Meet the Artist: John Maringouin
Martin Strel is a big man and an even bigger drinker. He’s also a world-class endurance swimmer. In Maringouin’s Big River Man, the Slovenian phenomenon attempts the Amazon – all 3,375 miles of it.
No sane producer would invest in a guy who was that old, a drunk, and was going to try to swim the Amazon,”
-Big River Man director John Maringouin explains.
-Big River Man director John Maringouin explains.
Martin Strel is overweight, over 50, and chugs two bottles of red wine a day. Yet he’s pulled off aquatic feats that not even Michael Phelps can claim. The world’s most famous endurance swimmer, Strel has swum the Danube, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Amazon rivers, piranhas and all.
While Strel may seem like a natural subject for a documentary, filmmaker John Maringouin initially didn’t think so. “I had no interest in jocks, Eastern Europeans, achievement, endurance, swimming,” Maringouin says. “There was nothing about it that appealed to me whatsoever.” But when his girlfriend and fellow filmmaker Molly Lynch saw a cutaway of Strel downing a bottle of red wine during a 2002 interview on CNN, she contacted the swimmer to ask which rivers he would take on next. He told her that the Amazon was on his calendar for 2007.
Still doubtful that he could make an interesting documentary on the subject, Maringouin flew to Slovenia to meet Strel and his son Borut in 2006. “It was kind of like Alice in Wonderland,” recalls Maringouin. “It was like dropping a tab of acid. I mean, I showed up at the airport. This guy pulls up onto the sidewalk and just puffed out of his car and said, ‘American filmmakers, here for me!’ It said ‘Martin Strel’ on his car, right? And from that moment, I wasn’t prepared at all for the magnitude of his celebrity in his country.”
Financing for the project did not come easily. Two months before Strel commenced his swim, the production didn’t have a dime in the bank. “No sane producer would invest in a guy who was that old, a drunk, and was going to try to swim the Amazon,” Maringouin explains. “I never had that morbid notion that he was going to get eaten, but everybody else did.”
With funds from Olivia Newton-John and other brave financiers, Maringouin joined Strel’s son Borut and a small crew on a life-threatening journey. But while their rickety boat could easily be sucked into one of the upper Amazon’s many whirlpools, some expeditions traveled in more style. At one point, they encountered the production of PBS’ Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures. “They saw Martin swimming by, and so the $50 million yacht turns around,” says Maringouin, laughing. “And they’re going, ‘Wow, is that the Amazon swimmer?’ And Martin kind of doesn’t know what to do. He says, ‘Ho, ho, Jean-Michel Cousteau! Oh great, oh yeah.’ And then they peel off. It was a moment, for sure.”
While Maringouin started the project thinking that he’d have to focus on anything but swimming, images of Strel gliding through the water by the banks of the jungle ended up dominating the film. “On land, he’s actually a really shy, awkward guy,” says Maringouin. “And then when he got into the water he became something else. He just transformed into — I don’t want to say superhuman, because it wasn’t that. He was almost like this creature. You’d just realize that nothing’s going to happen to this guy.”
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