Paul Watson is the kind of man that you either love or hate. His aggressive save-the-oceans campaign, which has included ramming Japanese fishing boats, scuttling Icelandic boats in their harbour and physically blocking Newfoundland seal hunters from their prey, has infuriated governments and inspired young activists. Watson’s page on Facebook has more than 140,000 likes, and his organization — the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society — is followed by another 44,000 people on Twitter.

And his story has been told dozens of times.

So when Vancouver-based Trish Dolman, the director, writer and producer of Eco-Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson, set off to make a bio-graphical documentary about the notorious figure, she quickly realized that she had to probe far deeper than others in order to bring something new to the table.

“The challenge with Paul is that he’s a very media-savvy guy,” the director says. “What I set out to do was to get past that exterior. I wanted to make a film that revealed more about the man than people had seen before and really get to the bottom of who he was and what his motivations were.”

It’s been a long journey for Dolman to do so. The idea of making a film about the life of Watson was in her mind when she graduated film school in the early ’90s. After meeting the “eco-pirate” in 2002 and acquiring his blessing to proceed with the project, she spent the next decade securing funding, filming and producing the movie. It finally screened for the first time earlier this year at Hot Docs in Toronto — in front of three sold-out crowds.

“It was a long process,” she reflects. “I’ve spent eight or nine years actually making the movie. So, it was like one-fifth of my life.”

The documentary, which clocks in at just under two hours, follows Watson and his crew on recent voyages into desolate locations such as the Antarctic and the Galapagos Islands as they search for whalers and illegal fishers. But the breadth of the film is far more expansive than Whale Wars, which is an Animal Planet show chronicling the debated actions of the organization.

An investigation into the character of Watson, including his abusive childhood and three failed marriages, is intermingled with an exploration of the history of Greenpeace, the firing of Watson from the non-violent activist group’s board and the growth of the renegade movement. Dozens of sources were interviewed including the founders of Greenpeace, the crew onboard the ship, environmental experts and family members.

Watson himself was interviewed numerous times; Dolman says that one of the chats they had was nine-hours long. For much of the time, she had to continue to ask questions until she received content that hadn’t been revealed previously.

Although the director originally admired her subject, she realized that she couldn’t simply produce hagiography in her film.

“Many people don’t agree with how he does things,” she says. “My objective was to present Paul and to present his approach, his cause and the way he tackles it, and leave it to the viewers to decide what they think about him.”

While onboard, the camera was seldom turned off. This resulted in documented moments such as the candid celebration of Watson’s birthday and crew members suffering from sea sickness.

In addition to filming the documentary, Dolman admits that she learned a lot about the state of affairs on the ocean.

“It really struck me that at sea, anything happens. There’s no one enforcing international law. I think that I, like most humans that live on land, naively thought that most people were following international law. But they aren’t. People are literally doing whatever they want out there.”