BU Today: How did you first hear about Michael Packard?

Abel: When I saw some tweets about what had happened to Michael Packard off the coast of Provincetown, I was immediately intrigued and fascinated and skeptical, and wanted to learn more about what happened. Shortly after that, the editor in chief of the Boston Globe (now the chairman of the BU journalism faculty), Brian McGrory, assigned me to look into it. He thought this incident was totally—to use a technical term—bulls**t. And he’s like, you have to debunk this. That set me up to call everyone I could, including the two eyewitnesses. I got the 911 tape, I interviewed Michael Packard, I interviewed his mom, I interviewed his sisters, you name it.

I eventually had to go back to my editors and tell them, I’m sorry to say, but I think that this is a true story. Of course, it would have been a much easier story if this guy was making it up. So I wrote it the way I reported it, and it probably had the best headline of any story I have ever written—it said, “This story isn’t hard to swallow.” I can’t take credit for writing that, but I was very happy with that headline.

BU Today: What made you overcome your skepticism?

Abel: As I got more deeply into reporting the story, I had one key benefit that most people who are reporting it didn’t have, and that was that the first mate of Michael Packard, the guy who steers his boat while Michael is lobster diving, is the son of one of the main characters of my last film, Entangled, which is about the effort to save the North Atlantic right whale from extinction. It turns out, I got to know this guy, Josiah Mayo. I filmed him for a scene in my last film and came to know him and trust him. He eventually connected me to Michael, and when I heard it was Josiah that pulled him out of the water, I was far less likely to think that it was untrue.

It was Josiah who, several weeks after I wrote the story for the paper, really encouraged me to go out fishing with them for the first time, when Michael finally started fishing again. He took a couple of weeks off after the incident—more like a few days, really—and that just led me to spending a lot of time with Michael over the last two years, while I was making the film.

BU Today: Did your research background in filming Entangled come in handy as you were investigating?

Abel: When I was reporting the story initially for the paper, I did go to some of the whale scientists that I had come to know quite well over the years while I was working on Entangled and writing lots of stories about whales for the paper. Obviously, the first question is, is this even possible? And the whale scientists I spoke to told me that while incredibly rare, it is absolutely conceivable. I remember them explaining the dimensions of humpback whales’ mouths, and one of the scientists told me you could probably fit a Volkswagen Beetle inside of a whale’s mouth. I mean, it’s huge.

BU Today: After finishing the Globe story, what made you decide that this could be a documentary?

Abel: After I finished Entangled, I was looking around and thinking about what I might make a film about, and I actually did start making another film. Then all of a sudden this happens, and the short of the long is that it checks a lot of boxes for me. The story of Michael Packard’s experience rocketed all over the world, in newspapers and on TV news. He was even on Jimmy Kimmel Live. The first question I had to ask myself was if this story is already potentially overexposed, why do I want to spend time on something that everybody already knows about? When I was invited to go fishing with [Packard and Mayo] the first time, I thought, should I really do this? I mean, you have to wake up at three o’clock in the morning and it’s a long day on the water.

But what I came to see was that there was a deeper story, which was [about] what happens to a human being who experiences one of the most frightening things possible: being engulfed in the mouth of another creature. It’s this incredibly biblical and harrowing experience that thrust this reclusive fisherman into the international limelight. This guy had already experienced some crazy things, like being in a plane crash in the jungles of Costa Rica, nearly drowning as a child when he got his first fishing boat. So I decided to spend a lot of time with him, and he was very generous with his time.

BU Today: So is this a story about a guy who gets swallowed by a whale or is it a story about Michael Packard?

Abel: It’s absolutely a portrait film. And ultimately, I would describe this as a love story, and what I mean by that is it’s a story about a man who is perhaps the last person on Cape Cod and maybe throughout much of New England who primarily makes his living as a commercial lobster diver. It’s a love for fishing, it’s a love for being on the water, it’s a love for his community in Provincetown—this very eccentric, idiosyncratic place where he grew up. And it’s a love story about fighting through all of the challenges that he has had, with the tether of his love for his family. This is a guy who, when he was engulfed in the mouth of the whale, first thought about what it would mean to his family if he never made it out of there. It strikes me that it was this love that he has for his kids, his wife, his mom, and his larger family that pulls him through that moment.

The title, In the Whale, doesn’t only refer to his experience inside the mouth of the whale; it refers to the depression that he has struggled with for many years and how he has fought through that. I would say, it’s love that keeps him going, keeps him above, coming up for air.

BU Today: What kind of person decides to be a lobsterman in 2023? What are the hazards—besides getting swallowed by a whale?

Abel: Being a fisherman is one of the most dangerous professions, and lobstermen have particularly dangerous lives. If you’ve ever been on a lobster boat, you can see it can be pretty dangerous. They haul in these traps, and they put the rope on this winch-like system that spins at a very fast rate to haul them in. If you get your finger in the wrong place, you could lose it quickly or when the traps are going off the boat, you can get an ankle caught. But what Michael does is on a whole other magnitude of danger because he’s a diver; he dives into now-shark-filled waters day in and day out, starting in May and going until the end of the summer.

A lot of the guys who used to do what he does got out of it because it’s just too dangerous. Michael just keeps doing it. With the trauma he experienced as a kid, that depression he suffers from, I think he gains a great peace from being underwater. It’s what gives him, in some ways, a sense of meaning—being a hunter-gatherer. It’s hard for him to see a path out of that, even after his experience getting swallowed by a humpback whale.

BU Today: Who are some of the others speaking in the documentary, and what it was like working with the Provincetown community?

Abel: I would say that Michael’s mom [Anne Packard] is probably the other leading character of the film. She is a renowned painter, and she comes from a legacy of renowned painters. Michael grew up in a broken family—his dad left when he was 10—and they’ve just suffered all this trauma. Michael’s older brother disappeared while hiking, also when Michael was 10. That just left Michael and his sisters living with a single mom who was selling paintings for like five bucks on the corner where they lived. And they struggled; it was hard. His mom, by hook or crook, made a name for herself and today she’s an acclaimed painter. She is just a really rich character and so are her daughters, Michael’s sisters. Josiah Mayo is also quite a character in his own right. There are a lot of really interesting characters in Provincetown. 

BU Today: Are you excited about seeing the premiere in Provincetown?

Abel: I am very excited. We’re considering this a “work-in-progress premiere,” meaning that I don’t consider the film quite finished yet. We’re going to be shooting a fine cut, and we will be refining it a little bit more over time. But it’s the first public screening of the film and it will be at the Provincetown Film Festival at 2 pm on Friday, June 16, at Town Hall. I’m hoping that there will be a large crowd there and that people will get a deeper understanding of Michael Packard’s experience.