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When I ask Jane Goodall what her favorite part of her job is, she's blunt: "I don’t prefer any of it. I do it because I feel I have to."
Nowadays, the famed anthropologist spends most of her time giving speeches, fundraising for the Jane Goodall Institute's 33 offices, and promoting projects like Jane, National Geographic's new film about her work, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Would she rather be in a forest somewhere, conducting field research? "I would love to be able to go back to that," Goodall explains. "[But] I can’t, so I’m not even thinking about it. I also love writing, [but] I don’t have time right now for writing. What I’m doing, I feel an increasing urgency the older I get, because the message is important, it’s making a difference, and I don’t know how long I have left to physically do what I do. I know you can do virtual, you can do Skyping, this, that, and the other, but every place says, 'Jane, it’s not the same, we want you.'"
You've probably encountered Dr. Goodall's work at some point (it's taught in most public schools), but for the uninitiated, here's some background: In 1960, while working as secretary for evolutionary anthropologist Louis Leakey, 26-year-old Goodall set up camp at the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe chimpanzees in their natural habitat. Those observations — particularly a report of a chimpanzee building and using a tool — sparked a new conversation within the scientific community about what it means to be human and it offered a glimpse into the world of the chimpanzee, one of our closest evolutionary relatives. Goodall catapulted onto the international stage. Soon, National Geographic took notice of the project and sent wildlife videographer (and Dr. Goodall's future husband) Hugo Van Lawick to record it.
"What Van Lawick documented was something that had never happened before in the history of civilization and will never happen again," Jane director Brett Morgen tells Teen Vogue. "It was this one moment in time, and it was documented so poetically." The film itself is a dreamlike confection of archival footage, cut together from more than 140 hours of previously unseen film discovered in a storage unit after the videographer's death. "Everything we were hoping to find in the footage to articulate Jane’s experience was present."
The archival footage is intercut with Morgen's present-day interviews with Goodall, now 83. "[Jane] was kind of a bit of a contrarian. She wasn’t giving anything up," Morgen says of the process. "Here’s the thing: She’s been interviewed millions of times, right? Jane didn’t ask for a film to be made on her. NatGeo said we’re gonna do this film, so for her, she’s like, really?, because we made a dozen of them." But the difference between Jane and the films that came before it is this: Whereas the existing body of work focused on her scientific discoveries, Jane would tell the story of her personal life, how it influenced her work, and vice versa. As Morgen explains, Jane is a love story — not between Hugo and Jane or woman and chimp, but between a woman and her work. In the film, Dr. Goodall says she never had an aspiration of being married or having a family; she only wanted to observe the animals, and ultimately, she chose her work over her marriage to Hugo.
"When I showed up, I was a nuisance," Morgen says. "She had no idea what we were hoping to achieve, and [I think] the first question I asked her was, 'Do you get tired of telling your story?' She looked at me very sternly and [said] it depends on the interviewer. I was like, touché, challenge [accepted]." Morgen is best known for documentaries such as The Kid Stays in the Picture and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. Goodall is his first female subject. "Most of the stuff we talked about was stuff she never talks about. Ego is never part of her discourse."
Despite serving as a figurehead for the conservation movement — a role that now mostly consists of speaking engagements and appearances — Goodall says she finds online self-promotion "strange" and openly admits to having a team manage her social media accounts. "My institute, they gave me a Facebook page, and I think I tweet? But I don’t tweet," she explains. Her candidness is refreshing, and having spent most of her career in front of some sort of camera (whether Hugo's or the media's), she knows her way around an interview. Now that she's assumed the role of the OG naturalist, or as Morgen says, "Saint Jane," it's easy to forget she was once a rather controversial celebrity.
"At the very beginning, because I was a woman, there were a lot of scientists who didn’t want to accept anything that I discovered," Goodall explains. "They said, 'How do we know she’s telling the truth? She’s just a Geographic cover girl. She wouldn’t have been exposed the way she is if she didn’t have good legs. That’s all she is.' I heard a lot of people saying that." Not only was she able to ignore the naysayers and continue her research, but she was directly responsible for galvanizing a generation of female scientists who have helped break down barriers for women in STEM today. In one scene in Jane, we see hundreds of little girls lined up at what looks like a movie premiere in the '70s, asking for the researcher's autograph while Hugo looks on, and in that moment it's clear: Jane Goodall was just as much a rock star to those girls as Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stones, or any of Morgen's other documentary subjects.
"Jane doesn’t like playing gender politics," Morgen says, but agrees there's no disputing the underlying feminist narrative of the film: After all, Jane explored uncharted territory accompanied by her single, supportive mother; made groundbreaking scientific discoveries; received backlash from the scientific community because she is a woman; took advantage of her poster-girl status in order to produce more groundbreaking work; and chose career over marriage.
There was a reason nobody had been able to document the behaviors of chimpanzees before Jane, and in Morgen's opinion, her success was not related to her gender at all. "That is where Jane’s constitution [came in] — Jane could sit out there for 16 hours a day not drinking, not eating, in a way that any person would be complaining and scratching and miserable, especially a scientist who wasn’t raised in those sort of environments," he says. "Jane’s father was a race-car driver, which is endurance, so she has a particular stock." She's continued that stamina today, traveling 300 days a year delivering her message to audiences across the globe.
"Jane will even tell you that is what separated her. No man was able to hold their own with Jane, and early on she had a couple of male guides," Morgen says. "They would cry and whine, 'We can't go any farther.' Jane — to this day — is the type of person who will keep walking until she collapses. She knows no quitting."
"Every single day you make some kind of difference, and it’s just as simple as thinking about the consequences of the little choices you make," Goodall explains. "If there are hundreds of thousands of people across the world thinking about the consequences of the little choices [they] make . . . cumulatively, that’s moving us toward the kind of world we really all want." In harnessing the power of the 100,000-plus young people participating in Roots & Shoots, she's widening her impact not among the generation who knew her as the NatGeo cover girl, but among the generation that will soon be tasked with combating climate change at its most urgent moment. Jane Goodall the 4-year-old observing a hen laying an egg became Jane Goodall the 26-year-old secretary turned scientist who then became Jane Goodall the icon, so there's no telling where the next major environmentalist will come from. But if a consequence of Goodall's advocacy work is mobilizing a generation of environmental stewards to take action, her work will have set off a series of powerful chain reactions. She understands this, noting, "Every single individual has some role to play in life, even though we may not know what it is yet."
