couldn’t “book a single pitch meeting” to get it made. So he and his crew took matters into their own hands.turns a manifesto into a thriller. The film, now in theaters, is based on a book by Swedish climate activist Andreas Malm. In it, the author asserts that climate change poses an existential threat to every human being on Earth. Global governments have proven through their inaction that they will not meaningfully address this crisis.
Fossil-fuel infrastructure itself being the villain of the movie is not only an extraordinarily incisive and exciting political idea, but it’s also a great bad guy. It’s a great target for a heist. So despite the fact that the plot of the film was invented by us, the soul of the movie was born from the subject matter of the book — and the title, which by itself supposes a really exciting genre picture.
Throughout that entire process we were talking with Dan Garber. I went to school with Dan, we’ve been working together for almost 15 years, so he’s also a cornerstone of my process. He was offering ideas and helping us sort through our research, even just casually. By the time that we presented the project to Andreas, we were very upfront about, “To be a good movie, you need conflict. You need characters that have different perspectives, and we want to engage in the criticism of the book as much as we’re engaging in the ideas themselves.”And Andreas’s response was to send us a bunch of his favorite criticisms of the book that he thought would be productive for us. You don’t write a manifesto not expecting people to take issue with it.
Yes. I think it’s important to say that we didn’t go into the process saying, “We’re trying to check a lot of boxes.” But when you do something like this, you want to feel like you’re listening to everybody, and we wanted the movie to be a cross-section of what’s happening in the contemporary American climate movement.
How do we shoot this so it doesn’t feel like we are editorializing the act too much while still being thrilling?This is actually an idea Ariela brought to the table. When it’s on a Steadicam, that’s when everything is going according to plan. And then when it goes handheld, that’s when things are going wrong. People think that the movie has a lot more handheld cinematography than it does, but by and large, everything is going according to plan.
There are 200,000 miles of active liquid petroleum pipeline in the continental United States, and most of it is unprotectable. The setting is partially about forcing a reckoning with that idea as well. The point is to say, if eight people could, on their own, with something like $700 worth of material, build two bombs and strategically destroy two sections of oil pipeline in such a way that it could significantly destabilize the global oil marketplace, what does that say about the tactics currently being employed by the climate movement? Part of what makes that question provocative is the immediate tangibility of how easy it is to build bombs.