Rage does different things to different people. If it’s the kind of enraged that gets you up off your chair and makes you start looking at how you do life—or explain to other people how they could go about life differently—then it’s cool. I don’t want the socked-in rage experience, which is why I made this film in a very specific way.
Environmental films have been done so profoundly well. But what I’m noticing with my kids, younger generations, and folks who aren’t necessarily in the environmental conversation daily is they see it as this thing that’s foretold—running out of water, ice caps melting. I wanted to say, “No, no, no, hang on. Powerful entities are grabbing up resources left on the planet out from underneath us—largely without us knowing it—so if there’s human agency behind it, then there can be human agency to fix it.” I want this to be a rightable ship rather than having the optics of a film that [says] things are getting worse or out of our control.
The film certainly makes the case that, rather than trying to combat global warming, the world’s nations have largely thrown up their hands and said, “Well, we can’t fix that, so let’s just grab as many resources as we can.” It says much about how society views the odds of repairing the damage.
That’s exactly right. What you hope from a documentary like “Blackfish,” [you] want people to not go to SeaWorld. That’s easy—you can be an activist by not doing something. This one’s asking you to do life a little differently—everybody has to eat less meat, period, end of story. And we also have to stop with waste. This starts with us—eat everything in your fridge, stop obsessing about expiration dates. All these things are things you hear, but that can also make this business-as-usual thing not as valuable for the grabbers.
What we need—and what this film hopes—[is to] see the world as interdependent. If [some people are] starving, then the human rights of that just are unreal. If you actually care about people at all, you know [starvation] is a horrible, insidious thing happening across the globe. But also, if there’s a place that falls into famine, that [creates] disease—and disease comes through our borders [as] refugees. That [means] conflict in places that the U.S. has deemed geopolitically very important—we’ll be involved in that, China will be involved in that, the UAE will be involved, and Europe will be involved. We all will be touched by this, so we can’t afford to let other people starve—we can’t afford to not care about other folks. I’m hoping that this is a film that makes that clear and connects the dots a bit.