7
THE AGE
OF STUPID:
THE DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Either we tackle climate change seriously or we wipe out most life on 2007. Disaster. Only people obsessed with climate change could
Earth. The future of our species and everything we have ever achieved is understand all our subtle links. To everyone else it was a hodgepodge of
at stake, so it is not a tricky decision, as a filmmaker, to decide which random stories.
subject to work on. After despairing a while, I decided to introduce a fictional character,
The original plan, back in 2002, was to borrow the structure of Stephen living in 2055, when the planet has been devastated and hundreds of
Soderbergh's movie Traffic: six human stories on all sides of a complex millions of people killed. He is trawling through ‘archive’ footage from
international issue. now, trying to work out why we did not stop climate change when we
I hooked up with the Producer John Battsek and agreed we needed a still had the chance. There was only ever one actor in my mind and when
decent budget to make such an ambitious film. But we also wanted to I googled ‘Pete Postlethwaite + climate change’ and learnt he was
remain independent. So we came up with a scheme we called ‘crowd- setting up a wind turbine in his garden, I thought we might just have a
funding’. The complete budget of £450,000 was raised by selling ‘shares’ hope of persuading him... ...We did just that.
to individuals and groups – including a hockey team and a health centre Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth,did a fantastic job at bringing the
– who care about climate change. Our 228 investors gave between £500 public up-to-speed on the science of climate change. The Age of Stupid
and £35,000 and each own a percentage of profits of the film, as do the takes the baton from Gore and examines the moral, psychological and
crew, who worked at massively-reduced rates. This finds us in the powerful human consequences of our current way of life.
position of owning all the rights. My first two films – McLibeland Drowned As Postlethwaite's character says in the film: 'We could have saved
Out– have together been watched by 55 million viewers worldwide, and ourselves but we didn't. It's amazing. What state of mind were we in, to
we are planning to smash that record with the climate change film, The face extinction and simply shrug it off?'
Age of Stupid.
After three years simultaneously following six different stories in six
wildly-different locations - New Orleans, Nigeria, UK, the Alps, India and Franny Armstrong, Filmmaker
Jordan – we held some test screenings of the rough cut. This was May Visit
www.ageofstupid.net for further details.
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