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Can Documentaries Change The World? Interview with Franny Armstrong*

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by Kerry McLeod
Franny Armstrong's latest film The Age of Stupid tackles the issue of climate change. Beyond the stories abounding in the industry press about her and her team's innovative way of funding and distributing it is the rather urgent message that drastic action must be taken - now.

DFG interviewed Franny back when the film was at rough cut stage, still without full funding, and without Pete Postlethwaite. As the film gets ready for its UK cinema release, we felt it was timely to revisit the interview - and the question of whether documentaries can affect change.

It’s hard to meet a filmmaker like Franny Armstrong and talk about the process of making films. Although she has been consistently innovative in her methods of raising finance for her films, and although ostensibly this is what our interview is about, it doesn’t take long before we are delving into a discussion of whether there really is any hope for the human race. It somehow seems very trivial to then go back to details like production planning and shooting on a shoestring.

“What we’re saying, which is the position of most climate change scientists… is that the only thing that matters is the global carbon emissions, so we have to get them down globally between us all. We’re not going to do that voluntarily, because that’s supposedly what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years and it’s going the wrong way… Humans have pulled off immense things in the past. It doesn’t look like we’re going to pull off this one, but if we don’t, we’re all dead so it’s quite a good reason to try…!”

Armstrong came to prominence with McLibel, a film that followed Greenpeace campaigners Dave Morris and Helen Steel in their battle against a libel action from McDonalds, and which she financed herself after it was turned down by pretty much every UK broadcaster. Seeing as McLibel was the longest trial in UK legal history, and that Armstrong followed it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, it’s clear that commitment and conviction are both qualities that she possesses in abundance. The gamble paid off: it’s been screened to audiences worldwide – it was even subsequently aired on BBC2 – and was recently included in a season of ‘Ten Documentaries that Shook the World’ at the BFI Southbank in London.
McLibel McLibel McLibel was followed by Drowned Out, which saw Franny battling the Narmada Dam in India with no budget yet again, and which the website for her production company, Spanner Films, claims has been seen by over 14 million people. However, she’s set herself a tough challenge with her latest film, The Age of Stupid, which tackles the subject currently fashionable among politicians: climate change. The only problem with this is that very little is actually being done, and it’s hard to see how a film is going to galvanise people into action – or whether audiences who aren’t already doing something about climate change will really want to watch a film about that very topic.

“With McLibel, you can go in there and unless you’re the CEO of McDonalds, everyone can come out feeling great, because McDonalds are the bad guys. And you watch the film, the good guys win and it might make you think ‘I’m not going to eat any more junk food myself’ but it’s pretty unthreatening. Whereas [The Age of Stupid] is saying that you, along with everybody else, is responsible for this crisis which is going to wipe us all out! And you are the perpetrator. And that is such a hard thing to take – and to sell – to get people to go along and watch it.”

So what galvanises Armstrong? What makes her believe that this film is worth so much energy in the face of so much opposition? Talking to her, it seems to come down to a fundamental belief in the power of film, and of documentary in particular, to effect change – and it’s this conviction that runs through everything she says and does, right down to her approach to filmmaking.

“Do I believe that documentaries can change the world? Abso-bloody-lutely! I mean, what else does? I mean, not than documentaries, but than ideas. There’s nothing other than ideas that change the world, is there? Apart from climate change! …And at the moment, in the current world that we live in, independent documentary is the best way I think; getting your ideas the farthest without constraint.”
Then of course there’s the way the film has been funded, which has been hitting industry headlines for weeks if not months. Armstrong and her producers Lizzie Gillett and John Battsek have used ‘crowd funding’, essentially a loan-based concept, where people – or groups of people – can loan money to the production and receive a percentage of the film’s profits. “With McLibel, I tried to get a commission, and then decided to make it with no money. And my dad happened to have a camera, which I could borrow, and then a family friend gave me a thousand pounds, which lasted two years! Everybody worked for free, and then at the end we made a fair bit of money and I shared it out among everyone who had worked on it and I could see within that that there was a germ of an idea that meant you can make films independently, without a broadcaster telling you what to do, and still make it viable. The other thing is, if you make a hit documentary at the moment, everybody gets rich except the filmmakers, and so I wanted to address those two problems at once. So we just tried to come up with a funding scheme where if we did make a hit then that money would go to the filmmakers, the people who believed in it, the people who worked on it, and it would be down to us rather than the distributors and middle men getting rich. But the main reason is to keep editorial control.”

For this film, Armstrong has joined forces with John Battsek, the Oscar-winning producer of One Day in September; a potentially odd move seeing as she’s placed herself proudly outside the system for so long, and he is someone who works squarely within it. When I asked why she’s done this, the response is characteristically bald: “He’s got an Oscar! That was basically it. The aim of this film is to help get international legislation passed very quickly, so to that end we have to be as mainstream as we possibly can, and that’s why I hooked up with John, so that he could bring the mainstream – not just his contacts and his name and all that but also as a producer; making sure that the film is palatable to a mainstream audience. How did I get him on board? I… told him the idea and he said ‘Love it. Let’s do it’ – and that’s a quote.”

And yet a big bulk of her energy must go into keeping the film going, into finding the next pot of money. History is littered with filmmakers who have self-funded their film only to lose everything they own, or at least to swear never to do it again. How does she keep going?

“I think the more interesting question, is where do people get their apathy from? The idea that it’s hard for me to get up, work with these fantastic people who are all working on my project because they believe in it, who are all fighting something that we genuinely think is going to cause the end of the world… Plus you get to see your ideas spread among millions of people, you get to travel to all these places, you meet the most fantastic people: the people in my film – in all my films – are the most inspiring people I’ve ever met. So to pretend that that is in any bad, compared to people who are going to work 9 to 5 for some employer: it’s fucking brilliant! Obviously it’s hard work, but at least it’s hard work in a positive way. You know all the hard work you’re doing is to a good, positive end. Not to just earn money so that you can get pissed at the weekend, or so somebody else can get rich, or to make some pointless goods that are just going to cause climate change!”

But there’s a caveat: “This is the last one I’m making, that’s it; I’m done with filmmaking. That’s it – there’s nowhere else I’m going to go. I’m going to go and grow turnips and be a sustainable farmer. Nobody believes me when I say that!

“I don’t really know what I’m going to do. But I think that either this will be my contribution to the fight against climate change and then I can retire and be selfish and have meaningful relationships and all the things you can’t do when you’re making a film, or I think the other way I might go is to carry on fighting climate change for the rest of my life.”
*This is a re-edited version of an article that originally appeared in movieScope magazine.

The Age of Stupid premieres across the UK on 15th March, with a cinema release set for the 20th.

Find out more on all the screenings here.

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