How to blow up a heist film? Make it about climate warriors instead.
CAMBRIDGE — Daniel Goldhaber’s parents are both climate scientists. He’s been hearing about the dire need to save the planet since he was old enough to understand.
His family has a history of survival instincts. His maternal grandmother emigrated from Romania to the United States in the 1960s, almost two decades after surviving the Holocaust.
Like his grandmother, who taught children to play the piano up until her death a year ago at age 93, Goldhaber has chosen the arts as his survival mechanism. He’s a little more provocative, however: The director’s second film, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” opening in Boston April 14, is a dramatic adaptation of the 2021 manifesto of the same name by the radical environmentalist Andreas Malm.
About halfway into reading Malm’s book, Goldhaber said recently, “I had an image of a bunch of kids in the desert struggling with a bomb. It was a lightning bolt moment — ‘We can do this as a heist film.’”
In this case, though, the group project is not a high-concept robbery but the destruction of an oil pipeline — a protest against inadequate action on climate change. The film follows a group of young adults who are variously traumatized by man-made environmental hazards. Sasha Lane plays activist Theo, who is ill from growing up near toxic industry. Forrest Goodluck plays a Native American man, Michael, and Jake Weary a Texas rancher, Dwayne; they share a deep resentment over corporate encroachment on their land. They’re part of a group that comes together to try to escalate the response to the climate crisis.
“We’ve seen the same thing in the climate movement for at least 15 years,” said Goldhaber, sitting in the lobby of a Cambridge hotel after visiting a classroom at his alma mater, Harvard Unithriller versity. The 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s wake-up call about the imminent effects of global warming, came out almost two decades ago, he noted.
“The scope of the change that needs to take place has not happened,” said Goldhaber, 31. “At a certain point, you have to start saying, ‘How do you force a change so that life on Earth as we know it does not come to an end?’”
Malm, a lecturer at Sweden’s Lund University, has become a leading voice of the climate movement, advocating for sabotage as a necessary next step.
While reading his book, Goldhaber “cold e-mailed” the author to explain his idea to adapt the call to action using fictionalized protagonists.
Malm “is a very shrewd person,” Goldhaber said. “He understands the different ways ideas are communicated.
“Putting these actions and thoughts into the characters, that changes it. It isn’t a polemical piece of propaganda. From the beginning, he said, ‘That’s amazing. I think that’s great.’”
Goldhaber is no newcomer to incendiary filmmaking. His directorial debut, “Cam” (2018), was a psychological
about a provocative video performer and her descent into the murkier corners of the Internet.
Born and raised in Boulder, Colo., Goldhaber rejects the notion that his home city’s renowned “lefty” culture helped shape his worldview.
“Boulder is actually very indicative of the kind of neoliberal political moment we live in,” he said. “There are a lot of people who believe in having the right politics and not doing [anything] about it.
“I grew up with a great degree of frustration about people who have money, who have power, who have the wherewithal to do something different,” he continued, “but believe they’re going to consume their way out of climate apocalypse. They really believe that by buying a Tesla they’re solving the problem.”
Harvard was a struggle for Goldhaber, who said he’s on the autism spectrum.
“I think the predominant culture of Harvard is people who go into the halls of power, into investment banking, corporations, mainstream government,” he said. “There’s not a lot of support for the arts and being an artist.”
He didn’t grow up around money, he noted. “I didn’t understand that there were social circles I didn’t know how to navigate in. … It took me a long time to understand how to engage as a social creature. It’s still an ongoing process.”
After meeting on an ill-fated film project, Goldhaber and the actor Ariela Barer bonded over their mutual despair about the climate crisis and began cowriting the script for “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” Barer, who starred in Hulu’s Marvel Comics series “Runaways” (2017-19), plays Xochitl, the organizer of the protest.
In order to finance the film, they paid their own way to France and effectively bum-rushed the parties at Cannes. Within 10 minutes of launching one pitch, Goldhaber claims, they had their first backer.
At the moment, Goldhaber is living out of his luggage. He has no home, he said, just a post-office box in Denver. His parents recently sold the house he grew up in and “absconded” to Norway.
Asked how the scientists who raised him feel about his film, he was cagey.
“I’ll say they’re thrilled about the project,” he said with a wry smile. “I don’t want to put words in their mouths.”
The pipeline, he said, is symbolic. “There is no one government or country or corporation or individual you can target, because we all participate” in the destruction of the environment, he said. “So what do you target?”
The answer, he said, is infrastructure.
“If we recognize that fossil fuel infrastructure is actively killing people, then there is an argument that there is a moral right, and debatably a moral necessity, to dismantle and destroy, in Andreas’s words, ‘the machines that are killing us.’”
Early feedback suggests that the film is connecting with audiences from a wide range of viewpoints. Goldhaber said one friend saw the trailer with her father — an ardent QAnon believer — who leaned over and whispered, “That looks great.”
“That to me is very exciting,” Goldhaber said. “Why do people believe in QAnon? Because they feel their government and the system have cheated them. And that’s true.”
His movie, he argued, “is no more or less propagandistic than ‘Top Gun: Maverick.’ We have a cultural allowance for a certain kind of advocation of violence. I think ‘Pipeline’ is actually significantly less propagandistic than a lot of those films.”
Wherever they stand politically, he said, people are feeling angry and disenfranchised.
“We all feel the world warming. We all can smell the death in the air. People don’t know where to place their anger and their fear,” he said. “One of the things the film can do is help people identify a common enemy.”