This Is The Earth: Interview With Davis Guggenheim

[RestoreGore]

http://www.star-ecentral.com/news/story.asp?file=/2007/3/6/movies/17032520&sec=movies

This is the Earth

By RIZAL JOHAN


An award-winning documentary inspired by Al Gore’s slide shows on global warming has caught keen mainstream attention. Director Davis Guggenheim, who won the Oscar for best documentary feature with An Inconvenient Truth, the adaptation of former US vice-president Al Gore’s slide show on the threat of global warming, was initially reluctant to make the film. “When the producers, Lawrence Bender and Laurie David, asked me to do this, I tried to talk them out of it,” said Guggenheim in a Q&A courtesy of United International Pictures. “First of all, I’m not an environmentalist and they told me there was this slideshow and I didn’t think you could make a movie out of a slideshow and also I was worried that Al Gore had so much political baggage.

“And they said, ‘Look, you have to see it ...’ and when I saw it I realised that the message in the movie is not political. It immediately struck me that it could cross over and I do believe that it is crossing over.” Guggenheim, an award-winning director and producer of television programmes and films such as Deadwood, Numbers, The Shield, Alias and 24, is no stranger to documentary filmmaking either. Actually, his late father, Charles Guggenheim, was also a noted documentary filmmaker.

snip

When it came to documenting Gore’s stand on global warming and the seriousness of it, Guggenheim knew that he would also have to delve into Gore’s personal life in order to tell the story. And that proved to be challenging at first. “He did not want to do the personal stories,” said Guggenheim, who added, “The problem with global warming is that it’s so abstract and, forgive the word ... cosmic. It’s so about how we live and it’s everywhere but it’s not in front of us and I knew you needed to invest in somebody for the audience to be interested in the movie.”

The film addresses Gore’s 30-year environmental campaign, his sister’s untimely death due to lung cancer and how he almost lost his young son who was involved in a car accident. Guggenheim also touched on Gore’s devastating loss in the 2000 presidential elections, a personal and massive setback to the former vice-president. Gore however, folded up his sleeves; hit the road with his slide-show presentation on the devastating effects of global warming and the urgent need to act on it at a time when nobody else would address this issue.

snip

“I began to see Al Gore as a remarkable character who, in a traumatic time, made a heroic choice to put everything else away and dedicate his life to an issue no one else was willing to talk about,” said Guggenheim. “I’m the kind of director who loves strong emotions and I felt that when you see Al Gore picking himself up after 2000 and trying to save the world, there was going to be something very powerful in that.”

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Great interview giving insight into Mr. Gore 's true devotion to this cause.

[Uncle Joe]

1. Thanks for the thread RestoreGore

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