Interview: Emily James, film director

Published on Thursday 14 July 2011 20:06

While documenting the lives of environmental activists Emily James had no problem with being accused of taking sides

WHEN she got permission to film inside the secretive world of Britain's climate change activists, director Emily James thought she'd have no problem getting interest from broadcasters. "I know the system," she says. "And generally when you go and show them that you've got access to a story that they can't get themselves, it's not too difficult."

The response to her early footage, however, was not what she expected. People thought she was too much on the activists' side and, although they never actually said it, James felt that what they wanted was "a relatively cynical, if not expos kind of critique, of what they were doing".

The problem, she believes, was the campaigners' anti-establishment politics. They activists are pushing back at the system, challenging the status quo through direct action, and "the system, in the form of broadcasters, pushed back at them and didn't want to give them that space to have their story told in a sympathetic manner."

Rather than give up, James set out to make her film independently, raising finance through crowdfunding and a like-for-like donation by Lush, the soap-making company. The result is Just Do It: a lively, funny and inspiring look at the efforts of groups like Plane Stupid and Climate Camp to effect change.

The film is unapologetically partial and leaves you in no doubt where James's sympathies lie. Partly this is because the filmmaker promised campaigners – who took a risk participating in the project – that she wouldn't "sell them out"; partly it's because she believes in what they're doing. Such bias isn't new to her work, though. When James made the entertaining short film, The Luckiest Nut in the World – in which a singing peanut presents a critique of trade liberalisation – she knew enough about the subject to challenge the orthodoxy on that the free market and other reforms were going to "save Africa", and her film was "playfully propagandistic" on behalf of the alternative position. It was all about redressing the balance, she says. Similarly, Just Do It is "trying to round out the story in the public domain".

Viewed this way, the film is the balance. "I feel like I've gone in as a film-maker, I've gotten to know people, I've gotten to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, what the culture of what they're doing is, and tried to communicate a portrait of them that I felt was true and accurate."

Of course it is subjective, she says, because all film-making is: "Anybody that tells you they're being completely objective is either lying or delusional." She suggests that it is usually the film-makers trying to tell the "underdog story" who are accused of biased. "It's kind of the tool of the status quo. A stick that they can beat you with."

In order to tell the activists' story, James first had to convince them she was on their side. "Time and time again they have been suckered in by somebody making a lot of promises, and I didn't feel there was any need for them to be unhappy with the portrait of themselves."

Security was the biggest concern, and she consulted a legal firm that represents activists to assess the risks involved and work out a strategy to keep footage out of the hands of the authorities. Tapes were labelled cryptically – James didn't even know herself what was on some of them when it came time to edit the film – and kept at safe houses, while a promise was made to people that no footage would be released until after their court cases were completed, no matter how long they took. "I felt that would be all right because I knew it would take quite a while to turn around a feature film."

In return, James was given access to planning meetings and safe houses. She filmed a direct action at Royal Bank of Scotland's headquarters and a failed attempt to shut down a power station, and reveals the chilling face of absolute police power at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009. She dismisses the idea that actions that don't achieve their goal or have little chance of succeeding are either a failure or pointless. The fact that people have decided to act, rather than just sit around moaning about how powerless they feel, is what matters, she insists.

James, a Cambridge-educated Californian, is an award-winning documentary maker who has worked in TV for ten years. Before making the film, she says she had reached a point – while working on Channel 4 series such as The War on Terra and Don't Worry – where she'd become overwhelmed by the scale of the climate change problem. "I was actually quite despondent about how bad the situation was and how little I could do to effect change on it, and had become quite nihilistic and given up. Then I met these people who knew how bad it was and they were still managing to pull together and take action."

What emerges from the film is that, for some people, communal action is not only empowering but also therapeutic. One of its most colourful characters, Marina – a "domestic extremist" who often serves tea in china cups at protests – suffers from depression, James reveals, and activism "has given her a sense of meaning and purpose. I think she's very aware that if she weren't doing this, she would be very deeply depressed."

If their actions are sometimes considered illegal, James, in subtitling the documentary A Tale of Modern Day Outlaws, says she wants us to question whether the activists are really criminals. "Generally the laws that they're breaking, like aggravated trespass, which is what they normally get charged with, only exist in order to punish activists." Most of them aren't "enaging in antisocial behaviour", she says, but are "people who are trying to build the world into a better place, not rip it down. And yet they're constantly portrayed and treated in the legal system as if something else is going on."

I wonder though, whether a film as partial – albeit entertaining and eye-opening – as Just Do It isn't just preaching to the converted.

James doesn't appear to have a problem with that. Preachers preach to remind people "of their values and to remind them that there is always a discontinuity between the people that we aspire to be and the things that we actually do in our daily lives," she says, "to try to get them to bring those two close together, and that's powerful." The point, it seems, is to inspire and give a broader picture than the one frequently presented by mainstream media, not to try and convert the unconvertable.

"Just Do It is not going to convince climate change deniers that climate change is man-made and happening," says James, "and it's not necessarily going to convince that Daily Mail reader that direct action is the thing you should participate in. But that's not where we're aiming."

• Just Do It: A Tale of Modern Day Outlaws is in cinemas now