LUCY WALKER, “COUNTDOWN TO ZERO”

By Damon Smith

Since her widely acclaimed first feature Devil’s Playground debuted at Sundance in 2002, London native Lucy Walker (one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film that year) has distinguished herself as a resourceful documentarian with a discerning eye for character detail. A study of Amish adolescents sampling the forbidden fruits of the modern world during “rumspringa,” an elective time spent away from the strictures of their traditional religious community, Playground was an insightful, humanizing portrait of a little-seen, faintly understood social milieu. For her follow-up in 2006, Blindsight, Walker again took on an uncommon challenge, trailing a group of sightless Tibetan teens attempting to scale the treacherous Lhakpa Ri peak of Mount Everest under the more experienced guidance of a blind climber. Even prior to venturing into documentary, and not long after she’d left NYU’s graduate film program, Walker’s talent was already apparent, as she earned two Daytime Emmy nominations for her work on the children’s TV program Blue’s Clues. More recently, at Sundance 2010, Walker was one of the rare filmmakers to unveil two features simultaneously at the festival. Waste Land is a profile of renowned artist Vik Muniz as he creates art out of garbage at the world’s largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, collaborating with other trash pickers. While this film, winner of an Amnesty International Prize at the Berlinale in February, merits all the praise it has received, her other equally compelling new doc, Countdown to Zero, has an urgency that cannot be ignored.

The threat of nuclear annihilation may seem like a relic of the past, a Cold War hangover that lingers in the minds of first-strike warmongers or high-strung, atavistic nuts, but Countdown to Zero (produced by An Inconvenient Truth‘s Lawrence Bender and funded by Participant Media and World Security Institute) makes a very compelling case for why disarmament should be at the forefront of our geopolitical thinking today. Speaking with an impressive roster of nuclear scientists, military strategists, authors, physicists, and former heads of state—including Pervez Musharraf, Tony Blair, and Mikhail Gorbachev—Walker outlines a number … Read the rest

WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER (SUNDAY MORNING LINKS)

By Scott Macaulay

Here are a few links I sent to my Instapaper account and have been reading this weekend.

* When we queried a few filmmakers for a column on software and apps in the new issue of Filmmaker, I noted the number of respondents who had migrated to the Android operating system. I recalled meeting an Android developer at SXSW this year, and he told me he was planning for the platform’s rapid rise. He also said that he was an Apple fan too, and he felt the competition would be a good thing for both platforms. There’s an exchange along these lines going on between Robert Scoble at his Scobleizer blog (“Why I Can’t Kick the iPhone Habit”) and Louis Gray (“Why I Turned in My iPhone and Went Android”). For those interested in the future of mobile platforms and how choice is playing out in the marketplace, they are worth a read. (Related from Barrons: “How Google’s Android Could Overtake Apple’s iPhone.”)

* Via Derren Brown’s blog, night owls are smarter than other people.

* I’m just starting Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, his book on videogaming, and noted Chuck Tryon’s blog post about the history of Roger Ebert’s relationship to the medium and what that has to say about media criticism. (For those who don’t know, Ebert has recently stirred up a lot of debate in the blogosphere over his since revised statement that “Video Games Can Never be Art.”)

* At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow notes Brazil’s copyright law, which levies fines against rightsholders who prevent fair use of their materials through implementation of DRM.

* This is from nine days ago, but if you missed it, the attempt by a law firm and group of producers, including those behind The Hurt Locker, to sue filesharers, has hit legal roadblocks.

* I recently watched Lucy Walker’s well-made and compelling documentary on nuclear weapons, Countdown to Zero. As a kid I was terrified by nuclear war — I still remember watching Fail Safe on TV. As a political science major in college Graham Allison’s … Read the rest

“COUNTDOWN TO ZERO” | director, Lucy Walker

[PREMIERE SCREENING: Monday, Jan. 25, 11:45 am -- Library Center Theatre, Park City]

There’s one thing that I learned about nuclear weapons that would make it so easy for terrorists to entirely destroy a city that there was a decision to make: Is it a good thing to advertise security vulnerabilities? Am I alerting responsible citizens to civilization’s scariest fault lines in order to demand enlightened leadership to make the world a safer place, or am I giving terrorists their best ideas and causing the deaths of millions of people? It’s not hard to build a nuclear weapon. It’s not beyond a group of a dozen middling grad students, and you see that in the movie. But I found out how one person could blow up a city with their bare hands. And I had to decide whether to include it in Countdown to Zero.

How To Blow Up New York was a working title for the movie, and I admit I liked it, although I understood why it had such a short half life among the rest of the above-the-line crowd. And just in case you’re confused, I don’t really want to blow up New York. On the contrary. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, recalling the first ever nuclear test, quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s not something I ever want to say about my work. On the contrary.

I think about professional pride — my own, and how it might compare, say, to that of a wartime nuclear scientist at Los Alamos, or to that of a terrorist today. Sometimes I’ve chosen not to include some of the best scenes in my movies — the ones that would really juice up my career, like the most outrageous scenes of Amish kids doing crystal meth (I’m talking about my first film Devil’s Playground, which also premiered at Sundance). I try to adhere to my own Hippocratic oath, and to make sure that my films first do no harm. Non-maleficence in filmmaking means not including scenes that would … Read the rest