Mike Gunton is creative director of BBC Studios' Natural History Unit, and has been in charge of its programming for over a decade. Responsible for bringing new and pioneering stories about the natural world to global audiences, he has worked on more than 300 documentaries during his 35-year filmmaking career. In this in-depth interview, Mike explains how an “idiot” weaver bird inspired him to make documentaries entertaining and relatable, discusses the groundbreaking new technologies developed to film the plant world for the upcoming series ‘The Green Planet’, and outlines the challenge of showing audiences the reality of climate change without “being preachy”.