Deep in the Heart: A Texas Wildlife Story

Welcome to Big City, Small Town, a podcast about the people who make San Antonio go and grow.

I'm your host today, Cory Ames, and my guest is Ben Masters, the Texas filmmaker behind Unbranded, The River and the Wall, and Deep in the Heart.

His new film, Deep in the Heart II, Texas Rivers, opens in theaters today.

We recorded this one outside, sitting beside a hill country creek, and it turned out to be the perfect setting.

Ben and his team spent years crossing the state to fill mountain lions on the Pecos, otters in East Texas, and whooping cranes on the coast in a little hill country muscle with one of the strangest survival strategies you'll ever hear about.

For me, conservation efforts, that's what I care about.

So, you know, a door opened, I started, I directed my first short film called Water From Stone about David Bamberger, and then got to do a whole bunch of short films and then directed my first feature film called The River and the Wall about the insanity of building a wall on some stretches of the Texas-Mexico border.

that opened up deep in the heart one uh which we did and then you know now we're at deep in the heart two and have several films on deck so it's been fun