Director Brett Morgen likens his new documentary Jane, which recounts how the trailblazing primatologist Jane Goodall began her lifelong study of chimpanzees, to a “cinematic opera,” but getting there was like solving “the ultimate jigsaw puzzle.”
Morgen, an Oscar nominee for 1999’s On the Ropes, boarded the project, which opened in theaters Oct. 20, when National Geographic offered him a trove of 16mm footage that Goodall’s then-husband, wildlife filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, shot in the 1960s. Sitting in Nat Geo’s archives, the footage was rediscovered in 2014, but, says Morgen, it was “140 hours of random shots — no two consecutive shots. There was no sound, no notes.”
To turn it into a compelling narrative, the director assembled a team of interns, assistants and researchers at his production office in…
