The credits for the documentary The Hollow Tree—when they are inserted—will show Daniel Pierce as director, editor, cinematographer, and producer. You’ll just have to take his word for it at this point.

When he spoke to the Georgia Straight regarding his film about the iconic Stanley Park attraction, the opening of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival—which has scheduled his film for next Friday (May 13) as part of its Spotlight on Vancouver program—was but five days away.

“This is going to be as hot off the press as they come,” Pierce said with a chuckle during a phone interview from his Vancouver studio, noting that although the colourist still had work to do, the titles were almost finished.

Anything else? He laughed again. “The music is being recorded tonight.”

Maybe the fact that Hollow Tree is the 25-year-old SFU film-school grad’s first major project is why he sounds so sanguine about a situation that would have other filmmakers leaking puddles. He doesn’t know any better.

Or maybe it’s because Pierce knows he has no one to blame but himself. After all, he said, when DOXA programmer Dorothy Woodend heard he was documenting the fight over the preservation of the famous Hollow Tree and asked if he could have the film ready for this year’s fest, “I foolishly said ”˜Yes.’

“But having that deadline really forced me to work as hard as I could,” he added.

And he had lots of help. After first being put in contact with the Stanley Park Hollow Tree Conservation Society in October 2008 by SFU film prof Colin Brown, Pierce agreed, “for a small honorarium”, to document and archive the work to be done to save what was left of the 800- to 1,000-year-old giant western red cedar that has acted as a tourist magnet for more than 100 years.

“It turned out to be a much bigger thing and a whole lot more exciting,” he said of that initial job.

The society had a dedicated core of volunteer professionals and amateur activists donating their time, money, expertise, and materials to the cause, including Bruce Macdonald, a former city-hall civil engineer, schoolteacher, and author of Vancouver: A Visual History.

“When you grew up in Vancouver like I did, and visitors came in the summer and you’d take them to see the Hollow Tree, people were always amazed by it,” Macdonald told the Straight while articulating why he got involved in the almost two-year battle with the Vancouver park board to prop up and preserve what remained of the formerly towering tree.

“You’d get your picture taken by it. That is what people still do—and that started in 1887.”

Macdonald said people need to understand the city’s logging history before they can really appreciate the importance of saving the Hollow Tree.

“Perhaps the tallest trees in the world grew here. That’s why Vancouver is here. That’s why people came here. Because of the trees.”

The finished Hollow Tree, Pierce said, will clock in at considerably less than the many hours of footage he shot at “meetings they had, the planning sessions, and inside the fence when they were working inside the tree”.

“In the end, it’s a better film at an hour.”

If it ever gets done, that is.

Watch the trailer for The Hollow Tree.