When Dr. Jane Goodall poses for a photo, she counts down, “1, 2, 3, chimpanzee!” When she has a drink, it’s often scotch, which has the added benefit of soothing her sore throat. Goodall is hoarse because she’s been talking a lot—most recently about Jane, the new documentary by Brett Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck) that focuses on her early years observing chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park; and more generally, about wildlife conservation and sustainable development and environmental awareness, the crusades of her past three decades, during which time she’s spent a reported average of 300 days per year on the road. Goodall, who founded the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in 1977 and became a U.N. Messenger of Peace in 2002, is currently a regal 83 years old. You can forgive her if her vocal chords are fatigued.
Hours after I meet her—in a room at the Soho Grand Hotel where she recently spent an afternoon receiving a spree of eager journalists—Goodall will fly home to England for five days; then to Osaka, Japan; then to Argentina. Why Japan? I don’t ask, but she tells me: She’s receiving the International Cosmos Prize, a prestigious science award. The crown prince of Japan may be there for the ceremony. That’s not the point. The point is that the prize comes with money, 40 million yen (roughly $350,000), money that can go toward the JGI’s many programs. Just a few moments into our interview, it becomes clear to me that basically everything Jane Goodall does is mission-driven. This film is no exception. “I agreed to do it because we’re doing so many projects in Africa. We have our youth program in a hundred countries around the world. And we need funding.”
For its subject, Jane may be sort of like a particularly artful Kickstarter campaign; for the viewer, it’s a fascinating, eye-opening time capsule. (And, to be fair, she feels that way too: “It took me back as no other documentary has, to how I was then, and the relationship with the chimpanzees.”) In the late 1950s, the British-born Goodall was an aspiring naturalist with a high school education, working in an administrative capacity for the famed paleoanthropologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey. Then Leakey took a chance on his 26-year-old secretary and sent Goodall out into the field to study the then-little-understood wild chimpanzee. Accompanied by her mother, Goodall in 1960 set out for the Tanzanian bush, intent on gaining insight into one of human beings’ closest living cousins. With the clock running down on her funding, she finally ingratiated herself with a troop of chimps and got close enough to observe them doing something rather remarkable: stripping leaves from twigs and poking the modified utensils into termite holes to extract and feed on the insects.
It was a major discovery of non-human tool use and modification—“Observations Challenge Human Uniqueness,” went one headline—made all the more intriguing because Goodall was a lithe young blonde with no credentials to speak of, who happened to share a given name with Tarzan’s fictional paramour. (Another headline: “Comely Miss Spends Her Time Eyeing Apes.”) In short order, National Geographic sent a photographer—the dashing Dutchman Hugo van Lawick—to join Goodall in Tanzania and to document her research and way of life.
Van Lawick’s silent, vivid 16 mm footage—more than 140 hours of his film were found, unindexed, in 2014 in a National Geographic archive—comprises much of Jane’s visual world. It serves as backdrop to Goodall’s creaky, kindly voice—reading diary entries and letters and in conversation with Morgen—and a soundtrack of orchestral music by the composer Philip Glass. (In format and feel, if not in tone, this project reminded me of Stevan Riley’s 2015 documentary about Marlon Brando, Listen to Me Marlon, also built around a salvaged trove of archival material.) The effect is less a primer on Jane Goodall—there have been plenty of those, after all—than a nostalgia-soaked tone poem about life cycles, about humanity in its natural context, an impressionistic portrait of a scientist finding her métier, of a young woman coming into her own, and an incredibly intimate look at chimps being chimps.
A romance blossomed between Goodall and Van Lawick (they would eventually marry in 1964, then have a son, nicknamed Grub), and you can sense their mounting affection in the tenderness with which the cinematographer regards his subject, and in the shy way she allows herself to be watched. Goodall, often barefoot, her lustrous hair pulled back into a ponytail, shimmies up trees, leaps across streams, picks her way through foliage, sleeps rough under the stars, all the while inching closer and closer to the chimpanzees she gives names to—David Greybeard, Flo, Fifi, Flint, Mr. McGregor—and who begin to incorporate her as one of their own. (This strategy to some degree backfires when they take to ransacking her camp in search of bananas; later the scientific community would also come to question some of Goodall’s more unorthodox methods, and her tendency toward anthropomorphizing.) Morgen tracks his subject’s personal development in lockstep with that of Flo, a female chimp with an unusually bulbous nose, whom we first observe as a young adult, then as a mother, and finally into old age and death.
Goodall’s commitment to the chimps would outstrip her commitment to Van Lawick; their marriage ended in divorce in 1974. After a stretch living on the Serengeti with her husband and child, she returned to Gombe amid a polio outbreak that afflicted several members of the original troop. She stayed on at the research station she’d founded until the late ’80s, when she turned her efforts toward conservation and advocacy, becoming a sort of internationally renowned Lorax figure, a speaker for the trees, for the chimps that depend on them, and for the people who coexist in their midst. When she flew over Gombe in 1990, Goodall remembers, the park where she worked was an oasis of green in a desert of denuded hillsides. Now she sees reforestation. In the surrounding villages—and in several other African countries—the JGI has launched programs focused on education, sustainable agriculture, water management, microcredit for women, and family planning. “I knew unless we could help these people living in dire poverty, there was no way we could save the chimps,” Goodall explains. “Everything’s interconnected. You learn that in the rain forest.”
And that, in a nutshell, is her message: Humans fancy ourselves supernatural, but we’re just as much a part of the natural world as chimps, as the parasites they groom from one another’s fur, as the termites they dig from the ground, and on and on and on. If we don’t course correct soon, she warns, we’re headed for disaster. “I care passionately about nature,” Goodall says. “I care passionately about children. I have three grandchildren. I think about their children. If we can’t do things differently, what is the world going to be like in 50 years?”
We talked more about that question, about what environmentalists can do in an age of climate change denial, and about the half-century-old memories stirred up by Jane.
You’ve been doing conservation advocacy for the past 30 years. Do you still spend time in Gombe?
I still go back to Gombe twice a year, but I seldom see the chimps now. The ones I knew have gone.
Were you ever as close to another group of chimps as you were to those in the film?
No. Except some of the orphans, whose mothers were shot, that we look after in our sanctuaries.
I felt that this film was in large part about parenthood: the crossroads women face when they become mothers, the questions of how to raise independent versus dependent children. I’m curious what your son thought of it?
The first time he saw it was at the Hollywood Bowl, with apparently 18,000 people, with Philip Glass’s music live, a 78-piece orchestra. It was amazing. He was blown away. He said he learned things about my relationship with Hugo that he never knew before. And my grandson was there, too, and he said the same.
When Louis Leakey sent you into the bush to observe chimpanzees, you were a total novice without a formal education. In his position, would you have taken a risk on somebody like you?
You know, Louis felt he wanted somebody whose mind was uncluttered by scientific rigidity. It was awful back them. I was told I couldn’t talk about chimps with personality, minds, emotions, because that was unique to us. That was separate. We were this supreme kind of [creature].
Based on religion?
I think originally it was based on religion. But I think also on the scientific mind that says, “If we can’t prove that animals have emotions, they don’t have them.” But I’d been taught [otherwise] by my dog when I was a child. So I knew in that respect that scientists were wrong.
I have given opportunities to several students who didn’t have BAs even. And they’ve all gone on and made careers. And if they haven’t, they’ve learned from it, and benefited from it.
Leakey seems to have particularly been interested in giving opportunities to women: you; Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas; Birute Galdikas, who studied orangutans.
He believed we were more patient and we made better observers. You know, back then when he gave me my chance, there weren’t women in science. The expectation was if you didn’t go into nursing or teaching or something like that, you would get married. So I think back that you could go out into the field as I did, not worry about the future, about getting a degree and competing, because you’d be swept up by some white knight. You wouldn’t have to worry. It wasn’t a conscious thought, but I think it was a subconscious thought.
If it didn’t work out . . .
I would have married somebody. I would! No question. As it was, I did both.
There’s this letter in the film from your mom. She tells you during your divorce: “Don’t be too upset. A man is always married to his work, and his wife has to be a complement to that.” Did you ever seriously consider a life as Hugo’s right-hand woman?
Well, I did for a while. But it wasn’t right for me. I’m driven. Just sitting around on the Serengeti, it was great. I learned a lot. It broadened my outlook. And it was better for Grub when he was little, because chimps can be dangerous. It was a perfect piece of my life. But I couldn’t have gone on doing it forever.
While researching you, I stumbled on a term I’d never heard before: “Trimates” [also sometimes called: “Leakey’s Angels”].
That’s kind of silly. It was me, Dian, and Birute. We were always kind of teamed up and we’re so different.
Were chimpanzees a particular obsession for you? Or would you have been just as happy if Leakey had sent you to study gorillas?
Or lions. Or elephants. One of the most fascinating animals I’ve ever studied were hyenas. I would have studied any animal. That was my dream. Live with animals and write books about them.
Do you feel you lucked out with chimps?
Of course I lucked out. It was because chimps were biologically so like us—like 98.6 percent of our DNA is the same—because they’re behaviorally so like us, that eventually persuaded science to come out of its little tight box, and realize we are part of, not separate from, the rest of the animal kingdom.
Was there a turning point in that thinking in your memory?
I don’t know. Getting my PhD was a turning point for me, because now I have it, and also Cambridge taught me to think in a scientific way, so I could stand up to people. It taught me to think logically, I loved it, and I loved analyzing the data; it was a very important part of my development.
Did you have to resist becoming just another rigid scientist?
If I had wanted a scientific career then that would have been a problem. But I didn’t. So I got my PhD, and I just went and immersed myself in Gombe. Subsequently, of course, I came out when I realized what was happening to chimps in Africa—medical research, circuses, et cetera.
One highlight that is never referred to: There was a big gathering in New York about using chimp organs in transplants. It was around 1990. There were all these medical people here, and they asked me to give a talk. I remember being outside and thinking, I can’t be with these people. But I gave my talk and they had a long deliberation at the end, and the consensus was: We will not use chimpanzees for organ transplants on ethical grounds. Thank you. That was my contribution.
Looking back on the footage in this film, some of your methods are pretty unorthodox, particularly the amount of physical contact you had with the chimps. What did you think seeing that after all this time?
It brought it back to me. It’s so real. We wouldn’t do it today, but back then, there was nobody doing this sort of thing. We didn’t know that chimps could catch all our diseases. I was just there, trying to get close to the chimps, trying to learn about them, trying to empathize so that I could understand why they did what they did. Why some mothers did this and other mothers did that. Science was telling me: You must be objective; you can’t have empathy. I’m saying, “I’m sorry, empathy is really important.” If you can empathize and say, “I think she’s behaving that way because,” then you have a platform. Then you say, “Okay, now I’m going to take my scientific knowledge and try to find out if my gut feeling is true or not.” But without the empathy, you’ve got nowhere to begin.
I want to turn to politics before we go.
Of course. Everybody does.
This is your life’s work. How does it feel after all these years to see a country like the U.S. moving backward in its attitudes toward the environment?
It’s shocking. Australia’s doing the same. The U.K. as well. It’s heartbreaking. Even if he’s only in—hopefully—for four years, some of the things he’s doing, like removing protections, saying it’s okay to go drill in national monuments, that we can go destroy these marine environments, putting in a head of the EPA who’s taken the “protection” out of it. It’s not EPA. It’s EA. Removing climate change discussion from the White House. Everything he’s doing is shocking. The most important thing for me is to give young people hope. So all I can say to them is: “Look, we’re under siege. We just have to be almost like an underground movement. We’ve got to work really, really hard. We’ve got to get strong.” So when the opportunity comes—because this won’t last forever; it can’t—we’re ready to take over again.
I remember that during the campaign your observations of male chimps were cited in explanations of Trump’s behavior during debates.
Where it always goes wrong is to say: “You likened Trump to a male chimp.” I wouldn’t do that. Trump showed behaviors that male chimps, competing for dominance, also showed. See the difference? It’s how you use words.
That distinction might be lost on our president.
Well, it’s not fair to the chimp.
This interview has been condensed and edited.