Toby Strong (‘Secrets of the Elephants’ cinematographer): ‘Elephants have taught me more about how to be a good human than any human possibly could’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

In case it seems simple to film a visually stunning four-part wildlife docuseries like NatGeo’s “Secrets of the Elephants” over the course of a year as its 2023 Emmy-nominated cinematographer Toby Strong did, he means to assure us that it isn’t. You don’t just turn on a camera and shoot pictures of these majestic beasts gliding over the Asian plains and the African savannah. “You’re stepping in your tent because the lions just walked through your camp,” he says. “You’ve got a sandstorm coming in. You’re trying to survive driving away from the flash flood in the desert. And amid all that, you’ve got to produce an image. And when you push that red button, that image has to be excellent. You’ve got to remember that the people sitting Saturday evening with their nachos at home watching, they don’t care how tired you are. You’ve got to produce the excellence. And we love that. We love the travail of it and the being part of nature and the struggle to produce.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.

The British-born Strong – nominated for an Emmy for his cinematography on a nonfiction program – has been filming elephants (and other wildlife) for 25 years now. He calls being involved with a global series like “Secrets of the Elephants” “an absolutely dream for me.” But having only a year to turn around such an ambitious project proved a significant challenge considering its colossal scope. “In the desert, you’ve also got 50-plus degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), scorpions, the sandstorms, the lions. There’s a helluva lot just to survive, let alone film anything.” Yet as he’s already indicated, Strong wouldn’t have it any other way. “Out there is where I feel comfortable,” he stresses. “Let me wander around with lions. That’s my home. Stick me in L.A. or London, (that’s where) I feel really uncomfortable.”

SEE Watch over 200 interviews with 2023 Emmy nominees

Risking his neck is a small price to pay for Strong for the opportunity to showcase the majesty of elephants and shine a spotlight on their ever-vanishing plight. While he doesn’t claim to be an expert on their behavior per se, he has witnessed enough in a quarter-century to know when to give them space. “If you’re bumbling around in an Indian or Sri Lankan village at night where the elephants come in to raid, you need to be real careful you aren’t going to get squished,” he says. “You also don’t want them afraid of you. You want to almost be invisible. So the challenge is to find that happy invisible area where you are as close as you possibly can be, but not so close that you affect their behavior. That’s a massive challenge, (I owe) the people who who devote their lives to know these individual elephants. We’re completely reliant on them to get the stories and the proximity to those animals.”

To some degree, Strong finds the title “Secrets of the Elephants” a bit of a misnomer. “It’s less about what we have found out for me and more about the things we don’t yet know…I’ve spent two decades with ellies, and I’ve seen stuff that is so extraordinary. Communicating over vast distances, knowledge of things that cannot be explained. So it’s less about what we’ve just found out, the secrets, and more about secrets that are yet to be told.”

One thing that’s unfortunately known about wild elephants is that they’re disappearing at an alarming rate due to a combination of climate change, habitat loss and poaching. One thing that gave Strong hope was the thought that the series could help to effect change. “We are going to lose elephants pretty soon unless we’re super careful,” he warns, “especially the desert ones. There’s only 130 left. If we do nothing, we lose them fast. We are encroaching over so much land, so much that elephants need. Up in the northeast, however, there’s a big national park. We can protect that corridor. Animals and people living in harmony. We’ve proven time after time, we can live in harmony with them. So we need to push those projects forward.”

At the same time, he admits it’s difficult to sustain a sense of hope. But he’s bolstered by the local people who devote their lives to preserving elephants and their habitat – and by the elephants themselves. “Elephants have taught me more about how to be a good human than any human possibly could,” he emphasizes. “They live the hardest lives yet still have compassion, they still play, they still have time for their kids. There’s also the kindness they show, and their stoicism. I feed off the hope of the people on the ground and the animals.”

“Secrets of the Elephants” streams over Disney+, Hulu and National Geographic.