying a positive message of hope, that all is not lost if we act now, Ocean becomes a powerful rallying call.
One of the biggest takeaways from the film is that our seas have a remarkable propensity to recover and the actions we have started to take are on the right path. "What we were able to do was show that some areas of the ocean, which have been properly protected, have really bounced back. Five years ago, we wouldn't have been able to do this but we saw an extraordinary rate of recovery," he says.
"There are lots of discussions around climate change," he concludes," but one thing that never gets talked about enough is that if the natural world, whether on land or sea, is allowed to recover, it will do a huge part of [fighting climate change] for us.
It won't do it all, by any means, but it will really, really help."
You can meet Colin Butfield at Ocean Talks on 12 June 2025, our annual event celebrating ocean conservation efforts in the week running up to World Oceans Day. Tickets are free, but guests must register their attendance.
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