James Reed makes natural history films in which the human at the centre tells the story in their own words, unscripted, and the camera stays close. It produces an intimacy most wildlife films lack, and it can leave the animal out of the frame.
Fi1m perspective
A man in a wetsuit swims down into a cold South African kelp forest, day after day, and a small octopus gets used to him. Nobody in a studio tells us what this means. Craig Foster does, in his own voice, and that is the James Reed method in a single scene. Find someone who has spent years close to an animal, put them in front of a camera without a script, and let them talk.
He came to it from zoology at Leeds rather than film school, and spent years as a freelance producer-director on observational documentaries and natural history before founding Underdog Films in 2015 to make Jago: A Life Underwater, a portrait of a Bajau spear fisherman. Rise of the Warrior Apes (2017), about the Ngogo chimpanzees, followed, and it is divers and primates he has kept returning to: My Octopus Teacher (2020), co-directed and written with Pippa Ehrlich; an episode of Frozen Planet II (2022); Chimp Empire (2023), four parts back at Ngogo with Mahershala Ali narrating; Shark Whisperer (2025). We have reviewed only the octopus, so the rest is named here and not judged.
What the method buys is plain in My Octopus Teacher. Foster is a likeable man who went into that water every day for a year, and because he is not reading anything, nothing he says sounds performed. Reed has said that a script, however truthful, "immediately feels like somebody's acting", and he is right. We were moved, more than we had expected to be, by how close and patient the footage is. Then Foster told us what she was thinking, and for a moment we stopped believing him.
That is the cost. Nobody else gets a word. Our review set the film beside Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005), where Herzog kept his own doubts in the frame; Ehrlich and Reed give Foster the last word on everything, and we came out knowing a great deal about how he felt and rather less about her. Reed knows this and counts it a virtue, saying the film is entirely Foster's perspective. It is, and that is the problem too. His reputation carries almost no reservations, and this is ours: a natural history film that trusts its witness completely has no way of noticing when he is wrong.
The multi-year series on de-extinction he is now working on has no octopus in it and no diver who has known one for years. We would like to see what Reed does when the animal is not there yet and nobody has met it.
Biography
James Reed is a British documentary filmmaker and director. He co-directed and co-wrote the 2020 Netflix film My Octopus Teacher with Pippa Ehrlich; the documentary won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Reed founded Underdog Films in 2015. His other directing credits include the features Jago: A Life Underwater (2015) and Rise of the Warrior Apes (2017), the Netflix series Chimp Empire (2023), and an episode of Frozen Planet II (2022). He has collaborated with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit.
