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08/04/2007Film Festival Q&A... with Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand
Panelists and commentators Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand during Friday’s Traverse City Film Festival filmmaker panel titled “What’s Up, Doc?” at the City Opera House. Within the last few years there has been a mass commercialization of environmentally friendly movies, people and products, from Al Gore and his "Inconvenient Truth” and the global "Live Earth” concert, to Hollywood stars showing up to ceremonies and film premieres in hybrid and electric cars. But despite that, the issue of global warming has remained a hotly contested and controversial topic. So beginning in the summer of 2002, filmmakers Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand set out to tell the story of global warming, the messengers who are fighting society's views, and the issue of why it remains such a political debate. The result is "Everything's Cool,” one of the features at this year's Traverse City Film Festival. R-E: How did you first get inspired to make the film? Gold: We were originally approached by an organization that was interested in a project called "Photographing the Future,” which was a vision taking photographs of iconic places in the world that would be affected by global warming if we continue on the course that we're going ... as we got into it, we started to realize that ... global warming is kind of at the top of the environmental ladder when it comes to confronting the environmental issues of our time. It really doesn't get larger than that, and that challenge became more and more intriguing to us. R-E: How challenging was it then to go off on your own and to try and tell the story of such a massive issue? Gold: Ridiculously challenging. Probably the most challenging thing ever. The most challenging project I've certainly ever been involved with. R-E: When you started work on this film, did you have a grasp of how large the issue was, or when you got into it were you surprised by what you found? Helfand: I think the best measure is Dan's, the evolution of his despair, which was measured by the urgency to make this movie. Gold: As you get deeper into trying to understand the global warming phenomenon and the scope of it, you start to realize that there could be articles in the newspaper in absolutely every section, whether that be business, science, politics, news, sports even ... So yeah, as we got into it, we realized there's really no boundaries to this thing. It affects everybody and it affects so many things that are important to us, and that was a major challenge. R-E: What was it like seeing people's reactions to you trying to talk about global warming? Gold: We certainly had a sense of how politicized this issue was before we went on our trip, but I think what was most striking was, to enter into certain communities where you knew it was a very, very strong conservative community and to meet people who at first didn't know ... So for me that was probably the most striking thing about going across the country, just to see this extraordinary division and rift politically, and that's really what drove people's opinions, not necessarily actual comprehension of the issue. Helfand: ...As long as this stays completely in the realm of the political, we're doomed. Gold: And yet, unfortunately, it's not a problem that's going to be solved by science. Science doesn't have the wherewithal to make the changes that need to be made. Unfortunately, at this point the way our society's structured, it's the politicians that are in the position of doing what's necessary. R-E: With a presidential election coming up in just over a year, what is it like knowing that you are now able to maybe have a huge influence on not only just the discussions leading into the election, but also on who gets elected? Helfand: This movement is moving right now. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of media ... I hope that our film is a very strategic and crucial piece of the story. R-E: What has it been like, ... to see the change from when you started until now? Gold: For me it's mixed. Because on the one hand, I'm optimistic that finally the message that this is real, that human beings are the cause of the most recent warming trend, and that it's an important issue, that message is actually reaching America. On the other hand … if that message was fully understood, we would be moving a lot faster to slow this down and to reverse this course.
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