Sister Directors Tackle Our Earth, Our Selves

How can you be fatalistic when you're eating chocolate?

On a recent afternoon, sisters and filmmakers Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners nibbled on brownies while they talked about "The 11th Hour," their new documentary about the perilous future of mankind. (See review on Page 28.) They interrupted each other, joked and alternated between matter-of-fact musings on human extinction and buoyant raves about biomimicry and the film's co-creator, Leonardo DiCaprio, who also narrates the film.

Using interviews with 71 economists, ecologists, engineers, architects, scientists and philosophers, the filmmakers created a tapestry of warnings, yes, but also creative ideas about the environment, politics and the human race. What Conners Petersen, who has edited several political journals and is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations (an independent policy group), and Conners, who attended New York University's film school and works in digital media, discovered along the way surprised even them.

"The shocker for me?" Conners Petersen asks. "Human extinction certainly jumped out; that was not what we went in with at all. We just thought we'd talk about the state of the world, what we've done to the world, then all of a sudden it was about the state of ourselves. So that was a huge theme that came up that we reoriented the whole movie around."

Our extinction is just one of the scenarios put forth in the film. Other possibilities include soil degradation, coastal flooding and the possibility that, as Conners Petersen puts it, "the oceans could actually acidify and stop producing oxygen, which means that we go into an anaerobic world. That scientists can't rule that out from happening is completely horrifying."

"The 11th Hour" sprang from the sisters' previous collaborations; their 10-year-old company, Tree Media Group; and several short films on the environment they'd made for Woody Harrelson and DiCaprio, who Conners Petersen said has been "a true collaborator," even before filming started.

Conners agrees: "Because he's so engaged in the subject matter and we worked very closely together, we'd have hours and hours and hours of conversation about the bigger picture, and the idea of a feature film kept coming up until we finally took the leap."

Her sister adds: "He's got a very good eye for structure and ideas and how ideas go through the culture. . . . There's no downside in working with someone like that, given who he is as a person. Celebrity helps, of course, because of the exposure in the media." But she cautions against putting him in "some liberal Hollywood box," saying he just "happens to take certain positions on the environment and works as an actor for a living."

The filmmakers said they found it exciting to explore the interconnectedness of Earth and society; they kept about 150 hours of interview footage and plan to make it available online.

"This is a human movie," Conners Petersen says. "Yes, it's about the environment, but it really is about humanity and our responsibility to the place we live. We live on Earth, and we're humans, and we want to live here for a long time; therefore, we have to take care of our home, simple as that."

She adds: "The truth of the matter is that there is hope, there is a lot we can do, and that's why we made the film. What we're trying to do is get beyond the arguing. . . . What we should be thinking of is what to do about the problem, instead of whether we have the problem, because the longer we argue about that, the fewer options we're going to have in the future."