Andy Maser, DP

My relationship with this film goes back a long way. In 2019, Wild Salmon Center hired me to make River Tigers, a film about giant taimen on the Tugur River in the Russian Far East. The Tugur is home to the largest taimen in the world, in a salmon watershed so remote and undeveloped it remains one of the healthiest on earth. In 2020, on the heels of that project, Wild Salmon Center brought me back to assemble the first teaser for what would eventually become this IMAX film. One thing led to another and full production happened across the summers of 2024 and 2025.

The production of Running Wild took me across four locations in North America. The most significant was the Dean River in British Columbia, one of the most remote, inaccessible, and legendary steelhead rivers on earth. The location dictated the crew and the approach: There were only two seats in the helicopter and two bunks at the lodge so Director Myles Connolly and I went in as a two-person team. That was it—just the two of us with a drone, an underwater camera, a Phantom slow motion camera, and a couple of topside cameras. That's what we had, and who we had, to capture the scene. I also shot in BC's Great Bear Rainforest, a place I've now shot two IMAX films. The production also took us to the Skeena watershed in northern BC and the old-growth redwood forests of Northern California.

It was a treat when more than a minute of footage from River Tigers ended up in the final IMAX film. Following Russia's political actions, the Tugur watershed became completely inaccessible to Western filmmakers. Footage shot for a project seven years earlier held up on the largest screen on Earth. I'm proud of that.

Running Wild: Return to the River is in IMAX theaters now worldwide.