Jeff Probst Interview

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Survivor: Gabon, Jeff Probst - National Geographic Adventure Magazine

Jeff Probst: The Survivalist
Filming Survivor in Gabon brought charging elephants, leopards in the catering tent, and the potential for new tourism to the central African nation.
Text by Andrew Burmon
Photograph courtesy of Jeffrey R. Staab / CBS
A cloud of malarial mosquitoes is never kind. Jeff Probst knows this, having spent the better part of three months inside one in Gabon to film the 17th season of Survivor. So before he takes the stage at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles to emcee the 2008 Emmy Awards this Sunday (September 21), Probst may spend a little extra time in the makeup room. Don’t blame him. Blame the Wonga-Wongue.

Probst has been living in the remote Wonga-Wongue Presidential Reserve, a tract of rain forest on the coast of the central African nation of Gabon. The park, which was established through the efforts of National Geographic's Explorer-in-Residence Mike Fay, attracted an advance team for Mark Burnett, the reality television hegemon. Untouched beaches, roaming gorillas, impenetrable jungle—if they could just get Probst and the cameras in place, the season was bound to be a success. But reality has a way of impeding Hollywood's best laid plans. The very inaccessibility that makes Wonga-Wongue a perfect place for a reserve also makes it the most difficult conceivable setting for a television show. After accidents, mishaps, and few close calls, it fell to Probst to get the production back on its feet. No easy task in knee-deep mud.

This Thursday, when Survivor: Gabon: Earth’s Last Eden finally debuts on CBS, audiences across America will probably be too caught up in another season of treachery and action to give a second thought to all that went into the show's production. That's just fine by Probst. It is supposed to look easy. ADVENTURE spoke with Probst about the 17th season while he was stationed in Libreville, Gabon.

ADVENTURE: What are your impressions of Gabon so far?

Jeff Probst: I never knew Africa looked like this. I was raised with the image of acacia trees and hot days. We’ve done a season in Kenya, so that was my impression. But here we have these wide-open green savannas, thick jungle, and we're sitting right on the coast. In retrospect, Kenya feels like going to the zoo. The animals here aren't acclimatized to Range Rovers, so when you come across a family of elephants, it's a big damn deal. Some of the people have seen the surfing hippos, but I haven't yet

A: How has it been dealing with the Gabonese government?

JP: The government here has been as good to us. Gabon is just beginning to embrace tourism, and they see Survivor as a great platform to get the word out. They actually went so far as to give us their military engineers. No one had ever done that. They built 100 kilometers [62 miles] of road and 11 bridges. We showed them what we wanted [to film] and then we worked so that we would all benefit from this building. After we leave, these roads will give tourists access.

A: The president of Gabon is a vocal supporter of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Do you have any misgivings about providing positive press for a country that supports a less than savory regime?

JP: Mark [Burnett] and I and the other executive producers spoke early on about going to countries where we don't agree with the politics. We decided we were going for one single purpose: to make the show. My own personal views are probably more in line with rational people, and at times it is a bit of a quandary. We dealt with it in China, where the interpreters wouldn't talk about Tiananmen Square. It is always strange situation.

A: Wonga-Wongue has obviously never played host to a similar production. Aside from a lack of roads, what sorts of difficulties did your crew face?

JP: We had a cargo ship pull up to base, and we were offloading a container of about $100,000 worth of food. It was 20 feet from our camp. The crane was at camp and the operator tried to move the food. When he did, the crane tipped over. The food, the crane, and even the crane operator went into the water. It was a big hit to the production budget, but it was a season of preproduction mishaps.

There was also the issue of the set. We based our tribal council on local villages, so we were building these adobe thatch-roofed huts. We hired pygmies to build the thatched roofs and ship them to us. But when they tried to get the roofs on the train, they got dumped because the space was needed for a dead guy. Then, the next time, they got dumped for a container of the president's food. After that, the pygmies went on strike. When the roofs were finally shipped the train workers wouldn't offload them for a week. We even tried to bribe them but they said, "No, it doesn't work that way."

A: What sort of wildlife were you dealing with around the set? Do you have concerns about the survivors being near hippos, gorillas, and other highly territorial animals?

JP: Well, there is some leopard that really likes the smell of what we've been eating. We've had leopard prints in our catering tent. We see animals but I wouldn't say we have had any dangerous encounters. But two weeks ago, a 12-foot python slithered into camp. It didn't take long for the rangers to control it. Then I—never waste an opportunity—shot a promo with it. They money shot for us is to have the survivors and wildlife in the same shot. We actually got that with some elephants, which was very exciting.

A: What has been your most memorable experience in Gabon?

JP: Coming home to oamp after 17 days without seeing animals. I was alone in the car on one of the new roads when I saw a family of elephants. Reflexively, I turned the ignition off. They didn't seem to care that I was there. They just got closer and closer. Then one of them gave what the ranger told me was a warning charge, as if to say, You've looked long enough, it's time for you to go. It was amazing. Elephants in zoos are old, but these animals were young and pure—their skin was just glistening.

A: What do you think will set Survivor's 17th season apart from the others

JP: The big new thing is high def. We'll do our normal twists, but high def is the big one. We're going for a National Geographic sort of feel. The other day we showed some Gabonese Government Officials our footage. They were nearly brought to tears by how beautiful the footage was of their country. It was a great bonding moment between two groups of very different people.

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While on Jeff Probst--On Jimmy Kimmel Live

YouTube - Emmy Hosts Brawl on JKL

Is Ryan Seacrest Making More Than The Other Emmy Hosts?
Ryan Moneybags Seacrest appears in this hilarious video with his fellow Emmy Award co-hosts Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel, Jeff Probst, and Tom Bergeron.

They are all present for an interview with Jimmy Kimmel which is supposed to be a promo for his special this Sunday called Jimmy Kimmel's Big Night of Stars. But when money is brought up, there's an all out brawl!

Who do you think would win in a fight between Seacrest and Probst?

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Jeff Probst survives a brutal locale

Show host likens jungle experience to Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Alex Strachan, Canwest News Service
Published: Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Now that he's out of the jungle, Jeff Probst can afford to be philosophical about his experience filming Survivor Gabon: Earth's Last Eden.

Forget Mai Tais, tropical island resorts and lazy afternoons tanning on the beach: Gabon, pronounced ga-bone, promised an untouched wilderness experience more akin to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and a survival endurance test more worthy of Man vs. Wild than the latest chapter in one of reality-TV's most enduring success stories.

Gabon, a west-central African country on the equator that borders Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo, is home to vast tracts of swamp and impenetrable jungle, where forest elephants and lowland gorillas roam and leopards cough in the night.

Survivor's game of type-A personalities trying to outwit, outplay and outlast quickly mirrored the themes in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, says Probst. Two groups of people emerged: one pure, noble and decent, the other conniving, deceitful and consumed by ambition and the will to win at all costs. The metaphysical battle between good and evil became a season-long metaphor, Probst says.

Probst had been through 16 Survivors before venturing to the equatorial jungles of Gabon, but nothing prepared him for the level of animosity and outright hostility he witnessed in Survivor: Earth's Last Eden. Everything in Africa happens on an almost biblical scale.

Probst says he will leave it to others to decide where Survivor Gabon fits in the pantheon of Survivor epics, but he won't soon forget it, from a $100,000 food shipment that mysteriously vanished en route to the production site to the nocturnal visitors -- not just the four-legged variety but the 80-legged and 400-legged variety as well. The Congo Basin is home to more than 10,000 species of insect, all of which decided to pay Probst a visit whenever the sun disappeared behind the rain-soaked horizon. The heat, the humidity, the humans -- oh, the horror of it all, Probst says with a laugh.

"It was clear to us, from the moment we set foot there, that this was an untapped, undiscovered part of the world," he says. "They've had virtually no tourism, and so nobody's been there."

When the production team originally broke camp, the jungle animals fled into the forest.

"They went into hiding," Probst explains. "Unlike Kenya (Survivor: Africa), where you could see the zebras and giraffes and you were aware of where they were, this was much more mysterious."

Survivor Gabon's cast of usual reality-TV suspects quickly learned this wasn't going to be a Club Med vacation. The real Garden of Eden has snakes -- real snakes. And there are things -- big things -- that go bump in the night.

"If you were to fly over Gabon at almost any time of the day while we were there, you wouldn't have seen any animals," Probst explains. "But if you waited and hovered, you'd start seeing movement. And that's what it was like for our Survivors.

"In the middle of the night, you'll hear a crunch in the branches. You don't know what it is -- and then suddenly there's an elephant. And it's huge. You don't know what's going on; you just know that, whatever it is, it's serious."

Midway through filming, Probst thought he had wandered into a scene from Jurassic Park.

"There's a moment where they encounter an elephant in the camp, and they're all trying to deal with it. And I thought, 'This looks like a Spielberg movie.' And then I realized: 'This is not a zoo; you're in their backyard. You've set up shop to do this dumb game. What are you doing?!' "

Survivor Gabon: Earth's Last Eden was filmed in High-Definition -- a Survivor first -- so the jungle is there for all to see, right down to the last fig wasp and carnivorous plant.

The devil is in the details: Survivor's truth lies in its editing, according to host Jeff Probst. For each day spent filming on location, three days are spent in the editing room, deciding how to fit everything together.

Each image is scrutinized and carefully considered before making it into the final cut. Probst is deliberately hands-on in the production process: It's one of the things that has kept him fresh over the past 16 seasons, he says.

"We come back and chart stories for all 16 or 18 or 20 of our players," Probst explains. "We know their arcs. We follow this person and that person from start to finish. We're always laying clues. Some of those clues are there to deliberately mislead you, but they're there.

"We're very much aware of what we're doing. We drop things in early all the time that will make sense in the end. I'll watch an episode back, for example, and think, 'If only you knew how big a comment that was.' The fact that certain people may form an alliance-of-three early in the game may seem, at the time, no more or less important than somebody saying, 'I really love dogs.'

"You don't know what's going to happen later. It may be that person who chooses to bring his dog on as a loved one later in the show, and that's what wins him the game."

Of course, that doesn't mean a man with a dog will win Survivor Gabon: Earth's Last Eden.

"I'm just saying," Probst says, with a playful laugh. "There have been times when I've jokingly said who wins the game, and I've been telling the truth. And nobody listens."

For example: Parvati Shallow will win Survivor: Fans vs. Favorites. Hard to believe, no?