Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterFade to Black:
Davis Guggenheim, Director
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
While Davis Guggenheim's film An Inconvenient Truth will leave no doubt that global warming is a catastrophe in the making, the director himself was a little dubious of the subject matter of his film.
“When [producers] Laurie David and Laurence Bender came and pitched the idea,” Guggenheim says, “they said, ‘Al Gore gives this slideshow, and we want to make it into a movie.’ I felt, I don't think you can make a slideshow into a movie.”
After Guggenheim was persuaded to attend Gore's presentation on global warming at the Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, he had a transformative experience. “I felt if I can somehow give people a front-row seat to what I saw, we could do some good. But I still didn't know how to do it until we finished. It was very challenging,” he says.
Essentially, the presentation is a lecture on science and environmental catastrophe using slides. “Al has put this set of arguments together in a very coherent way, and one builds on the other very elegantly. It takes the audience on a step-by-step journey of why this is important, why global warming is real, why it's urgent, why there is no controversy [about the science]. That's the spine of it.” The challenge was to make it a human story, and for this, Guggenheim composed a series of vignettes from Gore's personal life. “The theory is, if I could tell his personal story, we could lock into him,” Guggenheim says. “We could invest in him, and then we could invest in what he had to say.” If Gore were running for office, this technique could be viewed very cynically. But Gore's not a politician now, and the personal stories give the film an emotional drive.
Guggenheim has had a varied career, directing everything from segments of HBO's Deadwood to documentaries on public school teachers and art collector Norton Simon. But he had never assembled so many different formats, nor brought so many tools to bear on a project. Though Guggenheim had followed and filmed Gore in some 15 cities on several continents, he hung the film on several sound stage presentations with Gore's slides and graphics rear-projected on a 90ft. screen using Apple Keynote. Two 50in. plasma screens were on the stage around which Gore could walk in front of the audience. The talks were taped using four Sony HDC-900 HD cameras.
What excited Guggenheim most, however, was his experience with the new JVC GY-HD100U 24p HD camera, which he calls “remarkable.” Guggenheim recalls a scene in the movie where Gore is talking to two Chinese scientists. “It was so secret, this clandestine meeting in a hotel room, and it was so quick that I shot both sides of it at the same time,” he says. “One side was 16mm, and the other side was this JVC camera. You watch the film and it intercuts them, back and forth, several times, and you can't tell the difference. It's unbelievable.”
Guggenheim also shot 35mm, 16mm, MiniDV, and even 8mm Tri-X and 8mm Ektachrome for scenes on Gore's Tennessee farm — a stock that's been discontinued, but stockpiled and sold by a house in Los Angeles. He pulled in formats from a diverse web of international scientists and artists: images of glaciers were scanned by German photographers, digital photos were emailed from Greenland, animations were built in JPEG, Keynote, and Flash, with one sequence of a polar bear emailed from an animator in New Zealand.
But Guggenheim learned one of his most effective techniques from his father, the legendary documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. He conducted long audio-only interviews with Gore, sometimes three or four hours long, allowing him to tape at long intervals. “[These interviews] allow you to get very, very intimate, because the camera's not on and the whole crew isn't there. … [Al] calls them grueling, and he said he wanted to strangle me several times because I just kept pushing and pushing to get to the core of some of these questions and to find an intimacy.”
