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Zuccarini was passionately dedicated to freediving and
remains so today. He was always athletic, and freediving
came naturally to him. As a teenager he often took pictures
of his friends and the marine life on breath-hold dives.
When he began to combine filmmaking with his love for all
things aquatic, it was a winning combination.
As he grew to 6’ 3”, his height and athleticism helped him
become a Junior Olympics decathlon champion. He pole
vaulted, ran track and played football, but he also excelled
at academics, which made him highly recruited by Ivy
League colleges including Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
Brown University won out, and Zuccarini enrolled in a
cross-registration program with Brown and the Rhode Island
School of Design. Combining aquatic biology with film
school served him well, and in 1988 he earned his bachelor’s
degree in the arcane field of art and semiotics.
Stephen Frink
//
In the late 1980s you emerged from
college with a film degree. For many that goes nowhere;
how did you build on that to travel down your career path?
Pete Zuccarini
//
Actually, I worked on a movie even
before graduation. I was home in Miami for the summer in
1986,
and I read that a movie called Midnight Crossing was
being shot on location there. I wanted to see how movies
were made, so I got a job as a production assistant. They
quickly upgraded me to camera intern, and I was soon
loading film magazines and providing other assistance.
That was a pivotal opportunity that allowed me to see all
the pieces that go into a big motion picture. The summer
after graduation I saw that the James Bond movie License to
Kill was being shot in Key West, and I managed to get on
that one as a camera assistant, too. So early on I had at least
some semblance of a résumé.
If you look at the kinds of films I shoot now you
might assume that’s all I ever wanted to do, but I was
always motivated to shoot nature as well. I’d heard about
grouper spawns in the Bahamas where 100,000 fish would
congregate, and that’s what I dreamed of filming. I also did
a lot of work with Sam Gruber, Ph.D., of the University of
Miami at the Bimini Biological Field Station. I’d be there
with him when various news and documentary crews came
through, and if they had a cameraman who couldn’t or
wouldn’t get in there with the sharks, I would get the shot.
That’s how I met folks from Disney, too; Roy Disney wanted
to shoot sharks on 35mm cinema film in the Bahamas.
Their familiarity with my work allowed me to pitch them
the idea of a wildlife show based in the Everglades. For 150
days spread out over two years we focused on one mother
alligator and filmed three generations of young. This was
pretty exciting stuff for a kid fresh out of college.
JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, INTO THE BULE