CRITTER FLICKS.(filmmaker Mark Lewis's documentaries on animals)(Interview)

There are two species of Emmy winners that can be sighted at this time of year: the prime-time Emmy winners, who were all dressed up for the live award broadcast from L.A. last weekend, and the news and documentary Emmy winners, who, a couple of weeks earlier, were at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The latter group gets less "Entertainment Tonight"-type attention, given its less fabulous plumage, and Mark Lewis--tall, dark-haired, relatively mild-mannered--is a fine specimen, having won two Emmys this year for directing and producing the documentary "The Natural History of the Chicken." "Chicken" is the fifth in his series of excellent, funny, and very non-prime-time documentaries that end up being less about animals than about humans. The other films are "Cane Toads," "The Wonderful World of Dogs," "Animalicious," and "Rat," which won an Emmy in 1998.

The morning after the Marriott Marquis Emmys, Lewis put on jeans and a white shirt and wandered over to the Central Park Zoo. "A zoo is a wonderful place for animals to get a good look at humans," he said. "And you never know which side of the fence you're on." A native of Australia, Lewis lives in Hollywood with an adult female, two juvenile females, and a "pet," a cat. As Lewis approached the zoo's black-necked-swan exhibit, he began discussing his oeuvre.

His first film, "Cane Toads," in 1988, was about cane toads, which sugarcane farmers introduced in Queensland, Australia, in 1935, to combat a grayback-beetle infestation; they wound up with a cane-toad infestation instead. As is characteristic of Lewis's work, much of the film was shot from the toads' perspective, and stories of actual human-toad interactions were dramatically reenacted: a woman befriending numerous cane toads, people swerving their vehicles in order to kill cane toads, and a man smoking cane-toad venom, which can be deadly if ingested. "He compared it to something out of Carlos Castaneda," Lewis said.

"We have a cane toad," a zoo guide who was hovering nearby interjected.

"Really?" Lewis said. "How many?"

"Oh, I'm not sure," the guide said, adding, "You should see the penguins. Oh no, wait a second, they're molting right now."

Lewis gets his ideas from news clippings. He got started on "Chicken," for instance, after reading about a woman in Maine who had brought a chicken back to life through mouth-to-beak resuscitation. "For 'The Wonderful World of Dogs,' " he said, "I saw a story about how many tons of dog excrement are piled up in the streets of New York City every day, and it was an extraordinary amount." (Seventy-five tons, to be exact.) In "Dogs," which was shot in Sydney, Lewis recounts a woman's campaign ...