Monday night, filmmaker Ondi Timoner told an audience at a festival screening of “Cool It” that she first sat down with subject Bjorn Lom- borg, the Danish economist and climate-change contrarian, at New York’s Cosmic Diner.
Somehow that seems fitting. After all, “Cool It” — based on Lomborg’s book of the same name — is a provocative documentary about our predicament as a species in the face of climate change. Only it’s is not “An Inconvenient Truth: 2.” Nor, contrary to the way it’s been written about, is it the anti-“Inconvenient Truth,” — though Lomborg has very different ideas from Al Gore about cost-benefit priorities in regard to treaties, cap-and-trade proposals and geoengineering.
“Cool It” opens today. Over dinner, Timoner bounced from the Cars (the band and the hybrids) to her Sundance award-winning documentaries “Dig!” and “We Live In Public” and, of course, to the controversy that hangs over Lomborg like an ozone cloud.
Lisa Kennedy
Q: So the producers approached you to direct “Cool It.” Why you?
A: Exactly. I don’t know why me. Because I’m an indie film darling. They loved “We Live in Public.” They liked my style and wanted to appeal to a hipper audience. I had to make “Cool It” in a year. I had to make it on a heady subject, I had to make it engaging and feel like it’s unfolding. That’s my basic theory of documentary.
Q: Did you ever get stuck?
A: Yeah. We all got stuck, especially with cap and trade. How to phrase it. How to make it understandable. We all got stuck with the politics. That’s a big part of the problem. I grilled Bjorn for five hours that first meeting, trying to punch holes through his claims. Realized I believed him; realized through his ideas I could explore solutions.
Q: You dedicate the film to climatologist Stephen Schnieder (who died in July at 65). Yet he comes off pretty furious about Lomborg.
A: He threw me out of his office. I went in for a set-up. Walked out to take care of a few things. Someone from my crew told me “You better come in here right now.” He was screaming “Get out of my office! Get out of here!” He had a New York Times piece that said this was going to be the anti-“Inconvenient Truth” film. He was yelling. My director of photography is breaking down his camera. Luckily there’s a guy who’s been making a film about me, following me around, which is how I got the footage.
