Sundance Diary: Seeing the big picture with the director of 'Everything's Cool'

Here's interview number two in my ongoing series, "Three Depressing Issues and the Men Who Brought Them To Sundance So I Could Get Really Sad About the State of the World." It's a chat with Daniel B. Gold, who, along with Judith Helfand, directed Everything's Cool, a documentary about the people in the fight to reduce carbon emissions. It's a very everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to the global warming issue—and far less cut-and-dry than Al Gore's Inconvenient perspective—but the overstuffed film did get people talking at the festival (and the free compact fluorescent light bulbs they were giving away could be officially classified as "hot swag" once Year of the Dog director Mike White started bragging that they were the only free stuff he took).

Daniel and I talked at the EW Photo Studio, as he scanned the newspaper for word on what President Bush was going to say about climate change in that evening's State of the Union address; Mr. Gold also left behind a very yummy salad, so I'd like to thank him for that.

So tell me if I'm summing this up correctly: Everything's Cool takes off from the science we learned in An Inconvenient Truth, and shows real people who are actually involved in the debate.

That's heading in the right direction. Essentially, what we ideally hope for is that people who have seen Inconvenient Truth would finish watching the DVD and be angry about why they didn't know this sooner. How is it possible that the situation could be so dire—we're now being told that we're running out of time to do something about it—and we're being told this NOW? Why didn't we hear about this on CNN every night? What happened to the message? Our film addresses that.

You tell the stories of people like Heidi Cullen, the climatologist at the Weather Channel, and the work she's been trying to do.

Heidi Cullen is perhaps the one character in our film that makes the greatest arc of transition. When we met her, she had just started working for the Weather Channel, she had no experience on camera, and she was coming from a hard science background. And she was working extremely hard to be conservative with her language and yet struggling to try to make that language simple enough that it could work on TV, in three minutes a week. In the span of time that she's in our film [about 2 years], she grows much more confident. The science becomes more robust. The physical evidence gets greater. And by the end of the film she not only has a 30-minute show, but she's also stepping up to the plate and taking a lot more responsibility for what she knows, without calling herself an advocate. A couple of weeks ago she wrote a blog that basically said this: Meteorologists all over the country have to take responsibility for what is known about global warming. She immediately came under attack from Senator Inhofe's people—Senator Inhofe is the guy who said global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. The Weather Channel has gotten over 500 e-mails and phone calls to her boss. And this one guy named Marc Morano—he's the guy who did the Swift Boat campaign—he's in Inhofe's office, and he posted a blog calling her a Nazi, because he said that she was trying to restrict free speech of the meteorologists. The reason why we haven't done anything about global warming is, it's a very partisan issue. If you're a conservative, you probably have to not believe in global warming. Abortion, gun control, global warming. And until the topic transcends that, we're sort of in trouble.

Where did the idea for the movie get started?

The early phase was, we're going to make a film that shows how global warming is affecting Americans right now. We're going to personalize this. And so we started shooting here in Park City. I was doing a cinematography workshop at Sundance 2003, and we had researched the film for 7 months and didn't know how we were going to start it. And I was sitting in a hot tub with a snowmaker from New Zealand, who was downing beer after beer. And I was like, Uh, how you doin' there? And he said, I can't pay my rent. I'm a snowmaker, and I'm not getting called into work cause it's too warm to make fake snow. And here it is, second week of January at 8,000 feet, and it's not getting colder than 26 degrees.  So we started shooting the next day. One of the biggest struggles of the message of global warming is people think, oh, you know, it's probably affecting some native people at the top of the world, or maybe hit some coastal communities in India, but we're gonna be safe here. We've got our buildings, and our air conditioning, and our ways to defend against natural disasters. But I think that the combination of Katrina, Inconvenient Truth, and increasingly bizarre weather—

Like the 72-degree day we had in New York this January?

Yes. These things are starting to bring it home, but people don't feel an imminent enough threat in their own lives, in their own homes.

How many people came out to the Park City photo shoot yesterday [pictured], in response to the message from the people in Iqaluit, Canada, you show in the film?

About a thousand.

Because what struck me about the Vermont protest that you show in the film is that there are 450 people, and it's the "largest protest" in the history of global warming or whatever. You can get 450 people to come out and protest Evian changing the label on their bottle.

Well, I know. To be fair, by the end of that day, it was up to 1,000 people. But still. When we looked at the footage, it was both so pathetic, but so telling, and since then, that march was really the beginning of this whole idea of the "Step It Up" movement. On April 14th, there's going to be rallies all over the country with one message, which is, Step it up, Congress. We want 80 percent carbon emission cuts by 2050. And that's the message on the aerial shoot yesterday.

So let's say there are people out there who are lazy, like me. I'm not a rallier, I'm not a marcher. So what's a practical thing I can do right now to help?

The things people can do right now are to increase the efficiency of the way they use energy. And it's easy. The most popular, common one is to change out your lightbulbs and use compact fluorescent bulbs. Along the same lines—I don't know about you, but when I turn the lights off at night to go to sleep, there are like 17 blinking lights of things charging in my world. You've got the cell phone, the iPod, the computer. And the best thing is, as soon as those things are done charging, unplug them. Right away. You leave your computer plugged in all night, you're draining electricity. And that electricity is usually being generated by burning coal. So you're burning coal to just have your gadgets plugged in all night, and not using them. Obviously, if you own a vehicle, try to get a vehicle that has the very very highest miles per gallon, because every gallon  you burn emits carbon dioxide into the air. A lot of hardcore folks are riding their bikes more, which some people just scoff at, but some people are into. That has all sorts of added benefits, like not having to go to the gym.

Is trying to do carbon offsetting—having someone inventory how much carbon you're emitting and then paying for it or whatever—is that easy for normal people?

Very easy. There's all kinds of websites where you can go and calculate your carbon footprint and figure out, you know, I drive this many miles a week, and fly from here to here. And there's two ways to offset that: By planting trees, you're absorbing the carbon dioxide in the air, or by investing in alternative energy. We've offset the first 300 miles of the travel for everyone who comes to our film here at Sundance, and the money has been spent investing in wind energy.

But this kind of behavior—is it actually going to make a difference? Or is the problem so large that this is just a sort of drop in a bucket that evaporates?

It will make a huge difference. It isn't a drop in a bucket—but it isn't anywhere near the scale of what needs to happen. We can't do this alone. We're not going to solve global warming by changing our lightbulbs and unplugging our cell phones. It ain't gonna happen. It is far, far, far huger than that. But it's almost like PR, because it gets people talking about it, talking to each other, and it gets people realizing, "Wait a minute. I should be voting for someone who's talking about this. I should be putting somebody into a political position of power who considers this important." Because changing lightbulbs is working from the bottom up. It has to come down from the top, too.