Bridges’ film encourages viewer to be caretaker for environment
Jeff Bridges wants to know: What can you do to help save the planet? How about stop drinking water out of plastic bottles?
“I always try to get off these plastic bottles," the actor said during a telephone interview. "They really aren’t environmentally sound at all.”
Persuading people to help the environment by making meaningful yet sustainable choices is one of the points of “Living in the Future’s Past,” a documentary screening on Tuesday at the Crosswoods and Pickerington theaters. Bridges narrates the movie and serves as a producer; Susan Kucera is the director.
The movie asks a question of its viewers: What kind of future do you want to see?
Rather than simply list frightening data, the movie examines climate change through the lenses of evolution, neuropsychology, ecology and energy. It includes the viewpoints of a wide array of experts, including a philosopher, a marine biologist, a physicist, a retired army general and an anthropologist.
"When Susan Kucera asked if I wanted to be involved with narration, I didn’t want to be making a movie about a doomsday What: "Living in the Future's Past" Where: Crosswoods, 200 Hutchinson Ave.; Pickerington, 1776 Hill Road N. Contact: www.livinginthe futurespast.com Showtimes: Crosswoods: 7 p.m. Tuesday; Pickerington: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday Admission: $12.50
scenario; that didn’t make sense to me," Bridges said. "I wanted to look at it from a different point of view. We thought it would be interesting to look at it from an evolutional viewpoint. Why is our species acting the way it is?”
Kucera wanted to appeal to viewers’ intellects.
“If you’re just pointing fingers around, people shut down and don’t want to listen,” she said during a telephone interview. “What it does is it engages our powers for higher reasoning. It’s an interactive film; it’s not something you just consume. You find yourself thinking about it days later.”
Bridges knows first-hand about the effects of climate change. His home in Montecito, California, was destroyed by debris slides after heavy rains in January; 23 people died in the slides.
“The California kid, I’ve never experienced a crispiness that’s now in our state with firefighters and droughts," said Bridges, who along with his wife was rescued via helicopter.
"We prepared for the storm with sandbags, but that was nothing compared to what occurred … here comes boulders the size of cars, trees.”
Also, the location in the Santa Monica mountains where Bridges’ on-camera scenes were filmed was later ravaged by a wildfire. Some scientists blame climate change for the droughts, wildfires and subsequent heavy rains that have plagued California.
Kucera, a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, who divides her time between homes in Hawaii and Washington, grew up going on expeditions with her father, a glaciologist and instructor at the University of British Columbia. While on the glaciers of Alberta, she cut her teeth on movies by assisting as her father made films.
The title “Living in the Future’s Past” refers to how human behavior has been programmed through evolution and its effect on the future of Earth.
In the film, for example, psychologist Daniel Goldman likens energy use to a person in a bakery: a part of our brains, programmed by evolution to crave sugar and fat, desperately wants a treat, but more rational portions of the brain know that eating that treat might be unhealthy.
“Once we understand the true cost of the things we use and the things we do to the environment,” he says, “the very same mechanism applies.”
One major issue is the development of fossil fuels and humanity’s dependence on the machines that run on oil, gas and coal. While one person starting a car might not have a major impact on the environment, author and philosopher Timothy Morton says, “billions and billions of car-ignition turnings has a meaning.”
The goal of the movie, Kucera said, is to encourage viewers to change their ways of thinking.
“We’re trying to get people to engage their thinking systems a little bit differently," she said. "We have this capacity for innovation; we have elastic brains. How can I be thinking about things differently?”
Bridges wants people to understand that they can create change.
“They can make a difference,” he said, “out of the love of our planet, to create a world we want to live in and for our kids to live in.”