When the film My Octopus Teacher aired on Netflix in 2020 it was a huge overnight success, going on to win an Oscar the following year for best documentary. The simple but touching tale of the tender bond between film-maker Craig Foster and his young undersea companion had audiences spellbound worldwide. Some, like Sir Richard Branson, even gave up eating octopus after watching the film.
Yet for Foster himself, the overnight fame was emotionally debilitating. “You’re working on this little story that you think a few people might be interested in and suddenly you’re in front of 100 million people,” he says. “I didn’t think it would affect me so much, but it was very difficult. Terrifying, to be honest.”
His ocean front house in Simon’s Town, South Africa, burned down a year and a half ago, and he lost everything. But that was nothing, Foster says, compared with the blind terror he felt after being exposed to such a massive TV audience. It was so different to the quiet life he’d been leading on the shores of the underwater kelp forests, and he couldn’t handle it, he says. His mental health suffered and he had trouble sleeping for months.
But his love for the ocean didn’t change and it was partly his daily sea dives that helped restore Foster’s inner strength and equilibrium.
Now he has re-emerged, not with a new film, but a book, Amphibious Soul, which is published next week.
Foster hopes to “awaken the wild side” in people and get them connecting more with nature and species, even if they live in cities – look at how foxes have managed to survive in cities against all the odds, he suggests.
Many of the book’s stories, though, focus on animals most people will never come into contact with. But Foster sees his role as “trying to translate what these animals have taught me”.
Foster was 15 when he had his first face-to-face encounter with a giant octopus.
He had taken a boat out with a friend to a part of the South African coast that’s normally too choppy to swim in. But it was a calm day, he recalls. He took a big gulp of air through his snorkel and jumped off the boat, diving down about six metres (20ft). All of a sudden he was aware of something large looming beside him and saw through his mask a creature with “a bright orange head the size of a rugby ball” and huge tentacles.