Environmentalists often get short shrift from the movies. For every Greta Thunberg documentary there’s a Marvel villain wanting to destroy half of the universe’s population to reduce pollution. For every Erin Brockovich there’s a Walter Peck, the Environmental Protection Agency official in Ghostbusters who wants to stop our heroes operating an unlicensed nuclear reactor. Films paint activists as naive, hypocritical or dangerous. And with Extinction Rebellion glueing themselves to roads and throwing soup at famous paintings, there will be more villainous roles to come. But in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, environmentalists are, for once, the heroes.
American director Daniel Goldhaber is in the Norwegian town of Tromsø, high in the Arctic Circle, after the showing of his film at its film festival. The film is based on the non-fiction book by Andreas Malm, a provocative manifesto for activists in the climate movement, published in 2021. I ask how he took this work by a Swedish Marxist academic and turned it into one of the most exciting thrillers of the year.
“We came up with this notion of Ocean’s 11 but for eco-terrorism on day four of talking about the project,” Goldhaber says. “With the flashbacks we were very explicitly riffing on Reservoir Dogs, which is funny because that movie has a lot of qualities, but being about anything is not really one of them.” Another source of inspiration was Ava DuVernay’s Selma — “a vastly underrated film” — which he admires for its concentration on Martin Luther King Jr as a tactician rather than a preacher.
In Goldhaber’s film, a geographically, racially and sexually diverse gang of activists assembles in Texas with the intention of making and planting a bomb to destroy a vital section of oil pipeline. Each character has a different reason for becoming radical. One is sick as a result of living in a refinery town; a war veteran is seeing his land polluted; a young couple are simply anarchic adrenalin junkies. But this turn to extreme measures is not something that a Hollywood movie normally endorses.
“Every social justice movement in history has disrupted civic order, sometimes destroying property,” Goldhaber says. “The climate crisis is the largest existential threat we’ve ever faced and if we want to have a chance at stopping it, we have to at the very least explore these tactics. Andreas’s book makes the point that there’s no one system, no one person causing climate change, so how do you come up with a target? Well, it’s the machines that are killing us. That’s the morally defensible target.”
According to the usual Hollywood calculus, the plan has to go wrong, proving that this kind of action is extreme, irresponsible and dangerous. Here too things go wrong, but what is remarkable and subversive about the film is its refusal to belittle what the characters are trying to achieve. “We have to start telling stories about success,” Goldhaber says. “This is something corporate power is very good at, but activists are very bad at. I see activists coming out of the movie feeling a sense of hope that an escalation of tactics could work.”
The question has to be asked: does he really want to inspire people to blow up pipelines? “The film is a dramatisation of the book,” Goldhaber insists. “The book is calling for action; the movie is not. An explicit call to action isn’t a very effective form of storytelling. The movie wants to leave you with a feeling, a question. If you want the call to action, you should go read the book.”
Isn’t this a paradox? If people watch the film and don’t do anything, hasn’t the film failed? “What I want as a person is different from what I want as a film-maker. Do I think the tactics we’re using to fight climate change need to escalate if we want to have a hope of averting climate apocalypse? One hundred per cent. But as a film-maker, you’re telling a story about a group of characters in a particular way. You’re hoping it’ll shape the culture, which changes a whole lot of behaviour over a whole spectrum.”
Goldhaber is from Boulder, Colorado, raised by two left-leaning parents both working in climate science. He went to Harvard, which he did not enjoy: “This is the feeder school to the halls of power. There’s good stuff happening there but, by and large, the culture is one of nepotism and cronyism, and the most overpriced, overprivileged frat clubs imaginable.”
His first professional work was as an editor on an environmental documentary which taught him about the limits of an objective, impartial and more conventional approach. Maintaining objectivity while interviewing people living with the real-world consequences of climate change felt inadequate, given the scale of the problem. His first film, Cam (2018), used Kafkaesque horror to explore the world of the online sex industry. With that, the idea of employing genre cinema to make a point grew on him. “I’m incapable of making work that doesn’t engage me politically,” he says.
The director and his young and largely unknown cast shot How to Blow Up a Pipeline for less than $5mn in the space of a couple of months. “This is a movie about a youthful impulsive act, so let’s make it youthfully and impulsively.”
Goldhaber is strikingly energetic and optimistic. He is no doom merchant. In fact, talking about the resilience of the cinematic experience, he sounds like a young Spielberg: “There is something that is ineffably important about being in a room with 30 people and experiencing something as a collective and walking out and being changed together,” he enthuses.
However, for all the talk of radicalism, he admits that his life could do with some stability. “I don’t have an apartment or an address, and I’ve never had a stable income. I’ve never signed a lease in my life. So I’d like to try to build a little bit of structure for myself.” His next project is already in the works: a film inspired by the notorious 1978 “video nasty” Faces of Death. It seems like an off-the-wall choice but this is a film-maker who is willing to take risks and you can bet he’ll have a bigger point to prove.
‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ is in cinemas from April 21
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