NAYS BAGHAI (Class of 2015)
Paul Galea:
Hello Nays Baghai from the year of 2015. It’s your old friend Paul Galea from International Grammar ringing to see how you are.
Nays:
Great to see you, Mr Galea. How are you?
Paul Galea:
OK, Nays, but that’s nine years ago when you left school. You’re allowed to call me Paul now!!
Nays:
Of course, I’ll call you Paul. Fine.
Paul Galea:
OK, mate. One of the reasons I’ve rung you up to have a chat is because I’ve been aware that you’ve got a really interesting movie that you’ve made coming out called Diving in the Darkness. And I’m also aware that you made a beautiful movie called Descent. What I’m interested in is knowing the journey that you took to get to become such a great filmmaker, and particularly, in terms of being an underwater filmmaker. So do you want to tell us how you got there, mate? And some of the journey you took.
Nays:
Of course. So the journey actually really started at IGS, believe it or not. I had been experimenting with all sorts of genres in primary school. Stop motion, documentary, sci-fi, travel, sports. That was really due to a combination of watching both Star Wars and Blue Planet when I was, I think, in Year 2 but it was really between Years 9 to 12, when I began to take filmmaking more seriously as a career option and after I graduated, I went to film school, and that’s when the underwater cinematography bug really kicked in. Even though there wasn’t a course per se to learn how to do that, I was passionate enough to kind of carve out my own pathway to achieving that dream. And it helped narrow down the kind of work that I was most interested in. Then it slowly snowballed into making it into feature films. Now that we’ve got two films out, even though it’s been at least a decade since I first began, I still feel very much like a student who loves to learn and is curious about what’s next.
Paul Galea:
Very good. Now I distinctly remember, talking about the ocean, that we actually started -you and I started a club, a primary school club with Miss Strozer taking it. She was also a scuba diver. Do you remember the name of that club? By any chance? Because I can’t remember. But it was to do with ocean animals…
Nays:
I can’t say I do. But I do remember that Miss Strozer was very encouraging towards me getting my scuba certification. I was too young to do it at the time, but I remember as soon as I finished Year 6 and was getting ready for Year 7, I pretty much wasted no time getting my PADI Open Water certification. But I didn’t start regularly diving until after I had left IGS, funnily enough.
Paul Galea:
Yeah, well, it’s the sort of thing where you have got to actually devote a little bit of time and energy towards doing it. It’s not something you can just do every weekend; it’s a fair bit of planning and organisation involved-plus the gear, of course.
Nays:
Yeah, funny that you say that. That is one of the deleted scenes in the new film. It has a line that’s pretty much verbatim where one of the cave explorers says that you know, diving especially cave diving, is not something that you do once or twice a year and expect to be safe at it. It does require a lot of regular practice to do it safely.
Paul Galea:
OK, let’s talk about Descent which you filmed in Iceland and for all of our listeners out there, I thoroughly suggest you have a look at it. It did very well at the film festival here. Which film festival was it that it did well in ver here, mate?
Nays:
It was at the Sydney Film Festival. That’s right.
Paul Galea:
I can thoroughly recommend that as a really interesting but also visually beautiful piece of filmmaking. Do you want to tell us how that came about?
Nays:
Of course. So around 2017, I had just started making friends in the dive community and I was advancing in my own training. A lot of my non-diving friends were approaching me, saying, ‘You’re crazy. Why do you do it? Why do you do such dangerous endeavours into the ocean?’ and it got me thinking; the whole why we do it is more interesting than the what or the how and I had really wanted to do a more character driven film or series than what currently existed at the time. So that evolved into the idea of doing a series about people who go into the most hostile underwater environments and why they do it and who they are as people and the first person who really catalysed the project was none other than Kiki Bosch, who is the ice free diver that ended up forming the story of Descent. I came up with Descent as the first of this series, and in the process of making it, I really began to discover how personal and intimate her story was and how it wasn’t really about the diving, but more about the almost, I don’t want to say spiritual, but the psychological journey she took to become who she is. It was a real treat; it was the best film school after film school is my euphemism for it, and yeah, we shot in Iceland as well as also in New Zealand and Australia. It was a great learning experience for me.
Paul Galea:
Well, the other thing about that and one of the things I will say is the psychological or that sort of more spiritual side of that movie is what makes it so interesting. It is very, very beautiful, but it’s actually very, very interesting. Now, one of the things that I think was interesting there was that’s the first time I ever heard the name of Wim Hof. And now the ice baths and Wim Hof breathing and all that is massive in and around where I live in Bondi. That whole using cold water as a therapy has really taken off. So you are a little bit in the forefront of that.
Nays:
Yeah, well, I had no idea that there was such a spike in popularity for both that and just general cold water swimming, during lockdown, especially, which is when the film was released. So it was a really pleasant surprise to see that surge in its popularity and I guess, for me, it’s very strange being able to, on one hand, be able to go into cold water with no wet suit, let alone in scuba gear. But then, on the other hand, to be qualified to take the full regalia of technical diving here and feel more like a cyborg. So it’s kind of a funny experience. Yo-yoing between those two extremes.
Paul Galea:
Well, as I said, I’m a long time scuba diver, but I’ve got to tell you, I much prefer snorkelling and when I do go for a dive, if I can, I try and dive without a wetsuit because I always feel like in a wetsuit that I’m all squashed in; and it’s very hard to explain but not as free and as part of the of the ocean as I would like to do so I can sort of understand what you’re saying there for sure.
Nays:
Yeah. I used to feel the same way. But now in scuba diving, I exclusively dive in a dry suit, which even though it divorces you even more from the contact on your skin is in some ways more comfortable to dive because you’re warmer. And it reminds me a lot of the astronaut suits that they wear at NASA. So I love the versatility of it. And versatility is a very important quality for any piece of equipment that I use day to day.
Paul Galea:
Yeah. Now, what’s the coldest temperature you’ve scubaed in?
Nays:
The coldest that I have ever dived in was two degrees, which was in Iceland.
Paul Galea:
OK, that’s pretty cold.
Nays:
Yeah, and it was definitely not the most comfortable place to spend hours on end. But when you’re on the job, you just have to roll up your sleeves and suck it up until the job’s done.
Paul Galea:
Yeah, OK, and can I ask again, what’s the coldest you’ve been in, like free diving?
Nays:
I think the coldest I’ve ever been free diving was about six degrees, which was in the Blue Lake in Kosciusko and that bordered on torture for me. I’m going to admit it and say that I could not last as long as Kiki did in that water that cold, but 14 degrees and above, I can do all day long.
Paul Galea:
All right. The movie that you’ve just made, as you’ve just alluded to before is about cave diving; Diving into the Darkness. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? And what did you learn from that and some of what did you get from that?
Nays:
Of course. So, around the same time I met Kiki in 2017, I also met another remarkable lady by the name of Jill Heiner. So, Jill is, in my opinion, the greatest living female cave diver today. And when I met her, I was struck by how accomplished and badass she was. But I was also surprised by how warm and generous she was as a person, which is not really the first thing you’d expect when meeting a hardened cave diving explorer. So I kept in contact with Jill for many years. And then when I read her book, where she basically outlined her entire life story and a lot of things that I had no idea about, that was an even more compelling story for me. Then at the start of 2021, I called her up and I said, “Do you want to bring this to life?” She said, “Of course I’m in.” So over two years, we made Diving into the Darkness. It also saw me learn how to cave dive for the first time and initially, as a child, I was deathly scared of caves and didn’t want to ever do that because I thought it was a suicide mission. But then, when I actually did the course, as brutal as some of the exercises were, I slowly began to realise that cave diving is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to being an earthbound astronaut. When we were scouting locations in Mexico, some of the caves that we were diving in were completely otherworldly in places that looked straight out of the science fiction movie. I should also note that the entire crew for Mexico and New Zealand didn’t use traditional scuba gear to get the shots. We used something called close circuit re-breathers, which basically takes the carbon dioxide that you exhale and converts it into breathable air through a loop system. Because of that, you can stay in the water for 4 to 5 hours at any given time and because we were diving well beyond the reach of the sun and had a lot of shots to get, it meant that we had a lot more time to get it so that the our worries were more about the battery and SD cards of the camera rather than our air supply.
Paul Galea:
And what depth were you driving at?
Nays:
Well, none of them were ridiculously deep. I mean, the deepest that we may have gone to was about 42 maybe 43 metres. But we were more focused on how far horizontally we could go and rather than you know vertically and because when you go below 40 metres, you have to use helium to dive safely and helium is a very expensive, difficult gas to find, let alone operate. So we decided to keep it within the quote unquote recreational limits. But in terms of going horizontally, the longest we swam was probably just shy of a kilometre from the surface.
Paul Galea:
So you’re telling me that you’re in a cave? A kilometre underwater in the cave?
Nays:
Yeah. Mostly, to be honest with you, the average distance we kept it, was about 300 metres.
Paul Galea:
OK, I’m breaking out in a cold sweat here, even thinking of that. Oh, yeah, mate, that’s out of my comfort zone. Way, way, way out! All right, So you’ve made the two films. Obviously, you’ve been making films and a lot of stuff and you’re going on with it. But just going back to your days at IGS. I remember you very well, making films for ArtsFest and doing various things at the school and everyone who saw those knew that you had a special talent. One of the things I always remember was that you had a really, really good touch when it came to the editing. You were able to really extract from a lot of the footage, you took the really important bits and pieces. And I think that’s obviously a huge part of making a film.
Nays:
I mean, editing is easily the most difficult stage of the filmmaking process, because it really is the final stage where you have a chance to correct the story. But in some ways, it’s also the most meditative. And if you’re an introvert who likes computers like I do, then if everything’s going well, you essentially are just in the zone, crafting and chipping away. And the other thing I like about it is that it really is every job rolled into one like there are some days where I feel like an engineer, an architect, a poet, a writer and a detective, all in the span of 24 hours. So it really it’s a very strange thing to do, but if everything is going well, it can be quite pleasurable. I don’t know whether I’m jumping out of your questions list here, but one of my favourite memories back in the IGS days was actually your Year 9 history classes; both Conflict and Warfare and Traditional Cultures. What I remember most fondly was how you eschewed the traditional style of textbooks and PowerPoint. Instead, you would put on, like all these classic Hollywood movies, from Apocalypse Now to Good Morning, Vietnam, Dances with Wolves, Seven Samurai, you name it. And what I liked about it was that you would annotate what was accurate and what was not. But for me, I had never really seen much beyond what we watched at home. So that was a really eye opening experience for me and what was possible in terms of the craft of filmmaking. I mean, for me, the one that stands out the most is Apocalypse Now, the Ride at the Valkyries. And I remember having that light bulb moment when you played that thinking, “That’s what I want to do.” And I don’t know if you know this, but not long after that day, I became basically a high functioning cinema addict for the next four and a half years, and by the time I left IGS, I think I had seen about 1000 movies just because I was so into it because of that one day.
Paul Galea:
Oh, well, there you go!
That makes me feel pretty happy. I will say this. I’m pretty sure I would have had to ring up or send a note home to your parents to watch extracts from Apocalypse Now! That was pretty full on, that scene!
Nays:
Oh, they were not happy about that at all. But being the being the rebel that I am, I watched it anyway,
Paul Galea:
So OK, there you go. That’s great, man. That’s very nice of you to say, but I really remember thinking when I was doing those in those days that being able to use a film even though sometimes, you know, the representation wasn’t so historically accurate, that you got a way, way better uptake of interest from the students than sitting down, looking at a textbook and re-reading the dry words. So I think in a lot of ways, that worked for a lot more people than just you. But I’m very happy to hear that it worked so nicely for you.
Nays:
I was just going to say the other side effect of that experience that still hasn’t left me to this day is it installed a habit of making sure that whatever I do is as factually accurate as possible. I mean, for this latest one, I was constantly consulting with Jill on the accuracy of the technology and, you know, details of diving to make sure that, and also the story, to make sure that everything that was represented was as faithful to what happened. So I definitely owe a lot to those years in Year 9 history.
Paul Galea:
Well, we’re living in the age of fake news, mate. So you’d be one of the not many who are actually fact checking all of your stuff. So I congratulate you on that, that’s for sure. Thanks, man. All right. Any other nice memories from school time because you were there a long time?
Nays:
Oh, yeah. I was there for a long time. I think the only other one that probably is tied for that is frequently raiding the music rooms on Level Three whenever I could. And either practicing alone or jamming with classmates or tutors and that habit of jamming or playing music. It still stays with me to this day.
Paul Galea:
What instrument were you playing?
Nays:
The three biggest ones that I focused on in the last half of my tenure were piano, bass and guitar, but I also loved the drums a lot. And I remember we would compete with each other to see who could nail the drum solo from the end of Whiplash the most faithfully. And I remember the Music Department that were neighbours to our rooms were not happy about us just blasting the hell out of those drums.
Paul Galea:
Yeah, Fair enough. Uh, fairly noisy. Probably about 14 or 15 years old just smashing into the drum kit.
Nays:
Yeah, I know how they must have felt, but we were just too absorbed in the moment to to know any better.
Paul Galea:
All right, mate. So that’s great. Now, you’ve obviously made your way in the world, and you’re lucky because I know your mom and dad very well, and they’re fantastic humans. So that hasn’t hurt you in terms of that. But have you got any tips for the people listening, particularly the younger kids-you know, any tips you’ve learned along the way about school or about after school or anything like that?
Nays:
Yeah. There are really four tips that initially were just for filmmakers, but the more I thought of that, they’re also really good tips for life. I can’t remember but I wish I could remember who taught me these four. But I call these the four “don’ts in life”. So the first “don’t” is don’t play it safe from a creative perspective. Let your imagination run wild and take risks as long as it doesn’t compromise your health and safety. The second “don’t” is don’t be mean or unkind. The third “don’t” is don’t be averse or close minded to anything when it comes to inspiration. And the last one is don’t regularly compare yourself to either your classmates or adults who are at a different stage in life. Just go at your own pace, on your own journey.
Paul Galea:
Very, very, very good ideas. I don’t know if you remember a girl called Dina from school but she also gave me a very good piece of advice. “Comparison is the thief of joy”, which is your fourth “don’t?” I think too often, these days, particularly, on social media, that we spend a bit too much time worrying about what everyone else is doing and not just concentrating on what we do so that we do what we do very well. If you compare, it’s a slippery slope. Naysan -I keep calling you Naysan- because I remember that’s what I called you for many, many, many years. But I know I now know that you’re Nays and that’s a far more cooler name and cooler filmmaker’s name!
Nays:
It’s just like I keep getting asked, “Why did you just shave off two letters?” Well, it’s because when everyone keeps calling you Nissan or Nathan and getting it wrong, you just can’t help but want to shorten it for the sake of brevity. So there’s nothing pretentious about it.
Paul Galea:
It’s worked very well and I actually think it sounds very cool. Thank you. If you’re going to be a filmmaker, mate, being cool is a part of the job. I think.
Nays:
Thank you so much. Yeah, it was, but yeah, it was fantastic to catch up with you after all these years.
Paul Galea:
And you know what, mate? Say hi to Roya and Merhdad and give them my best. As I say, great people. We’ll catch up soon. And take it easy, mate.
Nays:
You got it. You too, mate. Chat to you soon. Bye