Smart money goes on Stupid
After building a buzz on the festival circuit last year, environmental drama-documentary-animation hybrid The Age of Stupid looks set to break through in 2009. Franny Armstrong (below), the film’s director, talks to Jesse Whittock.
While there has been no shortage of environmental documentaries in recent years, few have had as critical an impact as The Age of Stupid.
Not since Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth has a climate change documentary been this high profile, with much of the attention falling on the film’s unusual storytelling style, as well as director Franny Armstrong’s unusual funding model.
Armstrong used ‘crowd funding’ to finance The Age of Stupid (shown in production below), which involved 228 people each donating between £500 and £35,000 (US$740 and US$51,700) to support production. Each donor then qualified for a pro-rata share of the profits. Although the film has not yet broken even, the investors are due for their first payment in August. Armstrong says this does not put any pressure on her, because it is all about the cause and not the cash.
“Whether I pay back or don’t pay back some people is neither here nor there,” she says. “It’s a punt, you know. One of them described their donation to me as like saying, ‘I’m kissing goodbye to my cash,’ but that’s not why they’re doing it. Nobody’s expecting to get rich.”
The documentary is a moralistic call to arms set in 2055 in which a man, played by Oscar-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite, sorrowfully trawls through real-life footage of climate changing events in 2008 and laments that nothing was done. But despite the downbeat tone, there has been much excitable international network attention for the film, which won the Grierson Sheffield Green Award at last November’s Doc/Fest – something Armstrong (who refers to herself as a “climate change campaigner” rather than a filmmaker) is hoping to exploit to maximum effect.
“TV sales are crucial,” she says. “We are focusing on TV sales (over cinema), because that’s where the biggest audience is.” Her previous film, McLibel, documented two British campaigners’ ‘David and Goliath’ court battle with multinational fast-food giant McDonalds, and was seen by an estimated 25 million people. But Armstrong hopes 10 times that number will see The Age of Stupid and expects much of that traffic to be garnered by international television sales.
Paris-based indie Celluloid Dreams has been entrusted with international distribution and has already secured small-screen deals in Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece, Cyprus and Canada, while deals in Japan and Finland are expected soon. Dogwoof Pictures is handling distribution in the UK, where the film premiered last month in a solar-powered tent in London’s Leicester Square.
The event was beamed via satellite to 65 other locations worldwide, making it the biggest simultaneous premiere in history, according to Guinness World Records.
Despite the media’s recent focus on climate change, Armstrong feels that terrestrial broadcasters are not doing enough to cover the issue. “TV channels have been very poor in commissioning films about climate change or the environment in general. Their record is absolutely desperate, considering the size of the problem,” argues Armstrong.
“So it takes people like me or Al Gore to make (films or programmes) independently. You then have got to raise the money independently. It’s much harder than if the TV companies were actually doing their jobs, particularly the public broadcasters, telling us what we need to know. They’ve failed miserably.”
Armstrong is passionate about the issue of global warming and refuses to engage in debate on the legitimacy of climate change research. She is also particularly angry about Channel 4’s 2007 anti-climate change doc The Great Global Warming Swindle, calling it a “travesty” and questioning why a “tiny minority of conspiracy theorists” were given a primetime slot on a terrestrial broadcaster.
The programme ultimately received more than 265 complaints and a wrap on the knuckles from media regulator Ofcom, which accused the documentary of lacking impartiality, adding that it had taken a leading scientist’s comments out of context.
Armstrong’s two previous projects – McLibel and Drowned Out, a harrowing documentary about an Indian family who chose to stay and drown when the infamous Narmada River dam was filled – have, like The Age of Stupid, been small-scale and completely independent. When questioned about her future in the industry, she is stoic and says campaigning for climate change action in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Summit in December has become more important to her than directing.
A hint as to her future may be found on The Age of Stupid website, where a question reading ‘Life after The Age of Stupid?’ is answered: “Definitely no more films. Definitely.” But can she keep herself away? We shall wait and see.
