Host: The film The Deepest Breath is about the extreme sport known as freediving. Divers attempt to break world records for how deep they can swim before returning to the surface, all in a single breath, and we are not talking about scuba diving here. The best in the world can dive down over 100 meters, that's 328 feet, before coming up for air. Divers can black out before they reach the surface.

Some have even died in their attempts, even the best in the world, as we see in the film. That's where safety divers come in. They are freedivers trained to help struggling athletes reach the surface. The film follows one of the most celebrated freedivers in the world, Alessia Zecchini, and her pursuit of the women's world record for the deepest freedive. Alessia meets safety diver Stephen Keenan, and the two begin a training relationship and then a romantic one, but as the documentary explores the love of diving that bonded them would ultimately separate them forever.

In the review of the film, The Hollywood Reporter writes, "The Deepest Breath is a breathtaking documentary, one filled with eye-popping visuals, thrilling competitions, and a deftly presented love story." It's available to stream on Netflix, and I'm thrilled to be able to speak with Laura McGann, the director of The Deepest Breath. Thank you again so much for joining us. Laura, before we talk about this really human story that's at the heart of your film, can you talk a little bit about some of the freediving basics for people who have never seen or heard of freediving, what does it involve and what's required of the athletes who attempt it?

Laura McGann: Sure, okay. Thanks for having me on. It's really nice to talk to you, Brigid. Freediving basically in our film, we follow deep freedivers who take a deep breath on the surface of the water, hold your breath, go down, and see how far you can get, and the deepest diver wins in a competition. You've no scuba tanks, you've no breathing apparatuses, it's just you, and that's it. Freediving is kind of everyone has done it in some shape or form as in like, you know, Brigid, have you ever, as a kid, would you've held your breath in the bath and put your head in the water and count how many seconds you can hold your head in, that's freediving.

Host: Sure. See if you could swim under the pool as far as you can go.

Laura McGann: Exactly. Exactly. That's how a lot of people start. Alessia, who's in our film, she started in the pool. She was very young and she was able to beat the grown men in the pool at 13 years of age, but she has very much graduated to the sea now where she currently holds the deepest woman in the world record.

Host: When did you first become interested in this specific story?

Laura McGann: I read about Stephen and Alessia in 2017. I had to Google what is freediving, and I was met with by these beautiful images of people behaving more like seals and dolphins, like swimming, holding their breath under the sea as if they didn't have the urge to breathe. I couldn't believe it. It was like finding out that there was people that lived somewhere that knew how to fly. It really was like that. Not only was it like a physically incredible thing that I was looking at, but also it was visually stunning as well.

That kind of really grabbed me, but then when I started to learn more about Stephen and Alessia, that's when I thought, "Oh, there could be a really amazing story here, as well as beautiful images, and that that could be an incredible kind of combination."

Host: That opening sequence of your documentary where the dive just keeps going down and down. I mean, I could feel my heart tightening for the length of time that this diver just kept going deeper and deeper and deeper. How long can some of these divers actually be underwater? How much time are we talking about when they're holding their breath?

Laura McGann: In a dive like that, which is around 100 meters, it could be about four minutes, and that's as well as all the effort it takes to get down, and then of course the real work starts when you're down there. Let's say wildly, you're down at 100 meters, and because you've-- so basically something happens at 30 meters, you kick down to 30 and then free fall happens, and that's when the pressure above you just pushes you down, so you don't have to kick or anything, you just need to stay still, and it pushes you down.

When you decide you want to come back up, that's when the real work starts, and you have to kick against all that pressure. It's like swimming against the current to get back up. Not only are you holding your breath, you're also doing a lot at the same time physically.

Host: It is. It is. Even talking about it feels so intense, and dare I say, stressful but beautiful. As you said, the visuals were the closest I feel like-- as the daughter of a young child who loves mermaids, this idea of actual mermaids swimming in the ocean, that is the visual that I had when I watched your film. How did you approach Alessia with the idea for this documentary, and what questions or concerns did she have for you?

Laura McGann: I reached her very initially when I Googled, when I read about Stephen and Alessia, I spoke to a number of different people who were based all over the world, like Spain, Luxembourg, Africa, the US, and then they kind of-- It's a very tight-knit community, so the word got round to Alessia that I had been chatting to them, and she said that she'd like to be part of it.

Then I got in touch with Alessia, and we just kind of went from there. Alessia really wanted, from the word go it was always about Stephen. It was always about, she wanted people to know Stephen, not just remember him, but actually know the kind of person that he was. She wanted people to know that he lost his life saving her. That was really important to her. Alessia didn't particularly want a big film made about her. She's quite a shy person, but she knew that in order to tell a story about Stephen, she'd also have to tell her story too. That was something that she just embraced completely and was on this project from the word go and really was a driving force behind a lot of the story.

Host: The way you weaved their stories together is just so beautifully done, and we'll talk a little bit more about both of them as individuals, but to help people still understand what this sport is and why someone might attempt to do something that is so clearly dangerous, what do you think it is that attracts someone like Alessia to freediving?

Laura McGann: Well, I think done in the right circumstances, freedivers definitely do everything they can to mitigate the risk, and there is a way of doing it safely. Everybody wants to go home and have their dinner at the end of the day, so it's not that-- when you mentioned there a few minutes ago that it's very stressful, whereas actually for the freediver, if they're in any way stressed or feeling stressed, that's when they turn around and come back up.

You have to be completely relaxed, completely Zen, your heart rate lowers, you're almost like in a super meditative state. Even though we're all at home watching this with our face in our hands, whereas the person that we're watching is actually deeply relaxed, which is hard to believe, but they wouldn't be able to do it if they weren't. Yes, so that's a major part of it.

Host: How do you train to be able to hold your breath for longer and longer periods of time? You talked a little bit about how Alessia started out in a pool, but is it something where there are people who are born with a particular knack for being able to do this, or is it really something that you can train up to?

Laura McGann: It is definitely. Like anything, like any sport, there's certain people that just naturally have this aptitude for whatever activity it is, and that helps, but raw talent will only get you so far really. It's about your mental capacity to be able to relax your mind and also physically. It is obviously a very physical activity, and flexibility is really important as well, because your lungs are contracting and expanding, so they need to be flexible in order for that to go well.

Yes, it is both physically and mentally really challenging. Alessia would've started in the pool and worked her way up to the sea. It's not recommended that you start tomorrow and decide you'd like to get to 100 meters within the next year. It's a very, very slow process, and people are recommended to take it meter by meter and not be obsessed with numbers. Just enjoy the dive. That's kind of what Alessia learned to do.

Host: Part of what I think we saw in Alessia's evolution was when she realized that the mental preparation and the state of mind she brought to the dive was as important as all of that physical training that you talked about. I'm wondering what kind of breath work and maybe out-of-the-water activities did you observe from Alessia and some of the other divers you met? Because you spoke to a lot of people for this documentary.

Laura McGann: Yes. Everyone has their own way of getting into the zone. For Alessia, I know she has told me that she does a lot of visualizations, so she will take some time before each dive. I think for a few days beforehand as well, she'll do this, but she will visualize what every moment in the dive feels like. She'll see herself going down, taking the tag moment by moment, coming back up and coming out fresh and doing her protocol. I know that's something that she finds incredibly useful because she then just has to repeat what she has already done in her head. I've put that in really layman's terms now, but that was the gist of it.

Host: One of the other things that I think is striking about the film, and it's something you show at the very beginning, are some of the risks and dangers associated with doing these dives, which include some of these divers are blacking out before they reach the surface. Part of that is so terrifying because you see that they need to be resuscitated. What do we know about what happens when these divers start to black out before they are at the surface? How do you save someone's life when they're in this point of crisis?

Laura McGann: Okay. It's quite a technical question. I'll do my very best to answer it, but forgive me if I get anything slightly wrong. [crosstalk] Look your lungs compress as you go down. Then they expand when you come back up. It's when they expand that your brain starts to realize, "Oh-oh, I haven't got as much oxygen as I thought I had." That's when you have a blackout, your brain kind of shuts down. It's kind of like fainting for a moment, to protect itself. Then quite often that's when the safety divers come in, hold your nose, hold your mouth, and bring you to the surface. Quite often divers come around quite quickly then. The safety divers do a thing called Blow, Tap, Talk.

They blow on your eyes, they tap your face, and they talk to you. I know it sounds like nothing, but actually, it's because you're letting your brain know that your face is out of the water. There's a thing that happens when you blackout as well, that your larynx can often close because your face knows that you're in water and it doesn't want you to breathe in. When you do Blow, Tap, Talk, when they're out of the water, you're telling your brain you're out of the water, now it's safe to breathe. It's really incredible.

There's a lot that happens in the body instinctually. It's their reflexes. There's something called the mammalian dive reflex, and that's, as you go down, your heart rate lowers and your blood shunts to your major organs to protect them but also to conserve oxygen. That's something that also seals do, dolphins do, mammalian, like mammals in the water do that. That's a reflex that we humans still have today from when we were in the water ourselves. There's things in our body that we're discovering that are possible by putting our body into these scenarios.

Host: Have there been any studies on the long-term effects of participating in these types of sports for people who maybe don't even reach that blackout phase but still are putting that kind of stress on their body on a repeated basis?

Laura McGann: I think there's lots of different pieces of research that are being done, but it's the same, I'm not familiar with all of them by any stretch, but if you think about people who have been spearfishing for thousands of years, they're not doing that with scuba tanks on their back, they're freediving, going down quite far and getting mussels. It is something that we've been doing for a while. I think studies are quite inconclusive when it comes to blackouts on the brain and things like that, but freediving itself, I think humans have been doing it for an awfully long time.

Host: Sure. Let's talk a little bit more about Alessia and Stephen, your two main characters. You talked briefly about how Alessia first got interested in freediving, but can you talk a little bit more about her origin story and how she got committed to the sport and driven by the sport?

Laura McGann: I love Alessia's origin story because it's a brilliant story of a young girl who found the strength within her with no support. People around her saying, "No, I don't think you should try that. I don't think you can do that." Alessia tried it when she was 13, tried freediving in the pool, and it was only men there. It was a freediving course in Rome. They have freediving courses in Italy. It's a thing in Italy. It's not a thing here in Ireland. I was surprised to hear that. She went along, and it was all men at the course, and pretty quickly she was able to beat them in the pool. It was astonishing at that time. Pretty quickly after that, a rule came out that you weren't allowed to compete until you were 18.

Suddenly she knew that the next competition she'd go to, she was going to be on the podium at the least. Then she was told you've got to wait four years. She put her head down and she held onto her-- She had told people that she wanted to be a freediver, but she got a kind of frosty reaction, so she just really kept it to herself for her teenage years. She worked away and she kept fit and she kept training and she kept freediving in the pool, and she came back at 18, and the rest is history. She just absolutely was like a rocket in the pool. That just for me, I like wanted to be, make films when I was a young teenager, and I just saw her really just holding on no matter what.

I was like, "You are cool." I think a lot of people just really admire that about her, like she's extremely resilient. She believes in herself, and she's a very nice person as well. You're just drawn to her. Yes.

Host: Let's talk a little bit about Stephen. Unlike Alessia, he didn't start diving or training from a young age. What got him interested in freediving?

Laura McGann: Stephen was more of a wandering soul, he didn't know what he wanted to do at all. In fact, that was kind of his thing, is that he was wandering, he went traveling at quite a young age all around the world. Started in Australia, South America, North America, Asia, and then eventually Africa, and just rambling around with very little money in his pocket, on a shoestring really, and it was before that kind of traveling was a thing, and he had his DV camera and he filmed himself, and eventually, he ended up in Dahab in Egypt where he was just going to stop off to update his PADI license.

I think you have to do so many hours or something like that to keep your license. He started to do that there, and he liked it there. He said, "Okay, I might stay here for a while." He got a job as a scuba diving instructor, and then he discovered the Blue Hole and he discovered freediving, and that's when he decided to make the place his home.

Host: What do you think was so special about the relationship between Stephen and Alessia?

Laura McGann: I think when I started to look back at their stories, I was blown away by the kind of call and response that's within their stories. At the same time, one of them would be like, for example, like I said, Stephen really needed a little bit of direction. He was out there looking for something, whereas Alessia may be needed to take her foot off the gas a little bit in terms of direction. It was just like all the time it felt like their stories were like, you just kind of felt like if only they would meet now, or if only they would meet now, they would be able to solve each other's problems.

There is that feeling that they were each other's missing piece. Then when they do come together, you can see in the material that they just kind of can communicate underwater. She just needs to look at him, and she's okay, and they go to the surface. It was just, you could tell when they came together, that something really beautiful was going to happen and they would do something incredible together as well. I hope you can see that in the film.

Host: It is beautiful, and I'm also wondering from your perspective as a filmmaker about some of the logistical challenges of making this film. You acknowledged in the beginning that some of the footage is recreated, some of it is footage that you captured, some of this is footage that existed, how did you figure out how to blend all of that and what were some of the obstacles that you had to overcome?

Laura McGann: I suppose our process was to, when we really got started [unintelligible 00:20:44], it was COVID. I was sitting, where I'm sitting now, and I was on Zoom to people all over the world talking to them about Stephen and Alessia and piecing their lives together. That's when I put together different moments from their lives that I felt were indicative of them as a good moment to see, for example, just putting the story together of them coming together and meeting.

Once I knew what the scenes were that we wanted to cover, then it was about going out and seeing, "Okay, what exists of Stephen saving Alexey Molchanov in Kalamata, or what exists of Alessia with Alaria in the pool, or of Stephen and Alessia in Dahab or Vertical Blue." It was about going out and really we had an amazing team of archive producers, researchers, and they would just put their tentacles out all over the world.

Sometimes we would just have a photo of a scene, from one scene, it'd be somebody in the background, and we'd say, "Is that person holding a camera? Who is that? Find out. Okay, that's Stefano, right? Where is Stefano now? Okay." "Hi, Stefano. Do you by any chance have footage from that day 15 years ago?" Stefano, because he's at home, and COVID, the pandemic, he has time to go into the wardrobe, go up to the attic, get the hard drive, have a look at, and he came back to us and he was like, "Yes, there's-- I've actually got 500 gigabytes of Alessia when she was between let's say--"

Host: Amazing.

Laura McGann: That just kept happening over and over and over again. We were incredibly lucky. Once we had all the archive down, we knew that this is the story we want to tell, this is the archive, no rock has been left unturned, where are the gaps? A lot of this was shot by, some of it was shot by incredible freediving cinematographers, some of it was shot at 4K, some of it was shot by amateurs, some of it was self-shot by Stephen and Alessia. It was everything.

Depending on the scene, we would just try and match the archive with the stuff that we would shoot just to, because say for example when Stephen saves Alexey Molchanov, people aren't really focusing on the safety diver, they're focusing on the diver, so we really wanted to show Stephen waiting, he waited for like a minute,and that shot didn't exist. It was things like that. It was an incredible opportunity as a filmmaker to have all that archive but also get to go to Dahab in Egypt, Bahamas, Mexico, and different places around Europe to film underwater.

Host: Well, the film turned out in absolutely stunning fashion. I've been speaking with Laura McGann, the director of The Deepest Breath, a new documentary streaming now on Netflix. Laura, thank you so much for joining All Of It on WNYC.

Laura McGann: Thank you so much, Brigid. Lovely chatting to you.

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