American Primeval Taylor Kitsch A Skilled Nature Still Photographer

EXCLUSIVE: An occasional look at the surprising creative outlets of members of the Hollywood community. The section began with producer Denise DiNovi’s pandemic plunge into painting after the shocking death of her husband

After bursting on the scene as Friday Night Lights’ hellraising fullback Tim Riggins, Taylor Kitsch tried the fast lane to stardom, and found it wanting, with John Carter and Battleship sinking. Kitsch regrouped and found a far more interesting path, playing film and TV roles that captured the heartland sensibilities and vulnerabilities that made Dillon Panthers’ #33 so appealing, the rough and tumble Texas kid with a heart of gold.

Those roles, many of them done in collaboration with director and FNL exec producer Peter Berg, have ranged from playing the late Patchogue legend Navy SEAL Michael Murphy in Lone Survivor; a tragic opioid-addicted everyman in the series Painkiller; and cult leader David Koresh in Waco to name a few. His latest turn is American Primeval, the highly rated Netflix series set in the Old West, where Kitsch bares physical and existential scars as a guide escorting a mysterious hunted woman and her son across hostile terrain. Created and written by The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith, American Primeval is a dark frontier tale in the tradition of Lonesome Dove and 1883, with Kitsch’s Isaac its moral center.  

One of those offbeat movies Kitsch starred in unleashed what has become his offscreen obsession. The Bang Bang Club is a 2010 drama that captured the struggles of four conflict photographers in the waning days of apartheid in South Africa. The experience led Kitsch to pick up a camera and become an accomplished still photographer. Not a conflict photographer like the photojournalist he portrayed in the film, Kevin Carter. After Carter began photographing atrocities committed against Black South Africans during apartheid, he went to Sudan to cover the famine. He won the Pulitzer for his photo of a dying child being stalked by a vulture (Carter shooed away the bird and set the child on the path to find food and survive). The collective trauma was too much for Carter, who committed suicide at 33 and was posthumously hailed by Nelson Mandela for his revelatory work.

Kitsch relocated four years ago from Texas to Montana, where his photography took a different turn. He fell in love with the solitary pursuit of embedding in nature to capture great images of wildlife and landscapes. Braving the cold has never been a problem for him.

“I’m Canadian,” he explained. “I miss the skating on the ponds outdoors and just being in the wild, the wilderness and all that, so I love the snow, and I’m in heaven right now.”

How did the shutter bug take hold?

“During The Bang Bang Club, I shadowed a professional photographer, and he showed me how to shoot on film,” Kitsch said. “I still have my 60-something year old Leica that I shoot on film with. And so that’s where I got the photography bug. And then me and a couple other buddies, we motorcycle all over the world. We would motorcycle through Italy or the Alps or Spain, France, anywhere in Europe to Africa, and we’re going to Patagonia in February. I would always bring my camera and I’d be doing street photography and that kind of stuff. And then I started going through Yellowstone National Park, all these places on the West Coast. Oh my God, the big redwoods there! And then we started doing nature photography, landscapes, and then I started getting into wolves and grizzlies and the challenge of tracking them with your camera.”

Pursuing those predators armed only with a camera brings an irresistible adrenaline rush.  

“I’ve just taken it to an excessive extreme now where I have the adventure van and I get in the back country, and it’s obviously a lot of it is about getting the shot, if you want to call it that.”

The process settles him and keeps him creatively engaged between roles.

“90% of it is just so good for my brain, to be out there in the quiet and in nature and just really on the level,” he said. “It’s kind of an amalgamation of all that and the challenge of getting a shot. It lets me be creative and not have other people tell me how to shoot or tell me where to go, what to do. It’s 100% you. I could be on the same grizzly or something in a river, and we will come out with completely different photographs. My buddy and I were in the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, and we were shooting Grizzlies, and there were four cubs on the day before she kicked them out. I went on a wide shot for a landscape photo, and he went with the long lens and was just trying to get crazy tight shots of her. That’s the beauty of it. Whatever you see in your head, you try and create, and you always have to be in the moment. If it’s a wolf, then you have under five seconds to get the shot.”

Kitsch acknowledged that interrupting a mother grizzly with her cubs, or even tracking wolves with a camera sounds dangerous, but he said it’s safety over the shot.

“It was at from a really good distance,” he said. “There are these things they call Bear Jams, in the park where there’s a hundred cars. I don’t really like doing that because it’s just not very artistic to me. And you’re not in the moment as much when you’re posturing for fu*king parking. But yeah, we’re very conscious of the danger. I guess that’s a part of the adrenaline. I don’t want to run into a grizzly on a carcass or something, but I will say when you’re out there, I’m usually with someone else. Right now is a great time to track because they’re bedded down. They’re hibernating for the most part. So if I get on a wolf’s tracks out in the snow, and there’s no predators out there that are going to take me or challenge me or whatever. So winter’s the best by far, because you can find prints as well. But yeah, it’s always in your head, for sure. If I see a carcass or something from afar, I ain’t going in alone or anything like that, that’s just stupid. But there is that adrenaline, right, that you’re always chasing. My buddy has a beautiful ranch here in Montana and there’s a bunch of grizzlies on it. And in the surrounding area, if we scope a grizzly, we may try and get within 100 to 200 yards of it, but we’re not going to get closer. Unless it’s by accident.”

Even with the best planning, success is being in the right place at the right time. I tell him an encounter I once had with Neil Leifer, the great Sports Illustrated photographer and filmmaker whose most famous shot depicts an angry Cassius Clay standing over and yelling at his felled opponent, Sonny Liston. Leifer pointed to a more experienced photographer visible through the fighter’s legs, who stands with mouth agape. Because, Leifer said, the veteran lens man realized he was out of position and it would be a career making shot for Leifer, who snapped one of the most memorable photos in sports history.

“Honestly, you could be the best tracker, and you could have everything down,” Kitsch said. “That happened with me. We were in Churchill, Manitoba, and we were with a guide who’s a biologist. And this polar bear decided to just come over this hill and was walking towards us at 70 yards away. I was at the right place at the right time, and he was on the wrong side. You just got to have a little bit of luck here and there, and hopefully you’re really good with the settings so you can figure it out real quick, and get the right shot. But it really is a lot of what your friend was saying.”

Kitsch’s sideline seems to go with the rugged terrains in the movies and TV series Kitsch prefers to make, but his American Primeval experience heightens the speed he once had to run from a pursuing wolf or bear.

“I broke my foot and had a bone cut out during filming, so I was in a boot for five weeks, then I flew back to Montana and I was supposed to get the boot off, and then the doc was like, you need surgery today or tomorrow morning,” he said. “He cut up a bone out of my foot because the pin wasn’t going to take, he didn’t think, and especially in time with shooting. He said I’d heal a little faster with the bone cut out, and still be in a boot. You can’t walk for six weeks. So I was out of shooting for six weeks. That was tough, man. I just think going through that surgery and then I’m shooting on a horse in a boot. It was just kind of a whole thing. I couldn’t get off the horse without help. That part of the physical part, but everything else was terrific, and learning the Shoshone language, that was my favorite part. I felt more like Isaac when I’m speaking Shoshone than when I spoke English. I just learned an enormous amount and have so much respect for that community. Anytime you’re speaking a language like that, you can’t not be in the moment because it takes so much focus.”

And the foot?

“Take your big toe, there’s a bone that goes to the ball of my foot. They just cut it out right there. My mobility is okay, unless I roll on it. And then I’ll have early onset arthritis and then it gets really tough, because the circulation is shit. So unfortunately with the snow and hiking and being out there, it just hammers it because the circulation.”

He said it won’t slow him down, and if the notion here is to wonder why bother with a real camera when we all take good family photos with our smartphones, Kitsch has a ready answer.

“The iPhone serves a purpose, I guess,” he said. “But for me, I want the highest quality photo you can get. It obviously picks up an enormous amount more. The detail, the color, and these lenses that they have now; I have a 600 ml prime that’s just beautiful. I will take a photo, say of an eagle crashing into a river, trying to get a fish. I still can’t believe the speed of these cameras and what they can get now. It’s incredible. I just think it’s so hard to compare an iPhone…when you’re shooting on these big lenses, it is no comparison to what you’re getting from that to an iPhone.”

Now that he’s accumulated enough photos, Kitsch hopes to use them as a fundraising mechanism for a Montana charity he is starting.

“I would love to sell these photos and have the proceeds go straight to the charity I started in Bozeman called Howler Ridge,” he said. “It’s going to help veterans and it’s going to help people sober that have battled addiction, kids that have come from addiction, and hopefully women as well that have come from domestic abuse and violence.”

Kitsch expects to continue developing the craft, and it feeds something that can’t be found when he’s in a group and fulfilling the vision of a director.

“There’s a self challenge in a self creative way where there’s nobody to tell me how to take the shot, how to frame it, when to go, where to go,” he said. “You’re on your own little journey. And I love that part of it. I think it’s more of an empowering, creative journey for me. I do love collaborating but I think with photography, you’re telling your story and no one’s editing it. No one’s telling you it’s shit. Maybe it is, but maybe you love it. And that’s all that matters. What’s great for me personally, when I look at a couple of these wolf pictures, or the polar bear picture, othe Eagle in the snowstorm photo, I have such great stories behind them. The crazy big wide shot of the Grizzlies wrestling under the Grand Teton Mountain range, it’s a really cool story that puts me back in that moment.

“Being a bit in the wild keeps you on your toes, and not being comfortable or complacent,” Kitsch said. “That’s a big thing; as you get older you can easily lean into the comfort of life. And I am very conscious of trying to just get out, and that’s the beauty of living where I do. If you’re bored, it’s your fault. Just get in the van and drive, and you’re going to find something worthy of photographing. I’ll have my camera with me when I’m fly fishing. You’re usually starting early in the morning, and that’s when wildlife is most active. And so you never know. And usually when you’re fly fishing, you’re looking for a honey hole that no one’s hit, so you’re kind of in the back country where animals would kind of buzz around. So it’s always around you out here. I love that. And there is a sense of the untamed, and maybe I’m overthinking it as I get older, but I think I’ve just been very conscious of not being comfortable. Ironically, considering what I said, once I didn’t have my camera there, but I had my iPhone. I had the fish on, a rainbow trout, and I look over to this cliff edge where this cliff was going into the river, and there was five or four baby mountain goats and four or five adults that came all the way down the mountain to drink. I was right there. And that was pretty fucking incredible. Usually these baby mountain goats are at 10,000 plus feet, so to see them 20 yards away, just getting a drink of water and playing, that was probably one of my favorite wildlife moments.”