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The Legend of Pale Male

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : This is the true account of one of the most surprising and remarkable love stories in the history of New York. It begins in 1993, when a young man from Belgium looking to change his life has an unexpected encounter in Central Park. He meets a hawk. Not just any hawk, but a wild Redtail, a fierce predator that has not lived in the City for almost a hundred years. Compelled to follow this extraordinary creature, he buys a video camera and sets out to track the hawk. Little does he know that the journey will take him almost twenty years and lead him down many trails of life, death, birth, hope, and redemption.

Interview with Frederic Lilien

(Q): I heard that all of your family is lawyers and in law?
(Frederic Lilien): It’s been four generations.
 
(Q): So how did you decide to come into New York City?
(Frederic Lilien): I guess out of options. In a way I think I was very scared of my father, and I wasn’t brave enough to tell him so I wrote him a letter. I was in England at the time and wrote him a letter and then I said “I’m going to New York” for a few months and ended up staying more than 16 years.
 
(Q): I was curious with the Redtail hawks not living in the city for a hundred years and then all of a sudden come. It seems like Central Park is almost like a feeding ground for the hawks. How come they’ve never been there? There are a lot of pigeons there, a lot of squirrels.
 
(Frederic Lilien): It’s obviously the biggest fridge in the world. Rats, pigeons, squirrels but the thousands. But humans chased them down for centuries. They were scared of humans and DDT killed a lot of those. It’s a question of coming back, and they are very opportunistic, so all you needed is one that thought “I’m going to try to make it here” and he did.
 
(Q): It’s an amazing story. What I really loved about your film is how it captured the landscape and human element together. It’s a very heartwarming film. The Pale Male initially lived in Woody Allen’s apartment?
 
(Frederic Lilien): Next to Woody’s. He would kind of use the terrace as a perch and as a mating ground.
 
(Q): It was kind of funny that people are still sort of trying to get the scandal story from Woody Allen because of that incident that happened in the early ‘90s. They are still chasing him for that stuff.
 
(Frederic Lilien): He knew about the story I think. The writer approached him so he knew what was going on.
 
(Q): When got to Central Park, obviously not just the one Pale Male, obviously there are tons of animals living down there. I remember in the movie that some of the pigeon feeder detesting Pale Male around the city.
 
(Frederic Lilien): He had a mixed feeling about it because I think he loved his pigeons of course but he kind of loved Pale Male too. I think he was fascinated by the fact that he came in, but I’m sure he wasn’t too happy when he would eat his pigeons.
 
(Q): There’s a writer named Marie, she was with the “Wall Street Journal,” she’s the one that actually named Pale Male. I was just curious if she was writing any articles previously?
 
(Frederic Lilien): She was doing several articles on every topic, not necessarily nature or Central Park. I guess any journalist who smells a good story. What’s amazing with this story is it just became better and better. The script was written everyday just for us; I don’t think that you could have any Hollywood writer able to write a better story than this one.
 
(Q): You probably would not have expected how good this turned out to be initially because you were just capturing the birds. You never know this story’s going to break out or what will happen later on, particularly around 2003 when the nest was taken out and everything. So that was quite surprising; you didn’t expect anything at all.
 
(Frederic Lilien): I was totally clueless. The only idea I had was that there was a hawk here in New York City and I knew that it had no competition in the wildlife industry. Nobody had ever done a story like that. I mean everybody’s done elephants and tigers and polar bears. It was a tough sell; I had a real hard time to sell it to tv stations, but eventually it ended up in 75 countries. It did very well in festivals and people kind of appreciated a different approach where it’s not pure nature, which is, sadly enough, harder and harder to find.
 
(Q): Yeah but in a sense it’s more convincing because when you live in a city we’re not really closer to nature, but in New York City we have Central Park, which is a little bit of nature. It makes you kind of decide that if we’re actually living together with the nature.
 
(Frederic Lilien): I mean they came to us. It’s a gift. Pale Male decided to come to New York City, to come to us, and then the result was people sitting on a bench and meeting each other. And in a way I think nature makes you a better person if you respect it, and I guess that’s what Pale Male was able to achieve just by being himself. That’s all he did; he was all about survival. If only he knew what he has done. Almost every school in New York City now teaches about Pale Male and they come and see him, all the tourists stop there and explain the story. It’s quite an achievement.
 
(Q): It’s really true. Some guy’s name is Lincoln who has an enormous camera that is the size of like a Buick, it’s so huge. How did he get the equipment in the first place?
 
(Frederic Lilien): He’s an engineer; he works for AP. He’s brilliant, a very smart guy, and extremely fascinated by the hawks, to the point of bringing this Hubble, as we called it, and putting it on wheels and working on batteries.
 
(Q): Are those equipments used in the film industry?
 
(Frederic Lilien): He built it on his own and then put in a television screen so everybody could see what he was seeing through his scope.
 
(Q): When they were taking out the nest from the terrace, the person who lived in that apartment was Enron executive or somebody?
 
(Frederic Lilien): Yeah. Not everybody in that building was against the hawks or wanted the nest to be removed. I know very well. It wasn’t about being personal here, it was more about a message and something that anybody could do one day, make the bad decision.
 
(Q): Remember back in early 2001 when they had an incident with the scandal? I thought they were in jail or something. That’s one reason that nobody actually detects anything over there and then the apartment manager tipped them off. That’s what I initially thought; that’s not the story?
 
(Frederic Lilien): I think it is. Some people in the board were annoyed by the hawks. I think they didn’t like the attention, which you can respect. You have all those scopes aiming at your window, that’s a little bit scary even if for all those years I’ve never seen people watching there. It’s a question of you feel special because they choose your building or you go the other way, and I think they had no idea of the impact that the bird had on people and what happened.

But I think that we all need symbols, we all need metaphors, and in a way I believe that Pale Male’s story became a symbol. I’ve had emails from soldiers in Iraq who were outraged and writing to Bloomberg and I was like wait a minute. Those guys are in hell fighting for their lives and they’re spending time to fight for this. And I kind of realized that we all have our little secret garden or our little magical place that we need, those pockets of hope, that help us to go with our daily lives. And I guess that’s what Pale Male is doing to people. When you see him you feel hope.
 
(Q): When initially Pale Male hatched chicks and they were trying to fly you had a hard time capturing it.
 
(Frederic Lilien): I sucked at it.
 
(Q): No, it’s not your problem. Was there a moment where you thought you’re never going to catch that? They had three chicks initially right?
 
(Frederic Lilien): Yes, they had almost three chicks every year. They’ve been very successful because there’s so much food. Normally in nature the chicks could compete and eventually kill each other to make sure the stronger will survive. But here there’s so much food almost every year we had three fledglings. But in a way that became also a sort of a symbol. I was myself trying to jump out of my own nest, and eventually I got the shot.
 
(Q): Yeah, that was amazing, actually. Technically this was a 15 year, 16 year span. How much footage is there?
 
(Frederic Lilien): It’s endless. And Lincoln actually when I finished the first film borrowed my camera and then started shooting with it non stop. Every time he would be there he would put one tape after the other.
 
(Q): That was not a digital era back then.
 
(Frederic Lilien): It was the beginning, it was really the beginning. That’s my luck. I had no money to make that on film. But Lincoln that was like eight years ago and maybe a thousand hours or something. He gave me a box full of tapes. I went thought it and then of course once in a while I would find an amazing moment. The secret it to be there. I think it’s the first rule of wildlife filmmaking; you have to be there. And then you have to be lucky of course.
 
(Q): The picture was good.
 
(Frederic Lilien): It’s been an issue and a debate when we started to film the second part of the story, but in a way I felt like it was a style. It was one guy with one camera in a park. We were not pretending to be “National Geographic,” so in a way that is also some sort of a character. And we’ve been competing in festivals against “Planet Earth” and all those guys, Disney, who shoot on the highest of the highest definition. At the end of the day I think people connect to the story and they don’t see the quality that is not top.
 
(Q): Did you guys submit this for an Oscar?
 
(Frederic Lilien): No.
 
(Q): Because it’s owned by PBS.
 
(Frederic Lilien)No, nobody owns it but us, with my writer. It’s very kind of you to mention that. We struggled so much financially to put the whole thing together we’re already very happy to have the film made and have it shown in New York City. Now it’s spreading, it’s going to be shown in five cities and eventually all over the country. We felt we don’t have a controversial film; it’s a very sweet, touching story. And when you see what’s nominated at the Oscars it’s edgy, it’s the Holocaust.
 
(Q): It should be there because it’s very heartwarming; it’s a very nicely done film. Not since “March of the Penguins” have I been so affected about wildlife. I see more than a dozen since then about animals but I haven’t been that interested. It’s really well done. Once they took out the nest they tried to put back the nest but they never had chicks since then. You thought he might be past his prime or you think it could be the nest that’s causing trouble.
 
(Frederic Lilien): Everybody has their own theory about it. Some said the wind that goes underneath the nest. In a way it served the purpose of this story. It’s much more powerful to have a mystery than to know what happened. In a way we thought we were going to have a happy ending when they put back the nest, they moved back, so we thought “Okay great. In six months it’s done,” and it took another five years. And we were really struggling with the ending and what are we gong to do? Every year waiting and waiting and it’s not happening, and then we thought again let’s trust the story. It’s a story that’s been leading us for so long.
 
(Q): So during that time you are going back and forth with the version? So you were coming to New York City.
 
(Frederic Lilien): I would mostly come during the mating and waiting for the eggs to hatch.
 
(Q): That’s juggling with a lot of schedule and hustle.
 
(Frederic Lilien): I think you have to give yourself time. I think it’s a recipe to make things happen. You need time and I’ve done a lot of work where you have months before the story has to be done and sent to the tv station. Here we felt okay, let’s wait another year, and then eventually what happened is we discovered all those nests all over the city in those amazing locations. And then I found my wife and the kid; everything came together because we took the time and in a way we trusted the story. If there’s a lesson I could give it’s that; if you don’t know what to do try to trust the story and give it some time.
 
(Q): After all those years you’ve been shooting, what particular element did you learn?
 
(Frederic Lilien): I think it’s something that I always had. It’s a narration and hopefully respectful of those animals. In my generation I grew up learning that we were the super-species, there was us and there was them, and I think that it’s the wrong path, and I think we need to understand them better and respect them. We have so many scientific studies done on all the animals and all of them turn out saying they have no emotion or things like that, but this bird has demonstrated time after time amazing things. Behavior with his mate, they would stay all year long when they would say no they always mate and then raise the chicks and then they are on their own.

They’ve been alone together all year long; it’s something we’ve never seen before. And the effect that it can have on people. I’ve had cancer patience who discover Pale Male and who come and just sit on the bench and just watch him and that would give them the force to keep going. Dr. Fischer, who was in his 90s and lived another decade, after his death his son called me “You have no idea how much this community and this happening helped him to believe in life.” He was completely depressed and then he became a character. Everybody was waiting for him. So I think nature can make you a better person.
 
(Q): So after all those films that you’ve done for such a long period of time are you working on anything?
 
(Frederic Lilien): Yeah, I was just screening a film on nature PBS. It’s really the beginning. It’s a couple who spent a year living in a wilderness in Idaho, which is the widest nature reserve besides Alaska. It’s an interesting story. Again, a human, nature relationship that is complex but beautiful.
 
(Q): Do you know when it’s going to be on air?
 
(Frederic Lilien): No, this one is purely editing. I needed to have a completely different project where I was not so involved and personal. We’ll see; I have a kid now, we live in Belgium, and I kind of need to make sacrifices and stay with my family. So editing would be for me probably the best way to achieve that. I’m doing that in my little house over there, thanks to Skype and all of that I talk to New York every day. They can actually control my editing suite from New York. It’s crazy. And we’ll see, we’ll see if there’s another project that might come up.

End.