Inside ‘Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age’ - Mike Gunton Talks Science, Storytelling, And Tom Hiddleston’s Narration
- Demet Koc
- 1 minute ago
- 8 min read
Apple TV's Prehistoric Planet has become a landmark showcase of what modern technology can achieve in natural history storytelling. The series brings to life animals that vanished millions of years ago, species we will never see in the real world, yet presents them as if they were filmed today. The first two seasons transported viewers to the age of dinosaurs, narrated by none other than Sir David Attenborough, giving the prehistoric world a sense of realism and wonder.
The latest season shifts closer to our own time, exploring the Ice Age, with Tom Hiddleston taking over narration. Mike Gunton, Senior Executive at the BBC Natural History Unit and Executive Producer of Prehistoric Planet, talks to us about the making of the series, the decision to change narrators, and the scientific and creative challenges behind this groundbreaking production.
One of the biggest surprises this season is that Tom Hiddleston is now narrating instead of Sir David Attenborough. How did that change come about?
Mike Gunton: I think it's interesting you say surprise. We're moving 58 million years further, closer to our time. I just thought it was a new series, a new era. We just thought it would be interesting to change the voice, and Tom seemed a really good choice. He's one of the Apple universe voices for Natural History, so it seemed a good choice. I think he's done a lovely job. I really like his narration on it.
He definitely did! I enjoyed listening to him throughout the five episodes.
Mike Gunton: Great fan as well, I should say. He's got a young son who loves this kind of prehistoric dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and things. Every time we did a narration, he'd go straight home and tell his little boy about it all, so it was lovely.
Yeah, perfect choice. When you began in natural history filmmaking, the idea of doing a completely believable documentary about the distant past might have sounded impossible. How do you reflect on the fact that we now have the technology to bring that vision to life so convincingly?
Mike Gunton: I think you've hit the nail on the head there, really. I've always been interested in that kind of history. As a student, I did a paleontology joint degree at one point. I've always been interested in that prehistoric past, but equally, I've always felt that I spent most of my life filming, as you say, contemporary animals, but the inspiration of this actually came whilst doing that. I was in Africa filming the opening of a series, and David Attenborough was there… We were standing on a mountain, basically on the equator, and David says something like, "Nowhere on planet Earth does nature put on a greater show than here, in Africa." I thought, "That's absolutely true, hold on a minute!"
That has not always been the case. There are other times in history when that's true. The obvious time to go back to was the end of the Cretaceous, when we had the superstar dinosaurs. But having done two seasons, and this approach, which is kind of to make a Planet Earth-type show but in the past, it was only possible because of the technology to make the animals feel absolutely authentic… But also, so that we could film it and shoot it and tell the stories in a Planet Earth style, so it felt really authentic…
Having done those two shows, I thought, "Well, now, technically, mammals - and I say animals - that's going to be hard. Are we ready to do that?" Talking to everybody, we thought, we now can. That's why we thought, we'll shift from 2 million years [ago] to about 10,000 years ago, and tell the story of the Ice Age, because that's the other time when the world was extraordinary. Huge climatic changes, the Earth was kind of in turmoil, and all these extraordinary creatures were prowling around, doing these amazing things. Also, it feels quite close, doesn't it? It feels like you've got to almost reach them, but that makes it even more challenging. That's why the technology had to be so good to be able to deliver this convincing representation.
We are grateful you brought this to life, because it's so educational and so beautiful. I was watching it for the interview, revisiting the old seasons, and then there was family watching, and they were so into it, and they were so intrigued that someone made something like this.
Mike Gunton: It's a joy to do it, and it's a joy to hear that reaction, because part of my reason for existence is to tell people about the wonders of nature, and I've done that for many, many years about what we can see around us today. To have the opportunity to just tell people about things that they could never see until we invent a time machine, this is as close as you're gonna get to living in the Ice Age, and I think it's a pretty convincing experience. So, for people to share that experience, it's just so gratifying. It's a joy to do it.
The environments and the animals are so astonishingly detailed. How did your team approach depicting these animals in a way that still feels like a wildlife documentary and not a visual effects showcase?
Mike Gunton: I could talk to you for hours about that. A lot of it starts with the physical evidence. These animals have to be authentic. We want them to be as authentic a representation of these animals as scientific knowledge allows. Nobody can actually go back in that time machine, so this has to be used… This has to be on the basis of as much data as we can get. Now, some of that is actual physical fossils or other remains. One of the things [that's] nice about the Ice Age is we've literally got Ice Age animals coming out of the ice frozen solid so you can see what they actually look like.
There's other evidence; there's DNA evidence, and there's other conceptual evidence about what they call phylogenetic bracketing, where you look at animals that are closely related. The other thing, which is where I can help, is that I've watched animals for so long. You can see these animals are like the animals that we've filmed and watched that live today, so you can start to imagine what they would have done, because Mother Nature is quite limited in the options she gives animals. If you have a problem, you tend to do the same sort of thing if you're a particular type of animal. These are all social [animals] - not all, but most of them are social mammals - and they have these patterns of behavior, so you can legitimately start to reveal it like that.
The other thing is the photography. In a visual effects world, you can do anything in theory. You can tell any story, and you can put a camera anywhere. We don't do that. The stories we tell have to feel like we could have filmed them. They have to feel authentic. The same with the photography - the cameras - we compromise ourselves. We say, "Of course you could put a camera in a VFX world right next to a saber-toothed cat while it's jumping on the back of a woolly mammoth, but you can't in real life. You'd either get trampled or eaten, or you just wouldn't be able to get the opportunity. So, where would you be able to film it? Would you be able to film it from 300 meters away, hiding behind a bush on a telephoto lens? So, that's the camera we use - the virtual camera we use - to replicate that. Also, you can't suddenly pick the camera up and run around the other side while they're doing that because it will be over. So, how do you get around that? Well, you have to do a cutaway, or you have to use a drone. All those rules that we have to apply in the real world, we then replicate in the VFX world. That's why I hope it feels like it is a real documentary.
You're also collaborating with so many scientists across different fields, and there's clearly a massive amount of research behind every frame. What are some of your favorite or most surprising facts you discovered while making this?
Mike Gunton: One of the things that is very gratifying about doing this is that there's an interesting kind of virtuous circle between us and the scientific community. Of course, we rely on all these extraordinary people who know things and study in such detail, but they often don't ask the questions that the average person in the street, like us, would ask. So, how does that happen? How do they do this? You know, the behavior... So sometimes, when we have to create a scene - the mechanics of the animals, but also what they do - the questions we ask make the scientists think, "Hmm, I haven't really thought about that. Well, let me have a think about that." Then they say, "Well, we don't really know about this." Then we say, "Well, look, we've built this model - this creature from the skeleton, from the musculature - so it can only operate this way. For example, there's a creature called Doedicurus, which is this giant armadillo, so we were saying, "How do they swing these clubs? This is an armadillo with a huge sort of spiky club on the back, which we think the males use in combat over females. How do they do it?" [They say], "Oh, I don't really know, we haven't really thought about that." [We say], "Well, we can show you that it can only do this certain amount of movement. Also, what happens when it actually hits one of them? Does it puncture the carapace? Does it bounce off?." [They say], "Well, we haven't really thought about that. Let's think about it."
So, we then give them the problem. We also show them how we think it could work, and then between us, we come up with a scientifically-based answer, which we can then put back into the show. It's quite interesting. A number of academic publications came out of the first series, and I think the same thing will happen for this series.
Prehistoric Planet has covered the age of the dinosaurs and now the Ice Age. Do you see this series continuing into the rise of humans?
Mike Gunton: It's funny I keep getting asked these questions, and I would love to. I love showing things to people they can't see with their own eyes, and of course, this is the ultimate of that. We can only show it to you by this this approach, this Prehistoric Planet-universe approach.
I don't know what's next, or if anything, but clearly that would be an interesting area. But there's plenty of times in the past that I would love to load the time machine up, put the crews in, and fly back and go into some more things.
It was really nice to talk with you, because I love talking with people who are passionate about what they do. I also want to say I caught that Easter Egg, Bristol Flower Shop, in the series.
Mike Gunton: That was not done with my permit. My colleagues did that without even telling me. The funny thing is that my grandfather had a florist shop called Gunton. So there really was one, but not in Bristol. But that was funny, I'd forgotten about that. I didn't see that until it was too late to say no.
Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age is now streaming on Apple TV.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
