Wild life and brutal death: Joan Root, film-maker ane conservationist
Joan Root was a shy British eccentric who became a fearless film-maker and conservationist. And this is, almost certainly, what led to her death. Now her life story is to be turned into a film starring Julia Roberts.
By By Arifa Akbar and Andrew Buncombe
Published: 21 May 2007
The Independent
At her memorial service last year on the shore of Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Great Rift Valley, Joan Root's former husband did his best to try to sum up the contribution she had made to the series of remarkable, ground-breaking wildlife documentaries the couple had made together years earlier.
"Many of you know what a wonderful helper Joan was to me, but she was much more than that," Alan Root told the assembled group of conservationists, wildlife experts and film-makers sitting outside on chairs overlooking the lake. "She was really the producer of all the films we did together Joan was my right arm. She made it all possible. And if we flew high and far together in those years, it was because of her." At that point Mr Root, divorced from his former wife a full 25 years before, found himself unable to go on and dissolved into tears. His tribute would have to wait.
Yesterday it was announced that another tribute to Root - murdered in her lakeshore farmhouse in January 2006 - was under way. It was revealed at the Cannes Film Festival that Julia Roberts will play Root in a movie telling the story of her extraordinary life and her brutal death - allegedly a murder carried out in "retaliation" for her conservation efforts.
Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, who jointly head Working Title Films, said they got the idea for the film after reading a lengthy magazine article about Root's life last summer. Roberts apparently read the same article and was equally moved by the story of Root's efforts to try to preserve Africa's threatened wildlife.
"Joan had made many films with her husband in Kenya before she was shot. Julia read the article about her and we came together with it," Mr Bevan told reporters. "It is a story that we thought could make a great movie in terms of stretching from Out Of Africa to The Constant Gardener and with the issues that relate to the world today." He added: "We are thrilled to be making a film about such a courageous, adventurous and passionate woman. With Julia in that role, we hope it will be a movie that people will want to see."
Root was murdered on 13 January, 2006, in the bedroom of the property where the 69-year-old had lived with a collection of orphaned animals and staff of nine for the last 25 years. From her veranda, set on 88 acres, she could watch circling fish eagles and at night she could hear some of the lake's estimated 1,200-strong hippo population march ashore and make their way across her property.
But if her home, 55 miles west of the capital Nairobi, sounded idyllic it was in reality a place confronting severe environmental pressures. In recent years huge flower farms have bought up much of the lakeshore, using the water to irrigate the blooms that are flown out in export to Europe. Officials say some of the farmers have been using banned pesticides which have found their way into the lake.
Of much greater concern to many - Root among them - had been the proliferation of illegal fishermen in the region who were using close-meshed nets to land hauls of fish, many of them undersize. Their lack of discrimination had caused the lake to lose its ability restock.
Root had joined with others to establish a semi-official action group called the Task Force to try to stop the poachers and to preserve the fish stocks which played such a vital part in the food chain of the lake's ecosystem. It was made of government officials and former poachers who knew the lake and Root was footing the bill to the tune of 4,500 shillings ($62) a month for each employee.
The extensive magazine article in Vanity Fair magazine which inspired Roberts, the 39-year-old Hollywood icon, and the ceative powers behind Working Title Films - which worked with her on the film Notting Hill - tells how the work of the Task Force gradually grew out of control.
Initially, it was successful in reducing the illegal fishing and helping to give fish stocks in the 62-square-mile lake a chance to grow. But steadily the group's behaviour became more and more questionable. Some fisherman claimed that they were attacked and roughed up by the group's members and that they even stole their catches of fish.
Dodo Cunningham-Reid, a neighbour of Root's and whose upscale lodge, Hippo Point, is popular with the likes of Angelina Jolie, told the magazine: "Naivasha is the perfect microcosm for the larger picture of Kenya: lawlessness, poverty, collapsing infrastructure, corruption, abuse on all levels-the sad story of a displaced society where money talks."
As local support for the Task Force started to fall, Root's friends begged her to drop her links to the group and eventually she stopped paying its members to act against the poachers. That, police believe, was her downfall.
Suddenly she started receiving death threats and warnings by text message.
Former members of the Task Force, having been reduced from positions of authority to scrabbling once again to make a living, were not happy. "Her dedication to conservation of wildlife was unbelievable," said Barry Gamer, a neighbour and fellow conservationist who is president of the Nakuru Wildlife Conservancy, told The New York Times." She was tireless at it. She never gave up." Root had dealt with plenty of challenges before. The daughter of a former British intelligence officer turned coffee farmer, Root was born in Kenya in 1936. It was while working as a safari guide in the former British colony that she met her husband to be, an amateur film-maker who had left London in search of adventure.
An obituary published in a British newspaper following her death noted that Alan Root had found the young woman "painfully shy" but had decided to continue pursuing her learning that she had hand-reared a baby elephant. "Before we were married she wore a monocle and so did I.
"Together we made quite a spectacle," he said.
The couple were married in 1961 - their honeymoon night in a tent on the banks of the Tiva River disrupted when Root was stung by a scorpion that had crawled inside their tent - and over the next two decades they made a series of iconic films together that showcased the wildlife of Africa.
"She was completely fearless," Root said of his late former wife. "She dived with sharks in the Galapagos, and crocs and hippos in Mzima, and handled dangerous snakes as easily as kitchen utensils, all with a grin and a shrug that said, 'Anything you can do, feller ...'."
Among the highlights of their work was Mysterious Castles of Clay, narrated by Orson Welles, which showed the inner-workings of a termite mound. The film - in which they trained their camera on a termite mound and waited 30 days for the winged stage of the termite life cycle to emerge - was nominated for an Oscar in 1978.
Another film about the Galapagos Islands entitled Voyage to the Enchanted Isles, was narrated by Prince Philip and given a premiere at Royal Festival Hall. It also became the first UK-produced wildlife film shown on American television. Others included Balloon Safari, which followed their journey together over the 19,340-ft peak Mt Kilimanjaro by hot air balloon - the first such journey.
Police - who arrested four men over Root's murder but had insufficient evidence to bring charges - believe it was her love of wildlife and her stubborn refusal to back down in the face of confrontation that led to her death. The Vanity Fair article by Mark Steel, entitled "A Flowering Evil" reports how, in the early hours of 13 January, Root's security consultant, John Sutton, received a call on his mobile phone while in neighbouring Tanzania.
Root told him that there were men outside her door demanding in Swahili that she open the door. "OK, turn off your light, get on the floor, and get into the bathroom," he told her. Previously, at Mr Sutton's suggestion, steel doors had been put in place in the bathroom for this very purpose.
Mr Sutton called his team of guards at the farmhouse and than rang Root back. He heard her sobbing and then a volley of gunshots. "She was saying, 'John, help' and then her voice faded away," he said. All the time he could hear the intruders shouting "Open the door! Open the door". Reports say that by the time help got to her, Root - hit twice in the leg and once in the hip - had died from massive blood loss.
Appropriately enough, Mr Root is involved in the film project, which has yet to be given a name. The script is written by David Magee, who received an Academy Award nomination for the film, Finding Neverland, about the life of the children's author, JM Barrie, starring Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp, while Roberts will co-produce the movie as well as star as Root. Filming - shot on location in Africa - is due to start next year.
A story of daring and patience
* MZIMA: PORTRAIT OF A SPRING (1972)
A hippo almost bit off Joan Root's head during filming for this chronicle of life around a waterhole in Kenya's Tsavo national park. While she was diving, an irate male fixed its jaws around her mask, spearing the glass with a tusk.
* BAOBAB: PORTRAIT OF A TREE ( 1973)
Almost two years were spent capturing the life of the baobab tree in the semi-deserts and grasslands from Sudan to South Africa.
* BALLOON SAFARI OVER KILIMANJARO (1975)
The Roots became the first people to pass directly over Africa's highest mountain in a hot air balloon. Thick cloud meant poor visibility, Joan nearly passed out when her oxygen tube blocked up, a burner blew out and they landed unexpectedly in Tanzania, only to be arrested as "astronaut spies".
* YEAR OF THE WILDEBEEST (1976)
For the first time the epic story of the perpetual migration of 1.5 million animals was captured on camera by the Roots.
* MYSTERIOUS CASTLES OF CLAY (1978)
The Roots partially dismantled a termite colony, built a mini-studio beside it to house their camera and filmed the termites through glass.
* LIGHTS, ACTION, AFRICA (1980)
Joan acted as bait to allow Alan to film a spitting cobra in action, getting close enough for the snake to strike for her eyes then wiping the deadly venom from her glasses.