Saturday interview

The people's premiere

Made by 'amateurs' with cash from 'crowd-funding', the new film by Franny Armstrong aims to create 250 million climate change activists

Six years ago a young woman with no film training and just one full-length documentary to her name dropped in to the Guardian to ask for some advice. Long before anyone had heard of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, she planned to make a low-budget documentary about oil and climate change. Where should she go? Try Iraq and the Niger delta, two of the most volatile, oil-rich places on earth, the grizzled environmental correspondents advised her - hoping that she would come to no harm.

Blow me, but in 15 days' time, a bright green carpet will be unrolled in Leicester Square and Franny Armstrong, now 35, better travelled but just as singleminded, will trip down it in the company of A-list celebs, to a specially constructed solar-powered cinema. There they will see a docu-drama set in Nigeria, Iraq and elsewhere starring Pete Postlethwaite - the man Stephen Spielberg called the best actor in the world - playing an old man looking back from a climate-changed future world to documentary footage shot in 2008.

But this will be no ordinary film premiere. Armstrong's film, called The Age of Stupid, is getting the world's largest ever official premiere, with the whole evening being beamed by satellite direct to 65 cinemas. And because climate change affects everyone, too, it is being billed as "the people's premiere".

"Not bad for a bunch of amateurs making it up as they go!" says Armstrong.

But Team Armstrong are no amateurs. For most of her 20s, she worked on McLibel - an epic, low-budget documentary about McDonald's hamfisted attempt to sue two penniless activists who defended themselves in the high court in the longest civil case in English history. The film has now been seen in 15 countries by 53 million people.

There have been two other documentaries since but Stupid is very different - a mix of fact and fiction, using music and animation. It takes six real people in six countries and weaves together their personal experiences of oil. "We went to India, Nigeria twice, Jordan, Tuvalu, the Alps seven times, Cornwall, Iraq," she says. "We spent hours on boats right in the middle of the kidnap areas of the Niger delta. Just producer Lizzie Gillett on the sound and me on the camera. We shot 300 hours of film.

"We had a pretty much finished the film about a year ago, but when I watched it, I wasn't happy. I'd taken all these people's money and it wasn't good enough. So we brainstormed and decided to introduce a fictional element.

"At first I thought we could take the six characters and transpose them to a time in the future after an imaginary climate apocalypse. But our lawyer said they might sue. So we went for kids in the future. But no one wants to be berated by kids. So we ended up wanting someone older and we knew there was only one actor possible - Pete Postlethwaite."

They thought the Oscar-nominated Postlethwaite was way out of their league, but when they Googled him they found he was trying to get permission to put a wind turbine on his roof. It gave them the confidence to approach him. "I ended up directing Postlethwaite myself. He just rocked up and was awesome. I had my favourite actor speaking directly to me with a script that I had written."

In the film, each of the six characters's real stories interlock and overlap with the others. Postlethwaite plays an old man looking back on all their lives and wondering why no one did anything about climate change when they had the chance.

Postlethwaite describes working with Armstrong as "thrilling". "She was one of those people you trust. It started with a misunderstanding. I turned up thinking I was just doing a voiceover, then she said 'We've not got much money but we've got a small caravan.' I thought 'Why do I need to make-up for a voice over?' Her tenacity and integrity went together ... she was clearly not someone looking for the glitzy main chance. She has a real desire to get her message across.

"We have no option but to be sympathetic to the film," he says. "It's sympathy or die. We really can do something about climate change. We don't need government to tell us what to do. Individuals can do things too."

Armstrong, the daughter of BBC human rights documentary producer Peter, comes from the first environmentally aware generation. Her film does not seek, like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, to prove climate change is happening. Narrative, not just facts, she believes, is needed to make people understand what is at stake.

"At school I was awful. I named and shamed teachers who did not have a catalytic converter on their car," says Armstrong, who has never owned a car herself. "I terrorised my parents with greenery. I went veggie at 11, worked on a farm and understood then that animals were commodities. My favourite cow was called Piggie. She cut her udder but was sent to slaughter to save the vet's fees. I have not eaten meat since.

"I first heard about climate change in the 80s. We called it global warming then and I remember thinking 'that sounds dangerous'. But I never had a eureka awareness moment. It was a gradual build-up. Then I read zoology at University College London and my thesis was 'Is the human species suicidal?' I read it again recently. It was the blueprint for this film."

Let's be clear: Franny Armstrong and the team who have made Stupid for next to the minimum wage are on full-time planetary duty. She envisages people seeing Stupid and not just lobbying their MPs, pestering their bosses or lagging their lofts, but going to Copenhagen in December and locking world leaders into their hall at the vast UN climate change talks and not letting them out until they have all agreed to reduce global climate emissions fast.

It's improbable, but then so is the film. Not only have they made what is being called the first credible film dramatisation of climate change, they have invented a new way to raise money and may even have revolutionised the arcane film distribution system.

They bypassed the banks and went straight to ordinary people for cash, developing the idea of "crowd-funding". The first £50,000 was raised in a London bar on a single night in December 2004, and the £530,000 raised so far has come from 228 people who have invested between £500 and £35,000 each. There are still seven £10,000 shares available.

Aside from a few relatively wealthy people, many investors are made up of groups. There's a mothers' group, a hockey team and a women's health centre. The investors will get their money back if the film takes £1m. "Our lawyer said it was the most original film-funding scheme he'd seen," says Armstrong.

In addition to the innovative funding model, Stupid has broken new ground by relying on volunteers to translate the film into more than 30 languages.

But she and executive producer John Battsek, who made the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September, also know that the key to getting a small, independent film into more than a handful of cinemas is the first few days of its opening. If the distributors see good attendance figures they will pick it up. If not, it will sink without trace. Enter the network of people who have helped make the film. "There are 228 investors and 108 crew: if each of us buys 10 tickets we will almost definitely have sold enough seats to expand into week two," Armstrong muses.

But they have devised another way to get the film seen. "The usual film model is that the distributor pays the producer a pittance called an advance - and for that takes all rights to the film. Which means it belongs to them. If the filmmaker wants to have a screening of the film, they have to get permission from the distributor. So we came up with a new model whereby we employ the distributor, we keep all the rights, the money goes through us and we pay them a cut. This means we will be able to allow all sorts of small-scale school/church/campaign screenings which are not usually possible," she says.

You get the idea. Anyone at all will be able to stage their own Age of Stupid screening just by getting on the internet and paying for a licence to show the film. The rates will vary depending who you are and how many people you plan to show it to, but the licensee can charge viewers whatever they like.

So far they have had approaches from former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, Barack Obama's thinktank the Centre for American Progress, senior UN diplomats and the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Diplomats who saw it at the UN's climate change meeting in Poland before Christmas reportedly came out crying.

If Armstrong gets her way, which she usually does, The Age of Stupid will be seen by 250 million or more people in the run up to the crucial UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December and will inspire an army of people to force world governments to take action. In which case, Armstrong says, she will stop making films. "They take me a very long time and make no money at all. If we succeed at Copenhagen then I will go and grow leeks in Wales or Cornwall.

"You make a film, you present everyone with an extraordinary story, then it's over to them," says Armstrong.