The Not Next Big Blue ?
Posted By Paul Kotik on 14 January 2007
I tracked Sky Christopherson to his very lair, and relayed this comment to him. Turns out there's another chapter to this story, all right. Here's how that conversation went:
DB -The first thing everybody in the freediving community wants to know is whether you see your film as the successor to The Big Blue! Do you?
Sky - No, the new James Cameron film, The Dive, about Audrey Mestre’s death will be the successor to The Big Blue. Both tell stories of freediving as a sport of love,obsession, and death. Our purpose in making The Greater Meaning of Water is to break beyond the stereotype that prior films reinforce to the general public - that freediving is deadly. We emphasize the naturalistic side of the sport through the eyes of the lead character Maxwell Avery, a freediver with an almost inconceivable dillema. He suffers from a lung disease and finds peace from the suffering through freediving. Thus, in Max’s case, freediving and the water contribute to his health and survival, rather than threaten it.
More importantly, we wanted to explore the idea of “flow state” in elite level sports. “Flow” is a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly to describe a mental state where we become so fully immersed and engaged in what we are doing we loose a sense of self and can experience (sometimes radical) changes in our perception of time and space.
DB - The Flow? Hmmm, I know about a thing I call The Stream. Where are you coming from with this?
Sky - My wife and I, along with the lead actor, are retired Olympic athletes and we routinely experienced flow during our finest workouts and competitions. We wanted to communicate these experiences using freediving as a vehicle. However, during the course of the project it became apparent to us that flow is quite universal.
During our research for our script, we talked at length with people outside of sports; surgeons, musicians, writers, and the like, we found that they all had their own versions of flow. We soon realized this project was more that just a film about freediving or elite athletics, it was about the human experience.
DB -The Greater Meaning of Water is a movie about freediving experienced through the life of Max Avery, an athlete training to break the world record. How did your athletic background shape the story?
Sky -I was a sprint cyclist on the US Cycling team for eight years, and was 4th in the world in 1998. My event was called the "kilo", a 60-second, all-out 1000m time trial on the velodrome. The kilo is known to produce the highest lactic acid levels on record. My blood was turned into battery-acid. Even my teeth would ache unbearably, and with my blood oxygen dropping significantly, I would commonly ride that fine-line of loosing consciousness.
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