‘March’ was no cakewalk to shoot

The oceanic documentary “Deep Blue” includes a brief segment about the emperor penguins of Antarctica. It showcases the winter ordeal of fathers that instinctively form a mass huddle to protect themselves and newborn chicks from blizzard conditions.

Admirably timed, the French-made “March of the Penguins,” showing at area art houses, is a wildlife documentary devoted entirely to the migratory and reproductive cycle of emperor penguins. A crew supervised by Luc Jacquet accumulated awesome, humbling footage of a penguin colony during a year of arduous treks and vigils between feeding grounds and breeding grounds.

Recently in town to promote the movie, his debut feature, Mr. Jacquet explained that he first heard of the species while attending Lyon University. Also a native of Lyon, he grew up “fascinated by animals and nature.” He studied animal biology and ecology, earning a master’s degree in the subjects.

“I’d never dreamt of traveling to Antarctica or becoming a filmmaker,” he recalls. “My interests were strictly scientific.By sheer chance, I ended up making several trips to the south pole and participating in TV documentaries that were sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the Discovery Channel. It was really the life cycle of the penguins that triggered the idea for a feature. Their behavior expressed a lot about survival, about life-and-death themes.”

Mr. Jacquet’s expedition depended on the support of the French Polar Institute, a scientific group formed in 1950 and now administered by a European consortium.A permanent base is located relatively near the colony observed by Mr. Jacquet and his crew, which varied from two to four photographers, the director included. They were equipped with super 16mm cameras and Nagra recorders.

“We started shooting in February,” he explains, “the ’good season,’ as it were. The ocean hasn’t begun to freeze over, and the light is still plentiful. The breeding starts in March, and females lay their eggs in June. There’s a constant back-and-forth as either males or females walk to feeding grounds and then return to protect the eggs.Shooting gets very difficult by August. There’s virtually no daylight. Storms increase, the winds howl in your ears if you step outside. That alone is hard on the nerves. A week or so may go by before conditions permit you to return to the colony, which was about 20 minutes from the camp. It’s very frustrating. You know things are happening, but it’s impossible to observe them.”

’Me’ a first for July

Miranda July, slim and solitary, is encountered at a small table in a hotel conference room, definitely larger than a conversation demands. Because her voice tends to teeter along the brink of heartbreak, even when she’s being funny, an aura of vulnerability attends her. This impression echoes the touching aspects in her sometimes alienating first feature, “Me and You and Everyone We Know.”

She is the writer, director and leading lady of this collection of vignettes about lovelorn residents of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. Her name, one assumes, is a poetic fiction. Miss July readily confirms it. Miranda was adopted from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The surname derives from stories written by a childhood friend.”They were about girls called Ida and July,” she explains. “I was July.”

Miss July also reveals that she was born a Grossinger. “The family that ran the famous resort in the Catskills,” she says. “I think I was about 12 when we visited there one last time.It shuttered not long after that.”

Born in Vermont, Miss July was raised for the most part in Berkeley, Calif., during the 1970s and early 1980s.Her parents are writers who also moved a small publishing firm to the West Coast.

According to Miss July, it was important to her to continue the writing tradition, and she began placing short stories in magazines at a fairly young age. “The first sort of serious thing I wrote was a play,” she recalls. “I was about 16.Oddly enough, I didn’t write myself a role. But it wasn’t long before I had drifted into solo dramatic pieces. The cast became me, and my parents were getting nervous.”

Nevertheless, they permitted her to drop out of college and move to Portland, where Miss July had a close friend. She demonstrated her ability to make a living specializing in custom-made performance pieces.By 23, , she was doing well enough to abandon day jobs. “I’m closer to being broke now than I’ve been in years,” she says. “The movie has been completely time-consuming.”

She shies away from the term “performance artist.”Professionally, she is content to say, “I perform.”

Miss July explains, “For years I toured with so-called one-woman shows and shot videos and did some lecturing. People tend to say, ’Oh, she came from the art world,’ but people in the art world thought of me, correctly, as a loner.

“I’m more influenced by narrative things. The most ambitious shows I did were kind of live movies. They’d have video backgrounds, and I was the live element, portraying different characters and sometimes interacting with the audience. It always looked as if I kind of wanted to make movies.”

The idea of “Me and You” kind of rose up before her while she was riding an elevated commuter train in Chicago. “I hate having ideas and not doing them,” Miss July says. “I thought, ’Now I’m in for it.’ And I was. The movie was really hard work.”

Would casting someone else in the role she plays have eased the burden? “Being in it was essential,” Miss July replies. “It made me less self-conscious about being a novice director. It could have gotten made much faster with someone else in the role: Maggie Gyllenhaal or whoever. I rejected the idea. I wanted the material to remain familiar. There was one less unknown to deal with.”