Below you can read the first part of an interview with Disneynature’s “OCEANS” Executive Producer Don Hahn.

Q: I was wondering if you could tell us, as the producer of this movie, how this film came about and how you got involved in it and how this project came to fruition?

A: Well, we have a couple of brilliant directors, Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, two French directors, and they did a film years ago called Winged Migration that was really well received. They wanted to capture the oceans on film, which is no small feat. They shot for five years in every corner of the planet and developed some new equipment for filming – for example, a camera that can film dolphins while they’re swimming at full speed and torpedo cameras to pull behind boats and film.

They really had to invent the best way to get the best footage for this film and that’s really a credit to them and their hunger for putting something on the screen that audiences haven’t seen before. Aside from the logistics of getting around the world and trying to capture that footage, we also want to tell a story. For that we pulled in Pierce Brosnan and a team of people to try to create a story around, not only these characters, but also what faces these characters have and why the ocean means something to us. Why we are here to be, in a sense, stewards of the ocean? Well, because our life depends on it.

Q: I assume you saw the footage as it was coming in and probably had some input into the final take here; is there anything that really surprised you or blew you away as you saw it?

A: What always surprised me is the patience of the camera people out in the field because you’ll have a guy sitting in Antarctica watching a hole in the ice waiting for a penguin to jump out. You have somebody sitting there, and it could be two weeks, waiting for this moment to happen. These are men and women of amazing skill to not only to catch that image, but to catch it with great quality. That amazed me when I saw this movie and saw the pieces. I thought, “Oh my God!” There is such an unseen group of filmmakers here that are really contributing to this film and making it special, and that’s always been the pleasure here.

Of course, the animals, there are things in this movie that I promise you you haven’t seen before. There is a fish in this film called the Asian sheepshead wrasse that is a cross between a tuna and the elephant. There are just all these amazing creatures down there and the irony of it is sometimes as a race of people we look out at the stars for the alien planets for that life, and there is this amazing alien planet right under our noses here that’s so close to us. I think this film brings you, as an audience member, closer to that world and those creatures.

Q: The whole thing with the Nature Conservancy and how you guys are donating money from the movie to that organization, can you talk a little bit more about that, just how that came about? That’s a really incredible thing you’re doing.

You know, it’s great. It’s the one nice thing about Disneynature is yes, it’s called show business, but every once in a while you can do some great things to give back. Part of what has happened with Disneynature is we’ve had the phone ringing off the hook with people who want to help give back and use the movie to bring up issues that we all face.

Nature Conservancy, for this film, we’ve partnered with them to try to create some nature preserves and, specifically, some marine preserves off the Bahamas in an area where the coral reefs are really crucial. These are the equivalent of creating national parks. You try to go out and create some land, and in this case a stretch of coral reefs that is protected and set aside for future generations and just allowed to exist in its most beautiful form.

Last year, for Earth we planted a tree for everybody that went to see Earth during its opening week. This week you can really make a difference with your ticket because we donate a portion of ticket sales to that effort to preserve these coral reefs. It’s a really great chance to see a movie and actually do something concrete for our planet.

Q: What exactly are your responsibilities as executive producer?

A: It’s all about the food. [laughs] No, I do a number of things. I think on this movie I was really involved in the storytelling and how the final movie came together. I’ve made most of my career in animation working on films like Beauty and the Beast and Lion King, and I think what I love about the potential of these nature films, is the potential to not just show things but also tell a great story and on this particular film my job was mostly working with the directors and writers and musicians to try to turn this into a film that is really relevant in a modern world, and deals with issues that touch us all. As a creative producer that was my job on this film.

Q: How difficult is it to take nature footage and turn it into a story?

I think it depends. When we did Earth, the directors on Earth were able to take polar bears or animals that have faces and things, when you get under the sea things are really odd down there and you have creatures with eyes on either side of their head and somehow it’s hard to relate to them. I think what is really smart about what the directors chose to do was to just let us spend time with the creatures and create this experience where you’re just with them for a while and get a sense of that environment and the personality.

One oceanographer said, “Even every fish has a personality,” like we associate with a dog or a cat. They’re all individuals and we seldom see it that way. I think that was the challenge and opportunity here is to take what normally we would say is a screen full of fish and try to personalize them, not in an anthropomorphic way, not try to humanize them, but just to say each one of these fish is an individual character, an individual being and as such that can help us tell a story about who they are, how they exist, who their predators are, how they interact.

You see some amazing scenes. There is a shot in this movie of a walrus and her little cub, her newborn cub and she’s cradling him since he was born a few hours earlier. It’s so emotional. I think those are the things we look for in these films to share with our audiences.

Stay tuned for the rest of the interview on DisneyDreaming.com!