On Entertainment by Steven Libowitz
‘Diving Deep’ into deGruy’s Degree of Influence
Mike deGruy’s films pushed the seafarer boundaries and his kids Frances and Max immediately took to the water
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early nine years after his death, prolific Montecito underwater filmmaker Mike deGruy’s world comes back to life via Diving Deep: The Life and Times of Mike deGruy, the documentary written and directed by his wife and filmmaking partner Mimi Armstrong deGruy. The film doesn’t only cover his underwater life, where deGruy most assuredly blew past typical seafarer boundaries to explore the ocean’s depths and visit the creatures who live there as Diving Deep also delves into Mike’s motivations, his youth, his passion for the environment, and – most touchingly – his family life in Montecito. The bulk of the film features deGruy’s captivating underwater cinematography balanced by his often humorously self-deprecating on-camera commentary, plus plenty of accolades from his former colleagues that include Academy Award-winning filmmaker James Cameron, for whom deGruy was shooting when a helicopter crash took his life in Australia in February 2012. But some of the most moving as well as lighthearted moments come from the deGruy children, son Max and daughter Frances, who were just 18 and 14, respectively, when Mike died. But both had already served as assistants on some of Mike’s projects and, later, aided Mimi in producing the documentary about their dad that includes scenes of them playing as infants. Diving Deep premiered by opening the 2019 Santa Barbara International Film Festival – we ran an extensive interview with Mimi at the time – before going on to claim multiple awards on the film festival circuit, including Best Film at the Ocean Film Festival and Audience Favorite at the Aspen Mountain Film Festival. In early 2020, the film had a limited theatrical release, opening in 35 cities, before the pandemic canceled more screenings. Now, two years after it first screened in town, the film is set to make its streaming debut via Apple TV/iTunes and Amazon Prime Rentals on January 19. We caught up with Mimi, Max, and Frances via Zoom last weekend. Here are excerpts from the conversation. Q. Mimi told me two years ago that beginning to work on the documentary less
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than a year after Mike died was stressful but also healing. Max and Frances, you were involved, too. How was it for you? A. Frances: It was a very emotional process for all of us to go in and see it during the early stages of development and kind of try and help weed out which clips should be in it and which were too personal. We mostly acted as sounding boards for our mom and mostly I was thinking that what she was doing was amazing: it’s hard, but it’s going to be worth it. Max: My mom was such a trooper going through all of that stuff, looking through the footage of my dad after having not seen it for so long right after we lost him. I can’t imagine how hard that would have been to do it by herself. So I’m glad that we could be a little bit of a support mechanism for my mom, but also help decide what was important and what was too close to home. And then of course we were interviewed too. Mimi, I still can’t imagine anything harder than trying to be a filmmaker while looking at the footage is also hitting your heart nonstop just months after he was killed. I know we talked about this before, but how did you get through that? Mimi: There were a couple of reasons I had to make the film. The first was that I felt Mike had a lot more to say, but he was cut short, and I wanted to do my best to imagine where he would’ve gone. But it was also part of the grieving process for me, like I was continuing my conversation with him and that he was present while I worked on it. So it was an incredible gift to be able to do it. In the movie, Mimi talks about hearing the news of Mike’s death and thinking “How can someone so full of life be here one minute and then gone the next?” The film doesn’t have anything about the kids’ reactions. I don’t want to pry, but can you talk about what it was like? Max: Going back to that night’s pretty tough. But I can say that he was a rock, always a constant in my life, so it was a given that he would always be there and be a support mechanism. To have that gone so suddenly shook my faith in everything because I had taken his presence for granted. If we can relate that to the movie, I think we often take the natural world around us for granted. We expect it to always be there, to be in the same shape or form that we know it, but when it is gone, there’s no getting it back either. So we have to protect it. How is it for you to have those little pieces of home movies in there? How were those choices made? Max: The decision making really came down to my mom, but we had veto power. I think it adds to the movie. It shows that my dad tried to expose us to as much of the outdoors as he could all throughout our lives. I mean, I’ve got the hummingbird on my head when I was an infant. So I think it adds a lot of characterization for him and shows our family in a pretty realistic light. Frances: The first time I saw the finished product was when it premiered at SBIFF, which was weird because I was looking around and thinking, that’s baby pictures of me and my brother screening for this huge audience (at the Arlington Theatre). But it was very accurate of what growing up was like, because we did have our lives so intertwined with the natural world. Our dad would go off on these expeditions, but because he was a self-employed freelance cinematographer, much of what we did in normal day-to-day life was also kind of combined with work. There wasn’t really a big separation between the two. We’d go camping, but it was also an opportunity to film, whether that was Max and I running around or filming the squirrels and the
“The book is called opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” – Edith Lovejoy Pierce
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14 – 21 January 2021