The Age of Stupid

Climate change disaster film aims to save planet from destruction
From kidnap threats to stomach-churning helicopter rides, The Age of Stupid team reveal the lengths they went to make the film exclusively at Guardian environment
Felicity Carus, guardian.co.uk 2 Mar 09;

In just a fortnight, a film will hit cinema screens around the country that its makers hope will have a profound effect on attitudes to climate change.

Today, guardian.co.uk/environment is exclusively launching The Making of The Age of Stupid. There is nowhere else you can watch this film except on the lap of its director, Franny Armstrong.

The Making of Documentary charts the six-year history of the film and its many incarnations, false starts and screening hiccups. Armstrong's father tells her in The Making of … that the film is a "disaster" until the radical introduction of Pete Postlethwaite as its narrator. Thanks to a stellar cast behind the scenes such as Oscar-winning John Battsek, Armstrong goes back to the cutting room to make a much better film.

At times funny, irreverent and moving, The Making of ... documentary will give you a flavour of The Age of Stupid without giving away the whole story and the many surprising twists throughout the film.

It intersperses snippets of the film itself - which premieres on 15 March - with fascinating behind-the-scenes footage of how an animation of Sydney Opera House in flames was done by a team of 16 "boys in their bedrooms" , how the stories of the six main characters in the film were selected , how she persuaded Pete Postlethwaite to take up the role of narrator and how it was financed using a "crowd-funding" model.

Armstrong describes how she set out to make a film about oil and climate change called Crude. An early addition to the team was producer Lizzie Gillet, a former TV reporter from New Zealand, who was told by Armstrong that she'd have to give up everything to work on the film "hockey, clubbing, socialising, everything," Gillet says in the documentary.

The documentary shows a death-defying helicopter journey through the Alps with Armstrong's legs hanging out of the door to give a clear shot of the precipitious valleys and mountains. Armstrong and Gillet were strongly warned not to travel to Nigeria to film another character, Layefa Malemi. But as Gillet says in The Making of… "seeing the suffering of the Nigerian women for the sake of our lifestyle was a massive eye-opener". A scene also shows how frighteneningly close they came to kidnap themselves - a prospect that elicits only a nervous chuckle from the director.

Armstrong says the worst part of the film was waiting to reunite an Iraqi family in Jordan. They lose all contact with the family's oldest son, Malik, as he travels to the Jordanian border from Iraq where Armstrong waits with his sister Jamila, 5, and brother Adnan, 8. After a nerve-shredding four hours at the Jordanian border with Iraq they establish contact again. "It was the worst moment in the whole film," she says. "I thought I'd killed someone to make a film about climate change."

Armstrong says that "climate change is the most important story of all time" and she can only hope her telling of that story gets through to ordinary cinema-goers, starting with the People's Premiere on 15 March.

More about the film on their website.