For DiCaprio, The 11 th Hour is a merging of two worlds. Leo says he has taken valuable moviemaking lessons away from his stint at the Hollywood coalface, alchemised them with his eco-smarts, and condensed them into a moving, informing, powerful film that shows us evidence that our industrial society is smothering the planet’s biosphere, causing ecosystems to cascade into a state of collapse – but offers us the chance to become the generation that pulled humankind back from the brink.
“[Making this movie] has been a pretty profound experience and a great learning experience for me, because I really wanted to play the role of somebody who is hopefully asking the right questions of people that have devoted their lives to this issue,” he says.
The 11 th Hour does not shy away from asking those questions. Never before has such a diverse group of talking heads come together onscreen to discuss humanity’s toll on planet Earth. DiCaprio and the film’s writer/directors, Leila Conners Petersen and her sister Nadia Conners, secured interviews with more than 80 experts, including former Soviet PM Mikhail Gorbachev, renowned scientists Stephen Hawking and David Suzuki, former CIA boss James Woolsey, sustainable design gurus, tribal elders – a staggeringly qualified think tank of boffins that, one imagines, if sequestered in a bunker somewhere, would solve all the planet’s problems in a matter of days.
“The whole purpose of making this movie really stemmed from wanting to listen to the consensus of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community,” DiCaprio says. “I wanted to hear what these people had to say in an uninterrupted form. I wanted to hear their life’s work and what they’ve been studying for all this time.”
These luminaries naturally had lots to say on the issue, and DiCaprio and the Conners sisters ended up with reel upon reel of footage.
“This has been a homemade movie in a lot of ways, and very unique in my career,” DiCaprio says. “This has been hundreds of hours with [the Conners sisters] in the editing room, really condensing thousands of hours of footage into an hour and a half, and trying to make a film that will really impact people to the point where they leave the theatre sitting in the face of the harsh realities of what will happen to this planet and us in the future if we don’t make change, but also highlighting and, hopefully, inspiring people to realize that there are a lot of solutions out there if they become active. That’s the whole key to making this movie – hopefully inspiring people to become more educated about this subject and to take action personally.”
But inciting such action was never going to be easy, and still is not. Awareness of the so-called tipping point – the point at which our climate becomes irreparable – has certainly increased recently, but Climate Change has its skeptics, An Inconvenient Truth has its skeptics, and The 11 th Hour will surely have its fair share of nay-sayers too. DiCaprio’s response to them is the rhetoric of common sense.
“My response has always been: how could we as a country not be for becoming energy-independent and not reliant on foreign oil?” he says. “The overwhelming scientific community is in agreement that mankind is playing a major role in this. How could we not want cleaner air and cleaner water? These are fundamental human rights issues. So, I think it crosses political boundaries in a huge way.
“A whole segment in the movie talks about how in the 70s, the Clean Air Act was passed, the Clean Water Act was passed, and this was done by Republicans and Democrats working across the board. This is a huge issue. This is an issue that the whole world has to embrace. We, as the United States , all need to start learning – through films like this, through the media, through public awareness. We need to work together, and this is one tiny little piece in that puzzle.”
The 11 th Hour paints a grim picture of our future, it’s true – but at its heart, there’s hope for a sustainable future.
“We also highlight the great possibilities that are out there,” DiCaprio says. “There are technologies that are in place right now that can reduce the ecological imprint by 90 per cent. And it’s time that we as the people started urging the powers-that-be to try to infuse this into our daily lives, to the point where we don’t even need to think about it anymore.”
Above all, the film stresses that we – as consumers, voters, leaders and citizens – have the power to stop the chaos flooding in. And change can’t come too soon. After all, next year, we don’t want Big Jack Nicholson releasing an apocalyptic eco-doco called Too Late! We Warned You! – now, do we?
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