Remembering Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Philip Caputo

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. One of the most unflinching and acclaimed memoirs of the Vietnam War was about a young lieutenant, one of the first Americans to fight in the war, leading a Marine platoon through the jungle. "A Rumor Of War" was written by Philip Caputo, who died last week at the age of 84. In reviewing the book in 1977, John Gregory Dunne described it as, quote, "heartbreaking, terrifying and enraging. It belongs to the literature of men at war," unquote. The book became a bestseller and was adapted into a TV miniseries.

After the war, Caputo became a journalist and was part of the Chicago Tribune Pulitzer Prize-winning team that uncovered violations of voting procedures in a March 1972 primary. While a foreign correspondent in Lebanon during their civil war, he was captured by Palestinian militants and held for a week. Later, in another incident, he was shot multiple times by a different group of militants in Beirut. He returned to the States, and during convalescence for his injuries, he wrote "A Rumor Of War.

Caputo went on to write two other memoirs, 10 novels, two short story collections and four works of nonfiction. His love of adventure is detailed in an obituary on his website, which reads, quote, "Caputo caught a leviathan-sized marlin off Cuba's shores, hunted big game in Africa, roughed it in Australia's outback, cast fly lines in the world's oceans and streams from Alaska to New England and read books as voraciously as he wrote them."

We're going to listen to Terry's 2005 interview with Philip Caputo. At the time, he had written the novel "Acts Of Faith" set in war-torn Sudan about aid workers and missionaries there.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

TERRY GROSS: You've been in war zones as a Marine and as a journalist. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between being there as a fighter and being there as somebody just covering the fighting?

PHILIP CAPUTO: Well, probably the major difference is that the war correspondent can get out of there almost whenever he chooses, or she chooses. The soldier is stuck there, is under orders, and there's no return ticket. There's no going back to the hotel in another day or two or three. The soldier has to confront that situation constantly under orders, often against his or her own will. And also, the journalist generally has some kind of picture of what's going on, a big picture of what's happening. Quite often, if you're an enlisted soldier or even a junior officer, say, on the level of a lieutenant or a captain, all you know about what's going on is what's going on directly in front of you. And this can often give you a certain sense or feeling of powerlessness, no control over your fate or your destiny that, say, somebody like the war correspondent can maintain that sense, although it may be an illusion, even on the war correspondent's part.

GROSS: Did you respect war correspondents when you were fighting in Vietnam, or did you see them as, like, guys with pens and cameras who were onlookers?

CAPUTO: I think I was agnostic about them.

GROSS: (Laughter).

CAPUTO: I mean, I didn't particularly dislike them. I always remember feeling, and I think there were probably in four operations I was on, that there were journalists along, either TV or print journalists. I could never figure out why they were there. It seemed just peculiar to me. It seemed very odd. And sometimes I got a little annoyed with them because I would be - especially if they were with the unit that I was with or that I was in command of, which in this case was a rifle platoon, I would feel somewhat responsible for them and for their safety. And that would be a distraction to me. But in general, you might say I could have taken them or leave - or left them.

GROSS: You know, as we were saying, your new novel, "Acts Of Faith," which is about aid workers and missionaries in Sudan, is in part about how idealistic motives can become really changed once you're in a foreign war, where you don't really understand the culture. And you wrote in your memoir about fighting in Vietnam, "A Rumor Of War," war is always attractive to young men who know nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy's challenge to ask what you can do for your country, and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us. I guess I'm wondering if fighting in Vietnam made you skeptical of idealism.

CAPUTO: Oh, yes, it did. I'll just freely admit that - and like a lot of people my age - I was indelibly marked by that experience and by that era. Yes, I'm profoundly skeptical of idealism, profoundly skeptical about government pronouncements, profoundly skeptical about the honesty and integrity of our elected officials, profoundly skeptical about what generals and military leaders tell us is happening, as opposed to what may really be happening. And I would not want to speak for the entire baby boom generation. I forgot how many millions of people that is. But I think a significant number of people in that age group think that way, and as a result of what happened in Vietnam and in the '60s. And I can't - there's no sense in my trying to pretend somehow that that didn't happen to me because it did.

GROSS: You know, it's interesting. You managed to - as you pointed out in your writing, you managed to get through your tour of duty in Vietnam without any wounds. But then, as a journalist covering Beirut, you were shot several times in one episode. What happened to you?

CAPUTO: Well, it's one of those proverbial long stories that I will endeavor to make short. I was covering the Lebanese civil war. I was the Chicago Tribune's Middle East correspondent based in Beirut. I was filing a story to the paper when the building I was in came under heavy machine gun fire. I then exited the building, ran into some Muslim militiamen from some strange street militia that was active in Beirut at that time. They tried to take my press card away from me. The press card was very precious to us, as that without it, you could get killed fairly easily. And I remember I grabbed it from one of these guys that was trying to take it from me, and I put it back in my wallet and they said, all right, you know, get out of here. Go.

As I was walking away, they started to open fire at me - opened fire on me - and hit me in the ankle, in my left ankle. Hit me in the left leg. I got hit superficially in the head, the back, the shoulders, but just by, I'll say, superficial shrapnel wounds. And fortunately, I was - these were Muslim militia men, and I was right near a street controlled by Christians 'cause that was a sectarian war and - or at least in part, a sectarian war. And although I was down, I - because of the wounds in my legs, I couldn't walk - I was able to crawl. And I crawled onto this Christian-controlled street, and probably I just owe my life to that 'cause I think had they not been afraid to pursue me, they would have. And that would have been the end of me.

GROSS: You're a writer. You use your imagination all the time, and I'm sure during the war in Vietnam, you must have imagined what it would have been like to be shot or injured there. How did actually getting shot compare to what you'd always imagined it would feel like?

CAPUTO: Well, it - I suppose I used to wonder like anybody who's been in there, will it hurt? Even if it is an instantly fatal wound, like, say, one to the brain. I remember I used to think sometimes in Vietnam, especially if I'd seen comrades who were who were killed, if they felt somehow in the - in that last flashing instant of their life, some enormous amount of pain was compressed. Well, as I discovered, is that you actually don't feel a thing. The impact is so stunning from a high caliber high, I mean, a high velocity bullet that something happens to your system. And I didn't feel any pain. In fact, for probably two or three hours after I was shot.

GROSS: By then, were you in a medical setting?

CAPUTO: Yeah, I was in a hospital bed.

GROSS: You did some of your recovery back at your parents' house, the house you grew up in. And you've said that you wrote some of "A Rumor Of War," your Vietnam memoir, in the bedroom that you grew up in. And when I read that, I thought, wow, that's so weird because, I mean, a lot of people I know feel or used to feel that if they went - that when they went back to the bedroom that they grew up in after they were an adult, they'd feel like a child again. You know, that - you see that same furniture, stuff that's still on the wall?

CAPUTO: Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: Your parents are there, and somehow, you know, you're kind of a kid again. But what was it like for you to be in that kind of setting at writing this, I mean, this really complicated memoir of war?

CAPUTO: Well, I think, considering that I was then confined either to a wheelchair or to crutches, that I was almost naturally in a childlike situation. I mean, I had my wife and two kids with me, so we were all living in the same house. It was almost like one of those old immigrant families. And it was so intensely boring, you know, to be...

GROSS: (Laughter).

CAPUTO: ...To be confined to a wheelchair in a rather ordinary suburb of Chicago that, as a matter of fact, oddly enough, writing that book gave me some focus, a purpose in life, and was also partly an antidote to this intense boredom. And I think I would have either been perhaps reading some of the time, but probably most of the time would have been sitting in that wheelchair or in a chair with my legs up in cast, watching TV.

BIANCULLI: Journalist Philip Caputo talking with Terry Gross in 2005. He died last week at the age of 84. We'll hear more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's interview with journalist Philip Caputo, who wrote the well-regarded Vietnam War memoir "A Rumor Of War." He also was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a foreign correspondent. He died last week at the age of 84.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: Some of your new novel, "Acts Of Faith," is about extremism. And, you know, again, it's set in the civil war in Sudan, and the government in Khartoum is an extremist Islamist government. You've had firsthand experience with extremists. When you were covering Lebanon, you were captured for a week. Who captured you, and what did they do to you?

CAPUTO: I was captured by a faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization that was called the PDFLP. They captured me because they thought that I was a CIA agent, which is a rather frequent accusation made against journalists, particularly American journalists in the Middle East and in - elsewhere, but particularly in the Middle East.

GROSS: So what did they do to you in the week that you were held hostage?

CAPUTO: Well, I wasn't held hostage. They didn't - they weren't holding me for ransom or anything.

GROSS: Captive. Captive is the...

CAPUTO: Yeah. It was...

GROSS: Captive. Yeah.

CAPUTO: Yeah. Yeah. They interrogated me over and over and over again, often with questions that were ludicrous. They - I was subjected to mild physical and, at times, severe psychological torture - you know, things like having my hands tied behind my back and then my ankles - my legs bent back so my ankles were then tied to my hands. It was - you're bent like a bow. And then a guy sticks an AK-47 in your temple and says, you must now answer these questions truthfully, you know. No kidding. And...

GROSS: (Laughter).

CAPUTO: And then - or they stuffed me in a hole in the ground that - where rats were crawling around and things like that for 24 hours with no food, no water, no light, hardly any air, that sort of thing, all of which they were trying to break me down, convinced that I was a CIA agent and at any moment, I would suddenly, you know, like a person in the courtroom melodrama, leap up and scream, I did it. I did it. But of course, I didn't, since I wasn't one.

GROSS: So what were some of the things that went through your mind about what you should tell them? I mean, you told them the truth - that you weren't a CIA agent. But you did risk getting killed during this week. I'm sure that that was a real possibility. So did you think of, like, lying and making stuff up to give them or...

CAPUTO: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I sure did. And there were a couple of times I actually thought about telling them what I figured they wanted to hear 'cause I - you get the feeling that they're going to hold you there forever and that you're going to go through 10, 12, 14 hours of grilling every single day for - in the indefinite future and that you'll be driven crazy, to which was added the extra stress as the Palestinian camp they were keeping me in was under fire from the Lebanese air force and the Lebanese army. It was being bombed and shelled at the same time. So while I'm answering these questions, every now and then, the interrogation would be interrupted by a 250-pound bomb going off in the next block or something like that. So yeah, I was tempted at times to just lie to them.

And, in fact, after I was released, a CIA agent from the American Embassy called me in to his office and wanted to know if I had done just that and if I might have, you know, started to throw out names of people I knew in the embassy just to give my captors names and say, yeah, these guys are CIA agents, too. So that was, you know, one of the things I did think of, but I decided that it would be a bad idea.

GROSS: You know, people talk about war as a crucible that will test you and shape you. Probably being in a hole in the ground, held captive, is a crucible, too. Do you feel like you were tested and learned things about yourself and even about, like, your threshold of pain when you were held captive for that week in Lebanon?

CAPUTO: Oh, certainly. When you've had experiences like that and then you encounter the more or less ordinary stresses of life, even what one could consider, say, extreme stresses - I don't know - like, say, you're broke or you can't make the mortgage payment or whatever, that - you know, that's nothing to sneeze at, nothing to laugh at. But when you've been through something like that, you - in the midst of a more ordinary crisis, you will stop and you'll say, oh, my God, I - you know, I got through that. This is absolutely nothing compared to that, and I'll get through this easy enough.

GROSS: So what are - if this isn't too personal, what are some of the things you feel you learned about yourself in the extreme and dangerous situations you were in, you know, as a journalist, as a Marine, as a captive?

CAPUTO: Well, I think, you know, let's say on the flattering side.

GROSS: (Laughter) Yeah.

CAPUTO: On the flattering side, I certainly learned that I was tougher than I thought, not in the sense of a, you know, chest-thumping macho tough guy, but I meant that I could endure and keep my head under extreme stress better than I would have thought.

On the unflattering side, I know in Vietnam - and it's described fully in "A Rumor Of War," and it would take me way too long to go into a full, like, you know, description of it. But when I was in Vietnam, I had discovered that I had a capacity to be violent and dark in my actions in a way that totally shocked me. And I didn't think that that sort of thing was in me.

And, you know - and I've got this main character here in the novel, in "Acts Of Faith," Douglas Braithwaite, about - who never - who does have a dark force within him, but he denies that it exists. And his partner, Fitzhugh Martin, later says of him that those who deny the dark angel in their natures will become prey to it, and they won't recognize that dark force when it summons you, when it knocks at the door and summons you to do something that is really reprehensible. And I think that arises out of a discovery that I made about myself when I was in Vietnam.

GROSS: You know, since your Vietnam memoir, "A Rumor Of War," was such an important book about the war, I'm just wondering what you made of the whole debate about John Kerry's service in Vietnam during the election and how divided the country still seemed to be about the meaning of that war and the justness of that war.

CAPUTO: The Vietnam War and the 1960s will not be over until, oh, I'll predict, let's say 2040. That is roughly when the last baby boomer will die. And I just think that the divisions that were aroused during that era and by that war will continue to be fought by that particular generation, again, until they no longer have any effect on the daily and political life of the country.

GROSS: Philip Caputo, thank you very much for talking with us.

CAPUTO: Well, thank you, Terry. Thanks. Good to be here.

BIANCULLI: Journalist Philip Caputo spoke to Terry Gross in 2005. He wrote the Vietnam War memoir "A Rumor Of War," which became part of the cannon of wartime literature. He died last week at the age of 84. Coming up, we mark the hundredth birthday of Sir David Attenborough and listen to a portion of our 1985 interview with him. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF AARON DIEHL'S "A STORY OFTEN TOLD, SELDOM HEARD")

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Sir David Attenborough - the globally famous host, narrator and creator of nature films - marked his 100th birthday last week. His celebrated and popular natural history programs, since he began hosting and producing them for the BBC in the 1950s, have included "Planet Earth" and "The Blue Planet" series, "The Life Of Birds" and "Life On Earth," which traveled the globe to trace the history of evolution. London's Natural History Museum noted the occasion of Attenborough's 100th birthday by naming a new genus and species of parasitic wasp after him.

PBS did it by presenting a new special with Attenborough as host, allowing him to look back on what he considered one of his finest achievements - the series "Life On Earth." Today, we're noting the occasion by listening back to his 1985 interview with Terry Gross, where she asked him about making his "Life On Earth" and other nature documentary series.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

TERRY GROSS: When you're a cameraman looking for animals to display - a bird to display its feathers or whatever, are you sitting there with the camera waiting and waiting, having it poised, ready to be turned on?

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Well, of course, it's the - sort of the classic thing for the natural history cameraman to say modestly, well, I'm afraid we have waited nine months and 27 hour - whatever, you know, to get that shot. In point of fact, if the truth is to be told, the better cameraman you are and the better naturalist you are, the less time you have to wait. If you really know enough, you know - well, I mean, it's like, turning up in England and hoping to get cuckoos in December. I mean, you know, they don't occur in December. Cuckoos go cuckoo in spring. And so you turn up in spring, when - if you really know, you know which week to turn up.

And similarly, if you decide that you really want to have - what shall we say? - a monkey, the alpha male of a troop displaying at a certain time, you find out the man who knows about that particular species, and perhaps has been working with them for a year, and he'll say, oh, well, if that's what you want, I can take you. You want to meet Fred, who is the alpha male of group 3, and Fred always turns up in the morning about half past 5 with the troop on that log there just by the riverside. And he always sees Willie from the other side of the river, who is frightfully - very fed up, and they're great rivals, and he always displays. And you go down there, and there - and you get there half an hour before Fred's due. You set up the camera. Fred turns up, and he does it.

And so you go away, and you say, fine. I've got the shot I wanted, and I did it in a day. But that is a measure of - not in this instance, that instance - your success. It's the measure of the skill of the scientific observer who has spent his life studying that troop. And that's the fact of the matter, so that actually boasting how patient you were and how long it took you to get the shot is a kind of confession of inadequacy (laughter).

GROSS: Have any of your camera people ever gotten hurt or attacked by one of the animals who they'd come to shoot?

ATTENBOROUGH: No. None of my friends - thank goodness - have ever had - I mean, we've all had sort of mild occasions to climb a tree rather faster than one would think.

(LAUGHTER)

ATTENBOROUGH: But...

GROSS: Are you good at that?

ATTENBOROUGH: I have no idea whether I'm good. All I know is that when the rhinoceros charges, you find yourself 12 foot up a tree that has no branches beneath you...

GROSS: (Laughter).

ATTENBOROUGH: ...And you can't imagine how you got there (laughter). But actually, again - that, again, is a sort of - the wrong kind of boast. If you're a good enough naturalist, you should know how close you can get to an elephant before it charges. You should be able to read the way it moves its ears and the way it shakes its head,and which way the wind is going, and so on, to know that that is as close as you ought to get. And it's not my job or any of our - of any of us, our job, in order to demonstrate to be brave. Our job is to get the pictures. And you don't actually get pictures by persuading an elephant to charge you and pound your camera to little bits of cogwheels into the dust.

GROSS: Just curious, how close can you get to an elephant before he charges?

ATTENBOROUGH: You can get - it depends on the wind.

GROSS: On the wind?

ATTENBOROUGH: Yeah. I don't mean the elephant's wind. I mean...

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: Yeah. What does the wind have to do with it?

ATTENBOROUGH: Well, because of your smell.

GROSS: Oh.

ATTENBOROUGH: I mean, if the wind suddenly - what you do if you want to get close to elephants - which isn't a particular ambition of mine. I've spent a certain amount of time close to them. You get one of your silk stockings or nylon stockings, and you put talcum powder in it, face powder. And you hold it in a little bag, and you continually bob it up and down so that you can see from the way this very fine talcum powder is drifting which way the - this is less than a wind. This is just the faintest breath of air. If - as long as the talcum powder keeps coming towards you, which is how you should have been approaching the elephant in the first place, that's OK. You're smelling the elephant. He's not smelling you. But if that talcum powder starts to move away from you, then you can bet your bottom dollar that the elephant is going to smell you quite soon, and this is the time you ought to retreat.

GROSS: So the elephant's not really paying attention to seeing you or smelling you.

ATTENBOROUGH: It doesn't like human - the smell of human beings. Its eyesight is not all that good. It has very small eyes. And, of course, one on either side of its head, as it were, so it's viewing from the side all the time. And you are, you know - so it's - it is smell and sound which particularly get it upset.

GROSS: You've been making naturalist movies for over 30 years. Film technology has changed a lot during that time. Is what you're able to show us different because of how the technology has changed?

ATTENBOROUGH: It's changed beyond recognition. The first films I made back in 1952 in Africa - where you had a clockwork camera. I mean, you had to wind it up, and it only ran for about, I think, 40 seconds or something. That was the longest shot you could take. There was no way in which you could actually record sound at the same time, synchronously. The lenses were small focal lengths so that you could really never get any decent close-ups - without, that is, getting much closer than you would wish to be. The film stocks were extremely slow, so that you couldn't actually film unless the light was very bright. You couldn't film in the jungle, for example. Color - at least you couldn't film color, certainly. It was just not enough light.

Now, of course, you have cameras with marvelous lenses, very sensitive stocks, very fast lenses, very long-focused lenses, so that you can do with the cameras all kinds of things that you couldn't do before. You can get resolution definition of your picture much better than it was. But also, there are many other sort of things you can do. Recently, I mean, in the last - well, for "Life On Earth" for example, we wanted to show a mole running down its tunnel. Nobody had ever shown a mole running down its tunnel. Perhaps nobody had ever wanted to show a mole running down its tunnel, but we decided we did. And so we went to the local hospital and bought - borrowed their fiber optics, you know, which they know - they used to put down people's throats and look inside their stomachs or inside their lungs. And we used that fiber optic device to put it in a mole's tunnel.

GROSS: Sex and violence is such a big issue in television programming. How much of sex - parentheses, mating - or violence - parentheses, one animal killing another for its food - do you think it's proper to show for a documentary series on television?

ATTENBOROUGH: Well, the curious thing is that if you show one sequence of copulation, it may last - I mean, in terms of actual technical - of when it starts and when it finishes, no more than about, say, perhaps - let us say, for the sake of argument, a minute and a half - people will be convinced afterwards that the program showed nothing else. I mean, they'll say, that program, I mean, why you went on and on and on and on about that sequence, we can't possibly understand. It was really awful of you. And that, of course, is because the images - these images are so powerful that hit us subliminally and psychologically so powerfully, that we are knocked right off balance by them.

As you say, I used to be a film director. I used to be a director of programs, and I remember very well, we had a fairly liberal view about that - those sort of scenes that you can do. And - but on the other hand, we had a financial program, which was devoted to doing an item about blood stock and horses and the value in terms of economics of what thoroughbred stock was and so on. And they had an interview in it, in which a man was talking to a breeder about this. And over the breeder's shoulder in the background, there was a stallion servicing a mare.

Now, (laughter) I don't know how familiar you are with stallions servicing mares, but I can tell you, it's a fairly spectacular proceeding. And I was as mad as anything as a - as the network director that the irresponsibility of doing that, because actually it was totally irrelevant. I mean, of course, he thought it was quite - the producer thought it was quite entertaining, because it was marginally, peripherally appropriate. But it was not centrally appropriate, and it was not about the economics, and the result - but the image was so powerful that nobody could possibly listen to - about the economics while this extraordinary drama was going on behind. Now, that seems to me irresponsible and totally indefensible.

But if you're doing a program about the nature of display or the techniques the scorpion had - it being a very antique organism and how, in fact, the evolution of sexual behaviors developed amongst the - amongst that group of invertebrate animals, then it seems to be totally proper that you should do it. Of course you can be lascivious about it, just as you can be lascivious and obscene about violence, and you can use shots of lions tearing the entrails from some poor wildebeest. I mean, it happens. You didn't organize it, and there it is. But is it what the program's about? And is it necessary for it to be an accurate truth? If you actually sanitize it so that you never put any of that in, that's just as bad, because that gives a totally misleading idea as to what the world of nature is like.

BIANCULLI: David Attenborough speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1985 interview with David Attenborough. Last week, he celebrated his 100th birthday.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)

GROSS: Did you grow up in the city?

ATTENBOROUGH: I - in a town, yeah. Well, it was a city, yes - but one that I could get to the country fairly easily on a bicycle.

GROSS: Yeah, 'cause I was kind of wondering how you became as comfortable with different physical environments, 'cause I think a lot of people who grew up in the city adapt less easily to exotic locations and climates.

ATTENBOROUGH: I'm not sure that's true, actually. I think a lot of us who grew up in cities developed a great hunger for these kind of places and a sufficient hunger to kind of quell the uncomfortableness of - involved in going there. I grew up - I certainly spent a lot of time in the countryside looking for fossils or hedgehogs or whatever. But I was certainly a city boy.

GROSS: When did you decide that you weren't going to live the academic life and write textbooks, but instead, you were going to write popular books and make movies that a popular audience could appreciate?

ATTENBOROUGH: Well, in - when I was an undergraduate studying zoology, it sounds amazing now to say this, but it is true - and this was in Cambridge in 1944, '45. The kind of zoology that we learnt was a zoology which was laboratory-based. Most of the animals you dealt with were dead. You were cutting them up to learn about their anatomy. Or if you were studying live animals - behaving as it were - then there were rats running through mazes or frogs jumping in front of a checkered board or something. What you didn't do was to go out and look at exciting animals like elephants or lions in Africa. That was not zoology. That was either big game hunting or natural history or something - but it certainly wasn't science because you couldn't - it was kind of thought that science involved manipulating in an experimental way the animals you were studying.

But unbeknownst to me at that time, the great pioneers of animal behavioral studies - Konrad Lorenz, for example - were actually working on this behavioral science that we now call ethology. And - but I was then called up, and I went to the Navy. And when I came out of the Navy, it still seemed that they were still cutting up dogfish and watching mice in mazes - and I thought, well, this is not for me. And I went into publishing and then got into the BBC and persuaded them to let me make animal films.

GROSS: Did they reach an audience right away?

ATTENBOROUGH: Yes. Yes, animal films have always had a huge audience - in Britain, at any rate - and I suspect here. I really think that people - and I'm with them - think that there are few things more beautiful than a butterfly or a hummingbird, and that there are few things more dramatic than a party of warrior ants invading termites. There are few things more extraordinary than some of the breeding techniques of amphibian, and so on. And it's always had a huge audience.

GROSS: You think it's the beauty of it?

ATTENBOROUGH: No, I think it's all those things - the beauty, the drama, the fascination, the unexpectedness, the uninhibitedness, the truth in a curious way. I mean, animals don't lie in - to suit the camera, as it were. What they do is what they do. They may lie to one another. In fact, they do. But they don't lie to the camera.

GROSS: Do you ever find yourself, though, doing the equivalent of only looking to photograph pretty people, you know, like looking to photograph animals who are especially photogenic or landscapes that are especially dramatic or beautiful?

ATTENBOROUGH: That, in fact, is one of the reasons why I determined to do those two series - "Life On Earth" and "The Living Planet" - because there's a great temptation, as you say, to do the pretty ones all the time. I know perfectly well how you can get a very good - an enormously popular program. If you want an enormously popular animal program, it's not difficult. You make - just put a chimpanzee in it. And it's...

GROSS: It's the equivalent of having an infant, of...

ATTENBOROUGH: That's right. If you make - want to make an unpopular program, you put a snake in it. Now, if you are - but if you - on the other hand, you say, I wish to survey the animal kingdom, you have to do programs about snakes and chimpanzees. And so you have to do programs entirely about insects - which are not all that pleasant. I remember starting "Life On Earth - because I said we've got to start at the very beginning and go from the beginning of life all the way through - the first program was going to be almost entirely about algae and single-celled organisms, you see? And I was trying to sell this to a television executive to make sure that I get some money, a decent budget for this. And he said, it's very - the first program is of great importance, you know, and that's what the audience is going to judge it on.

So what's your first program going to be? And I told him it was going to be about this. And he said - how the hell, he said, are you going to get 10,000 people grabbed by the throat by green slime, he said - which indeed is a question. Making programs about green slime is not as easy as making it about chimpanzees - but if you're going to be comprehensive and responsible, you should try and do so.

GROSS: Did you keep that as the first show?

ATTENBOROUGH: Oh, yes.

GROSS: And did it work? Did you get the rights?

ATTENBOROUGH: Yes, it did, fortunately.

GROSS: Is there a desired response you'd like viewers to have to your programs?

ATTENBOROUGH: Well, I - I'm - if I'm totally honest, I have to say that the reason I make these kind of programs is because I find the subject matter fascinating. And I - and therefore, find them very enjoyable. There's nothing I enjoy more than watching animals doing things. And I would hope that other people would enjoy them - that's the primary thing. Now, of course, if you think that the wildlife and animals and plants are enjoyable and important and somebody says they are in danger, then you have a sort of obligation to make sure that you can do what you can to help them and protect them. And so, I am delighted if a subsidiary purpose, or subsidiary effect of these films is that people also say, not only is this wonderful and marvelous to look at, but it is valuable. It is threatened, and therefore, we must do something to make sure that it's not destroyed - then I'm delighted.

BIANCULLI: Sir David Attenborough speaking to Terry Gross in 1985. Last week, he celebrated his 100th birthday. His new TV special, "Life On Earth: Attenborough's Greatest Adventure," is available to stream at pbs.org and the PBS app. Coming up, critic at large John Powers reviews the new film "The Wizard Of The Kremlin." This is FRESH AIR.

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