Influencers come and go, but Grizzly 399 seems to have no trouble staying on top of the social media food chain. The famous grizzly bear, who lives in Grand Teton National Park, started hanging out on the park’s roadside in 2006, and has returned with her cubs year after year (she’s had 18) to the delight of park visitors and wildlife photographers. In the film 399: Queen of the Tetons, filmmaker Elizabeth Leiter captures 399’s unique place in both the park and social media scene. Leiter (Jane Goodall: The Hope and The Abortion Divide) tells 399’s story through the eyes of people connected to her and as a way into the bigger policy controversies.
In anticipation of the film’s world premier on the opening night of Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Leiter talks with The Pulp about the role 399 plays within the context of delisting and human encroachment, and how 399’s intriguing life offers an opportunity to examine our own behaviors.
The Pulp: You have made films on such a variety of subjects, how did you end up deciding to make a film on 399?
Elizabeth Leiter: I met the photographer Tom Mangelsen working on the film about Jane Goodall, and they’re friends. And anybody who’s talked to Tom for more than five minutes hears about 399, right? Because he’s been documenting her his whole life. And so my partner on that Jane Goodall film, Kim Woodard, who’s my executive producer on this film, got really interested because Tom is so passionate. So that was sort of the origin of, ‘Let’s go out and start exploring this story.’
Did you know anything about 399 when you started?
I’d never heard of 399. I live on the East Coast and I’ve been to the Tetons before, but not since I was a kid. The narrative of the film evolved from there in the sense that it was like, OK, well, what’s the story? Is it just a man and a bear? This photographer who’s obsessed with this bear?’ That felt like a simple and straightforward approach. But pretty early on I felt like there was much more here. Her story is so much more intimate than I realized. I knew it would be intimate with Tom, but I didn’t realize how intimate it would be for a whole collective community. That was kind of surprising.
Also, just the deep emotions that grizzly conservation stirs up in people was really interesting, and she’s a celebrity grizzly, so she’s actually really controversial, despite how many people love her. And Tom’s story with her is so important to understanding her trajectory, so I was grateful to have him as that initial introduction to 399.
What did you make of this strange relationship humans have with wildlife in national parks, where people are preserving wildlife but also often endangering it?
Everybody circles around what the film’s really about, but you just nailed it right there. I still find it really complex because I was a part of it too, right? In documenting the photographers and tourists and air brigade and all the folks that are sort of surrounding her, you become a part of it. I was deeply a part of it even while I’m trying to think about it critically. And I’m still wrestling with it. I wanted as a filmmaker to acknowledge through the film that there’s a lot of beauty in the connection, but that there’s a complexity in it. It felt really, really important to talk about habituation appropriately. I started exploring ideas about, “What is her free will?” And “What is encroachment for her?” I can’t know all of these things since I can’t interview her. But I felt like it was really important to acknowledge what’s happening by the roadside in the Tetons. I mean, she’s incredible because she comes to us, but then we really get interested in seeing her. And it felt to me like, “Wow, look at this really delicate dynamic of humans just hanging out by the road.” By the hundreds, even! I felt that tension the whole time while filming.
I was wanting to explore what was happening and what was healthy and what was not. And where that line was. And that line is changing all the time.
What did you notice about the reaction to her on the roadside?
When I would see people connect on this really profound level with nature, it seemed really valuable to me as another human. That we, for one moment, shed this idea that we’re alone in the ecosystem or that we’re the top of it. And, visually, they’re incredibly beautiful, and to be outside in Wyoming or Montana or Idaho in this most pristine wilderness—very few places are wild enough for grizzlies. So I felt like there was a real connection and respect that can happen from that. And then there was the other more complicated [aspect] of “What is too close? Who gets to decide? What is she putting up with in order to protect her cubs?” Some of this is hard to know because you don’t want to anthropomorphize, right?
That tension felt really present for me throughout almost the entire process, both filming and editing. I was always thinking about it. I never wanted the film to be just an easy gloss of how she is so beautiful and we can feel good about ourselves for having been such good stewards. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t that easy. That we had to ask some more questions of ourselves. I think ultimately she’s given her species a great deal through her proximity to us. Because she is a teacher. People can connect with her and that’s really incredible. But, also, hundreds of people by the roadside feels like, “Am I in nature anymore?”
It’s such a weird scene. And, it’s true you don’t want to anthropomorphize but it makes you wonder: How is she processing this whole thing?
Exactly. What’s happening for her? And something that kind of emerged for me pretty early on in research was that there are two 399s, in a sense. There’s her and her biological life and her living as a grizzly on the landscape. And I love it when the bear biologists say “making a living on the landscape.” That means all of her biological impulses to feed, to mate, to hunt, to teach her children, to rear them. That’s her real lived life. And then there’s the story and the ethos and mythos all around her that is a human projection and that says far more about us than about her. I liked trying to ride the line of that tension. But I do have a deep curiosity of what is motivating her and what she understands is safety and threat.
What were some of the bigger challenges of making this film for you?
What wasn’t a challenge? [laughs] There’s all this controversy surrounding grizzlies, and [399 is] contentious because she’s a grizzly. She’s a celebrity in part because she’s beloved. And some people also resent that celebrity that she has. So I would say access [was challenging]. Balanced access was complex. I knew it would be easy to get the folks that loved her. But I also wanted to make sure that I was—both in my research and on film—talking to people that shared different perspectives about delisting or about grizzlies and conservation.
Once we were in the editing process, there was such an immense amount of archive of her, from multiple sources over many, many years. That’s a challenge of any film, but one thing that was really challenging about the archival is that you get all these brief moments, but they’re not stories. And when we were trying to explore her behavior, sometimes there wouldn’t be that much. And we’re like, “Hmm, how do we make a meal out of this?” And, again, I didn’t want to anthropomorphize her. And because she’s by the road, there’s not a whole lot of bear behavior, right? Which is what a natural history film is really about. It was never going to be purely a natural history film. If you want a bear that really is just in the wild, she’s not your bear.
And then there’s all the social media video of her on Facebook and Instagram.
That was endlessly interesting to me. At a certain point you go down weird rabbit holes in your research and think of things that might be a part of the film. And at one point, I was like, “OK, she’s born in ’96, so she’s born under a Clinton presidency in the early dotcom boom. And then she really comes to the roadside in 2006, [around the time] the first generation of the iPhone was released and in the early, early Facebook days. And nature photography—wildlife photography—also really changed during that time. It used to be something that only wildlife photographers who did it for a living could do, and now you’ve got enthusiasts, because they can afford [the technology]. So the whole landscape of humans and our technology and all of our interests changed around her, making her the most documented living bear in the world—in the wild, at least.
That didn’t end up making the film, but those ideas percolated in the way that I wanted to use social media video in it. She’s kind of always being watched, whether it’s the roadside or when she’s walking through people’s yards. People are always filming her. And she is such a spectacle. I mean, I think any grizzly would be, but when you’re walking around with four cubs, it’s really like a bear parade.
Telling already really contentious stories, like about delisting grizzlies or abortion, seems difficult because there is so much noise around the topics already, so how did you approach finding that nuance?
I was really lucky to have an amazing editor in Colin Nusbaum, who was really always interested in those conversations with me. We wanted to make sure that everything was fair, that we were doing right by that complexity, but at the same time, you still have to make a film that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it’s entertaining and engaging. You can make the highest minded film you want, but if it’s not engaging and accessible and beautiful … I guess they don’t all have to be beautiful. Some are not supposed to be, but this one had to be. I mean, you’re talking about grizzlies and the Tetons.
And I had an incredible cinematographer who also was interested in the complexity of these ideas. If I said, “Listen, this rancher said we could just show up today, and maybe nobody will talk to us, but we’re gonna have to get up even earlier. It’s gonna be dark when we leave and it’ll be dark when we come back.” He was like, “Let’s do it. Let’s go.”
Like in any kind of journalism, there are dead ends everywhere. You start following a particular story, but it doesn’t yield fruit. Or certain people would get cold feet and then didn’t want to talk in the end. Because there was a lot at stake for people here.
How did the story of 399 help you tell the bigger delisting story?
Understanding the recovery of grizzlies was really important to understanding her emergence in 2006 in the Tetons, [which] is massive, right? There had not been grizzlies documented living in that area. Maybe they were coming in and out, but that was a sign of the vitality of the species. Nobody thought she would stay around that long. And here she is, year after year, reemerging, hanging out in the same spots, having all these cubs. And so you needed to understand also what grizzlies had been through. And I felt like that little bit about how there used to be these shows in Yellowstone where they would feed grizzlies … that was really, really crucial to understand that our relationship has been shifting with this species. And in what ways has it shifted and in what ways is it still the same? I also wanted to get to a point in the film where you don’t need all this background context to be able to just be in her story and live in it for a minute and understand, “Wow, it’s really escalating. It’s really reaching the fever pitch of humans and grizzlies interacting.”
The film couldn’t answer any questions about what we are supposed to do. But we could at least explore the moment that we’re in. It’s amazing that we got to this moment—that we didn’t lose them, that we’ve recovered. But what next? Because we have less land than we did when they were listed. There are more and more humans everywhere in the GYE. And even though it’s this beautiful and incredibly protected space—which was an act of foresight—what’s next? We still have people who are truly trying to make a living ranching. We have security concerns about living with an apex predator.
The discourse gets flattened a lot, like other issues in both our domestic discourse as well as international. “Save them all.” “Kill them all.” “I’m right, you’re wrong.” And we don’t solve any problems that way. We certainly won’t solve this one that way. In discussing what we should do, I felt like 399 was a really interesting prism, because she reflects back onto us our own beliefs.
399: Queen of the Tetons screens at the Wilma Fri., Feb. 16, at 7 PM. It will be available to stream from Feb. 19 to 24.
