Filmmaker Matthew Brady lives in Los Angeles, but Seattle holds a special place in his heart.

His brother lives in Kirkland. He has shot several commercials here, including promos for Monday Night Football. And you may remember his 2012 movie, Grassroots, based on the true story of former local journalist Grant Cogswell, who helps his friend run (unsuccessfully) for Seattle City Council. It was shot in Seattle and featured several iconic places, including the Space Needle and the Comet Tavern. For that, he was given a key to the city.

Brady’s latest endeavor is Escape from Extinction: Rewilding, a movie produced by The American Humane Society directed by Brady and narrated by Meryl Streep. The film is a deep look into the process of restoring biodiversity and combating climate change for endangered and extinct animals. The movie recognizes both the Woodland Park Zoo — for its funding to restore a marine sanctuary in Peru to house near-extinct Humble Penguins — and the Seattle Aquarium for its work to reduce acidity levels in polluted kelp forests along the western coastline to reintroduce sea otters.

BTS filming in Volcanoes National Park

Photo courtesy of MRB Productions

Brady, who has worked on dozens of film projects, also directed Escape from Extinction, a 2020 movie narrated by Helen Mirren that shows rare footage of endangered animals.

Rewilding debuts in theaters across the United States Sept. 27, including at Big Picture in Issaquah. Additional Seattle theaters will be announced soon.

Q and A

What led you to Escape from Extinction: Rewilding?

American Humane is a client of mine, and one of the things that was coming out of the last decade was this kind of hatred of zoos and aquariums. And people are loaded with misinformation, and they come out against zoo and aquariums and don’t really know what they’re talking about. And I was one of those people. But zoos and aquariums are pretty much the No. 1 conservation tools in our world. And supporting good zoos and aquariums actually helps conservation in the wild.

Wasn’t Woodland Park Zoo also in the first Extinction movie?

We did some big, deep dives into Woodland Park Zoo, and they developed a really cool program. Tree kangaroos are in only a few places in the world. In Papua New Guinea, (the zoo) incentivized the locals to do coffee farming, and they had to keep the trees intact. Those trees are the habitat for the tree kangaroos. You go into the zoo, and you buy a stuffed animal at the gift shop, (and) 80 cents of that might be going for operational costs, but 20 cents of that is actually going to save wild tree kangaroos. It’s a really cool story.

And someone from the aquarium is in this movie?

Dr. Erin Meyer (the aquarium’s chief conservation officer). She was terrific. She told this whole story about how the sea otters were down to the last few, and they’re actually rewilding the sea otters on the coast, bringing the kelp back, and how that provides oxygen and hiding places.

What did you learn by working on these movies?

I mean, I wasn’t a believer when I started the first one. Then I learned what’s really going on and all of the good things that are happening in zoos and aquariums. It’s so obvious, but you have to be able to separate. Like, you go to a a bad restaurant, and then you don’t boycott every restaurant on the planet. So, that’s the problem with zoos and aquariums. For some reason, people just consider them all a group, and there’s good zoos and bad zoos, and that’s the biggest thing to get your head around. And when you save a kelp forest, you’re not just saving the forest. You’re saving the thousands of animals that live in the forest and survive from it. It’s hard to raise money for insects, but if you’re saving an iconic animal in this ecosystem, there are thousands of animals and plants that benefit from this.

What surprised you?

Knowledge is power. Going to a place like Rwanda, where you kind of just know it as having genocide and not much more, and realizing how much the community changed. The people that were poaching gorillas used to cut off their hands and sell them to China for good luck charms. Those people’s children are now tour guides, and they’re making more money as a tour guide for the gorilla community and doing gorilla conservation. It’s not just about not hurting animals. It’s about making it financially beneficial for the people in that community, so that it becomes a win for the animals and a win for the people.

Endangered golden monkey in Rwanda

Photo courtesy of MRB Productions

Endangered mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.

Photo courtesy of MRB Productions

So, ultimately, your goal is correcting misinformation?

Yes, absolutely. What we tried to do in our film is really make bite-size things. You don’t have to save all the animals. Just pick one animal to save. Just decide that “Hey, I’m going to work on the tree kangaroo, and I’m going to donate $5 to tree kangaroo, and I’m going to tell my friends.” That’s my effort.

How important is it to have names like Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep attached to your work?

Oh my God, it’s so important because there’s just such a saturation of great documentaries out there, and some are very well-funded. We didn’t have those kinds of resources. We’re working for a charity organization, so how do we rise above and get people to see this film so that they can learn, and help and improve the world around them? And having celebrities like Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren attached really just helps open those doors that would otherwise not be open.