A 'Crude' Awakening

Much like the oil that rises from the jungle wells, a legal battle of epic proportions has seeped out of the Amazonian rainforest of Ecuador and, thanks to a powerful new film, is now commanding the world's attention.

Joe Berlinger's film, Crude, tells the story of an environmental disaster 30 times worse than the Exxon Valdez spill. For the past 16 years, the indigenous people of the area have been fighting to clean up the land which they say was polluted by Texaco, now owned by Chevron Corp. The Ecuadorian people's case is being fought in a class action lawsuit in Ecuador against Chevron, and has already been a victory of sorts simply because the case has gone so far.

According to various reports, a decision on whether Chevron is liable for billions of dollars in damages could finally be reached sometime next year. The case currently hangs in legal limbo as both sides try to out-maneuver the other in various international courts.

Crude, an official selection of the Sundance Film festival, brings us face-to-face with the people whose lives have been irreversibly damaged by oil exploration and the subsequent exploitation of the jungle. In the film, a surprisingly moving documentary, we also meet the representatives of Texaco and Chevron, who deny responsibility for the pollution.

Rounding out the cast of characters is an improbable pair of attorneys: American consulting attorney Steven Donziger, and Pablo Fajardo, a young Ecuadorean trial lawyer who, in his first case, became the lead attorney on the largest environmental lawsuit in the world against one of the world's biggest companies.

Berlinger's first feature, My Brother's Keeper, co-directed by Bruce Sinofsky, was about a man accused of killing his brother. The pair teamed up again to make the cult classic Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,documenting the iconic metal band's emotional near-breakup. He's made several other features, and is the creator, co-producer and director of the series Iconoclasts.

During a recent visit to San Francisco and near Chevron's corporate headquarters, Berlinger met with Tonic and told us how this story almost never made it to the big screen.

Tonic: What prompted you to make this film?

Berlinger: You know, the fact that it’s a film that’s out and having a theatrical life is as much a surprise to me as anybody. I did not set out to make the movie that I made.

Tonic: What did it start out as?

Berlinger: Steven Donziger, the “shy American lawyer” on the case (editor's note: Berlinger is totally being sarcastic, Donziger is a stereotypical pushy lawyer), and I have a mutual acquaintance.  He came to my office, and told me about this 13-year struggle in Ecuador. He was looking for a filmmaker to tell the story, because he thought it was hugely important.

Tonic: Steven is quite a character – they all are, like they were created to tell the story!

Berlinger: It’s amazing that the film has all of these juicy elements and all of this cinematic stuff. In addition to having an important message, it works as a movie. It didn’t start out that way. As Steven was first describing the situation to me, all of my filmmaker red flags were going off, saying, “This is something I shouldn’t do.”

Tonic: What kind of red flags?

Berlinger: Steven was talking about all of this history. I am a cinema verite filmmaker -- I film things in the present tense and it sounded like I’d missed most of the story.

The other concern was, here was a for-profit plaintiff’s attorney, with a clear agenda.

I am a much more ambiguous storyteller who probes the human condition. My initial instinct was that Steven didn’t want a film like that because he was obviously “100% Chevron is evil, look what they’ve done!”

I told Steven, I don’t think I’m the right guy for the film you want.  Get someone like Robert Greenwald, who did Walmart, the High Cost of Low Price, with a political, single-message style.

Tonic: That would have been a very different film!

Berlinger: Another issue was that I barely knew where Ecuador was – I had to go look it up on a map after our meeting! I worried that if I, as an intelligent moviemaker, don’t even know where Ecuador is, will the general audience even care?

Add to that that it’s obviously going to have a chunk of the action in two other languages. I thought, how am I going to raise money for a subtitled film, in a country most Americans have never heard of?

Steven called me after our meeting, said, "I really think you should go down."  He was convinced that if I only saw the pollution, I would have a change of heart and want to do the movie.

Tonic: Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?

Berlinger: [Long pause as he considers the word.] I consider myself extremely environmentally aware, but I’m not an environmentalist filmmaker.

Tonic: You’re not out demonstrating on the weekends?

Berlinger: I’m not an environmentalist, nor am I a human rights activist, but I consider my films very concerned with the human condition, so I think of myself as a humanist.

Tonic: What intrigued you enough to go?

Berlinger: I said to Steven, "I've been all around the globe but never been to the Amazon rainforest. As long as you understand that I have a lot of doubts, if you want to take me down, and take the gamble that it’s not going to pay off, I will be happy to take this trip."

The trip ended up being an eye opening, life changing epiphany for me. And making this film was my environmental wakeup call

Tonic: How long was that first trip?

Berlinger: Two days in Quito, three in the rainforest, and I was dumbfounded. The pollution was far worse than he described.

I think one of the failings of Crude is the two-dimensionality. You have to see it with the naked eye, smell it to really understand what has been done to this region. I was shocked at the level of pollution, the level of despair, the amount of disease.

By the second day of the trip, I started to feel the criteria of not making this film wear down.

Tonic: Did something in particular happen?

Berlinger: On that day, I was taken to a Cofán village. As I was getting out of the canoe, I observed some regular people, just by the river, making a communal meal with canned tuna fish. Here we are, deep in the heart of the Amazon forest, with water-based people who live off the river, being forced to eat canned tuna because the fish in the river are all dead. And that image more than anything deeply spoke to me.

Back in New York, looking at my family, holding a fresh glass of water from the tap, I asked myself, "What kind of human being would I be if I turned my back on these people?"

I thought, "I'm a professional filmmaker, so I'll shoot a little bit and hand off the footage to somebody."

Tonic: How did the film get so much bigger?

Berlinger: The minute I let go of my aesthetic criteria, all of the things I was worried about started to materialize. Like meeting Pablo Fajardo over a bowl of potato soup. When I met Pablo, I felt like, "I have a hero!" He has this incredible story:

An impoverished oil field worker, who saw the injustice all around him at a young age, vows to himself he’s going to do something about it. He pulls himself up by the bootstraps gets himself educated, becomes the lead attorney as his first legal case in the largest environmental lawsuit against the 5th largest company in the world.

You couldn’t make that up.

Tonic: Trudie Styler seems like another hero in the story.

Berlinger: One of the things the film observes is the portrait of the advocacy, what lawyers need to prosecute their case. It is a sad but necessary reality that you need to bring a celebrity.

But I have to say, Trudy and her husband Sting have been walking the walk and talking the talk in the rainforest for two decades. After 17 years, the only tangible benefit that the indigenous people have received is the UNICEF fresh drinking water and sanitation programs she established and that we show in the movie.

Tonic: Given these great heroes, and your strong feelings, you made a film with a fairly neutral perspective.

Berlinger: I made a fundamental decision early on that that I didn't want to do an agitprop environmental film. When you have that singular point of view banged over the head, it's a passive experience for the audience. My style is the opposite. If you respect the audience and allow them to weigh pros, cons and complexities like a jury member, instead of it feeling like an illustrated lecture, they can come to their own conclusions.

And it’s fine if people walk out of Crude with a conclusion that’s different from mine.  I believe in this style for this story because I believe the film is about a larger set of issues than who should win the lawsuit.

Tonic: What are the larger issues?

Berlinger: I see two: First, this experience was a wake up call for me about the treatment of indigenous people.

The film opens and ends the Cofán people of Ecaudor. While the lawyers from both sides continue to argue out in the media, the Cofán are living in despair. At a time of when we’re all aware that we’re on a collusion course with environmental calamity, instead of tapping into knowledge of people who have tread lightly on the Earth for eons, we force them into this quasi-Western lifestyle.

I say “quasi" because we take away their traditional means of sustenance, like fish and animals, tease them with Western ideas, then abandon them, leaving them with diseases they’ve never had before, and no economic resources to live that Western lifestyle.

Tonic: And the second issue?

Berlinger: The legal system doesn't seem to be an adequate method of solving these environmental and humanitarian crises.

I’m not smart enough to tell you if Chevron has wrapped themselves up in enough legal technicalities to win this case. But there’s no moral justification for what they did in that region, even if the law is on your side. If you’re going to tell me it’s taken 17 years to get to this point, and it will probably take 17 more, that means three generations of people are going to suffer and die before we get to a resolution.

We shouldn’t delude ourselves that anything is getting resolved through this process.

Tonic: How can people help?

Berlinger: If you visit the CRUDE site, we have a page, “Get Involved," with a list of supporting organizations. In particular I would love for people to click on the UNICEF logo and make a contribution to The Water Project. Each of the barrels we showed people getting in the film cost about $500. I'm glad to say that the film has been used to raise a lot of money for the program.