Trevor Frost and Melissa Lesh (‘Wildcat’ directors) on ‘unbelievable story’ about a solider, a scientist and a baby ocelot [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I was a still photographer before making this film,” reveals Trevor Frost, who co-directed the Amazon Prime Video documentary “Wildcat” with Melissa Lesh. “I was looking for a new story for National Geographic magazine and I was down in Peru looking for anacondas with a team of local and international researchers. We were there for 60 days and we weren’t finding any anacondas. I was sitting in a hotel lobby and Harry walked by and he’s covered in tattoos and he didn’t have a shirt on. My friend leaned over and said, ‘Did you see that young man with the tattoos? His name’s Harry, you won’t believe his story.'”
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Back from war in Afghanistan, a young British soldier (Harry Turner) struggling with depression and PTSD finds a second chance in the Amazon rainforest when he meets an American scientist (Samantha Zwicker), and together they foster an orphaned baby ocelot. We talked with Frost and Lesh as part of Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&A event with 2022/2023 awards contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“I had the chance to meet Harry and Samantha,” Frost continues. “They brought a hard drive with them and on that hard drive was tons of footage that they had filmed themselves with an ocelot named Khan. I was blown away by how incredible the footage was. By what they managed to film, when they turned the camera on when most people would turn the camera off. I immediately called Melissa and said, ‘There’s this unbelievable story.’ It was about a month later that Samantha called us and said they had rescued a second ocelot named Keanu.”
Turner and Zwicker had already talked to various news stations and outlets about sharing their footage, but none of it felt right to them. “It was really them meeting Trevor and connecting on a deep level, seeing our method of filmmaking, our backgrounds in conservation storytelling,” Lesh explains. “They entrusted us in telling this story. From day one we were equal collaborative partners in telling this story. When Keanu came along, now we had the chance to follow this in real time.”
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