Anyone who knows what the sport of freediving involves might, like Ray D'Arcy, have one burning question: why do people do it? Someone who’s directed a documentary on freedivers should, you would think, be well qualified to answer that question. Enter Laura McGann, director of The Deepest Breath, which recently won the Outstanding Long Documentary award at the 45th Annual Sports Emmys in New York.
The acclaimed film is visually stunning and absolutely gripping. Set in the world of freediving, it tells the story of Alessia Zecchini – who broke freediving records while she was still a schoolgirl in Italy – and Irish freediver-turned-safety-diver, Stephen Keenan. Freediving is an extreme sport in which divers plunge into the depths of the sea, go as deep as they can and try to get back up safely. All on a single breath. But why do they do it? Laura told Ray that, well, nobody is ever satisfied with her answer to that question:
"Everyone who watches it says, 'But why do they do it?!’ And I’m like, ‘Can you not see the joy?’ So basically, it’s really like, euphoric. You hold your breath, you get to kind of be a seal. It’s like getting to be a bird, you know, except for you get to be a fish. You hold your breath. Basically, one of the freedivers puts it really well. He says, 'You put your faith in the water, you're holding your breath and all the sh*t from daily life just fades away. All the stress, all the niggly thoughts, everything just goes quiet and it’s like meditation.’"
Except, well, there isn’t a significant risk of death from meditation, as far as we know. But freedivers are adults, Laura says, and they know what they’re getting into and they do their best to mitigate the risks. Alessia and Stephen knew what they were doing and they knew the risks – they had both suffered blackouts on ascending during a freedive. The Deepest Breath brings their stories to life in the sort of vivid detail that we rarely see in documentaries, and it grips us from start to finish:
"It’s a film about freediving, two amazing freedivers... and it’s a love story and it’s a film that has a message about life and seizing the day and kinds going for it, you know, it’s a film about going for it and enjoying it and sometimes you know, there are dangers involved but there’s a lot of joy in it as well."
Stephen died in a freediving accident at Dahab, Egypt and it was Laura reading about his accident in the Irish Times a few days after it happened that got her thinking. She likes the sea and the outdoors, and she immediately wondered what freediving was:
"I spent hours watching these videos online of people just under the water – way down under the water – for ages, you know? These two, two-and-half-minute videos. No cuts, just somebody swimming under the water holding their breath. And the colours were amazing and the light was amazing. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, it really, really was."
Laura spent six months talking to different friends of Stephen’s from all around the world until eventually Stephen’s dad Peter got in touch with her – and that contact proved to be crucial to the decision to make a start on what would become The Deepest Breath:
"Stephen had been recording interviews with a producer, who was a producer in RTÉ... He’d recorded about 15 hours of audio, Stephen. So, really I sat down and got to listen to Stephen in his own words tell his own story. And that was the point where I thought, maybe like, this is the one piece of material that you wouldn’t be able to recreate, obviously, for Stephen to actually tell his own story."
It was something that Peter said to Laura early on that, she says, framed the way she approached the film. He told her that Stephen had lived more than some 80-year-olds had lived:
"He was 39 when he died, but he had lived such an incredibly rich life and that made it possible to kind of like – that's how I approached it. Not as like, obviously, it’s a really sad ending, it’s really awful. But there’s an awful lot about Stephen’s life to celebrate and I really leaned into that because it felt right... He didn’t live in fear and that’s the way I wanted to approach the story, not as a cautionary tale, but one of exploration and joy."
You can hear Ray’s full conversation with Laura by clicking above. The Deepest Breath is now streaming on Netflix.