S1 E2:
Transcript
Burning with
Eva Orner
Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas, and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life, by Wondercast Studio.
Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane. And it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change makers from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
My guest on The Green Dream today is the Academy and Emmy award-winning documentary producer and filmmaker Eva Orner. She's speaking to us from her home in Los Angeles, where, at times, you'll hear her less-green-minded neighbor's leaf blower. I first met Eva through my book, Fashionopolis. And last fall, we spent time together at COP26, the climate conference in Glasgow, where she was invited by Bloomberg Green to host the European premiere of her latest movie, Burning, an unflinching look at the Black Summer, the epic Australian bushfires of 2019 and 2020.
After a celebratory dinner, we hit a classic 19th-century pub for a night cap with another female friend. While there, a local fellow walked up to the bar and ordered a pint of beer. As he waited, he asked us: "So are you here for this COP thing?" Yes, we said. "What's it all about, anyway?" he said, echoing what children's book author and artist Oliver Jeffers told me in my first episode of The Green Dream podcast–that a large swath of Glaswegians were wholly disconnected from the summit. Eva explained that it was a global meeting to figure out how to slow down climate change. "So, are you with the [expletive]? Or against the [expletive]?" he asked us. What we have bleeped is a vulgar description of female genitalia. Since I'm a woman, I said: "With." Eva, assuming he meant climate deniers, said, "Against." Our far more diplomatic friend, she said, "Yes."
Humor aside, the Black Summer was a cataclysmic event that torched 50 million acres of land, destroyed countless homes, and killed hundreds of thousands of animals, including 60,000 koalas.
Australia recently declared the koala endangered, citing the impacts of drought, bushfires and habitat loss. Some conservation groups say the action is too little, too late. In the film, Orner celebrates Greg Mullins, the former fire commissioner of New South Wales, who's been fighting fires for more than 50 years and warned Australia’s conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison of the coming catastrophe. In the film, Orner shows that Morrison ignored Mullins’ pleas and instead enacted coal-friendly policies that put the country further at risk. As one interviewee puts it: “The greatest tragedy of this terrible black summer bushfire season was that we saw it coming.”
Let’s hear an excerpt from Burning. In this clip, you'll hear climate scientist Tim Flannery, a renowned environmentalist and Australia's former chief commissioner of the Climate Commission, explaining why, in Australia, there are economic, political and social forces that are standing in the way of climate reforms. But this is not just an Australian problem–what he says is true worldwide.
"Australia is a distillation of the world's dilemma when it comes to climate change. But the story doesn't make any sense unless you understand what Australia is actually like. From its very inception, it's a country that's been reliant on fossil fuels. We're now the world's largest exporter of coal, the world's largest exporter of gas, and you hear the same thing over and over: 'If we haven't got fossil fuels, we've got nothing.'"
Dana Thomas: Eva Orner, thank you so much for joining us on the Green Dream. You're speaking to us from your home in Los Angeles:
Eva Orner: Thanks for having me.
Dana Thomas: So tell me, how did the making of Burning come about?
Eva Orner: Yeah. So, so I'm obviously Australian. You can probably tell from my accent. Despite having lived in America since 2004, I was actually home in Australia, visiting family and friends, December 2019 and January 2020, which was the absolute height of the unprecedented fires that became known as Black Summer. Um, And I just witnessed this catastrophic fire situation across the country. And Australia is a fire country, as California is a state that faces fires every year. So we're not strangers to it. But this was something that was unprecedented. We'd never seen anything like it before. The size, the scale
Dana Thomas: You were in Melbourne?
Eva Orner: I was actually all over, Victoria, country and coastal. Fires were just everywhere. And the Australian sort of public radio station is the ABC, and it was like this 24-hour emergency radio station.
We were driving, just listening to the horrors, and we had friends who lost homes and a lot of people we knew were impacted. And they say one in four Australians was ultimately impacted by the fires. By the time I left in January and came back to L.A., I was pretty determined to make a film about it. A couple of key moments that really struck me, and one of them was, December 27, 2019. I was in Melbourne, and it was 47 degrees Celsius, and I lived there for 34 years and it never got above 44 degrees. There was usually one or two hot weeks in February, it was excruciating. It was 44 degrees. And it was 47 degrees at the beginning of summer at the end of December,
Dana Thomas: Which is what in Fahrenheit? I can't even imagine. Like 110, 115, 120?
Eva Orner: It's hot.
Dana Thomas: It’s hot. It’s desert hot in the city.
Eva Orner: I was like kind of freaking out and everyone's like, Yeah, it's really hot. And the fires were everywhere. There was smoke everywhere. Everyone's kind of in that laconic Australian way going, Yeah, it's really hot, and I was like, it's like Baghdad. This is not normal. Like anecdotally, the temperature has gone up in my hometown, three degrees in my lifetime. This is wrong. And so that was something that sat with me. There was a 52-degree day recorded somewhere in Australia, like in the last couple of weeks. Clearly the temperatures getting hotter.
Dana Thomas: As Australians would say, crikey, oh my gosh!
Eva Orner: It’s bloody hot and not normal and also breaking records. Clearly, scientifically, the planet is warming up. It's science. It's not questionable anymore. So that was one thing. And then the other thing was, being in Sydney when it was just completely shrouded in smoke, which was again something that we'd never seen before. And you know, the images were seen all over the world. But to be in it and see people sort of just going about their daily business, almost getting used to the fact that they were just covered in smoke for weeks and weeks and weeks. And you know, when we got on the plane flying home, we were coughing and sneezing and our eyes were watering and it was just really shocking to me, the whole experience.
Dana Thomas: I went through that when I was in San Francisco in the fall of 2017, and they were having amazingly huge, devastating fires in Sonoma and the whole Napa wine region. And when we flew in from Los Angeles to San Francisco, you couldn't really see the city. It was just shrouded with smoke and then you broke down through and the sunset was very eerie. It was beautiful, but very eerie. It felt apocalyptic. And it looked like it was snowing, but in fact, that snow was ash. And they said to people do not go outside. And those who did had their faces wrapped not just with masks, but with towels, damp towels. So they wouldn't get smoke inhalation.
And you could just feel like there's something wrong that there are places that have fires. And as you say straight out in the movie, Australia's always been a country that's had fires. It's just that before, they were once a decade, sort of like the hurricanes slamming the East Coast, the massive, massive hurricanes, they were once a decade. Like in my childhood, there was one, and now they're almost every year. And that's what's happening with the fires in Australia, right?
Eva Orner: Yeah, absolutely. And the fire seasons are longer now. One of the key characters in the film, Greg Mullins, who was the former fire commissioner for New South Wales, who's been fighting fires for over 50 years, he’s a national hero. And he talks about how they used to reciprocate with California, the firefighters, during the American winter, they would come to Australia and assist and vice versa with Australia.
Dana Thomas: Right. Because of the hemisphere’s, it’s summer in winter and winter in summer.
Eva Orner: And not they can't do it anymore. Because of climate change, the fire seasons have become so much longer. These fires that I talk about in the film that the films about the Black Summer, they started in August, September, which is just coming out of winter. That's not normal. They used to start in sort of October, November. And it's the same in California now. The fire season is longer because it's getting hotter and drier. And so they can't even help each other anymore.
It's really, really, really catastrophic. And I just feel like people are sort of getting used to it and living with it. And, you know, towards the end of the film, we talk about how it's not just Australia, it's not just California. I mean, every summer now we're seeing the entire west coast of America burning. We're seeing the Amazon burning. Canada, we premiered the film at TIFF, Toronto Film Festival in September. And all the Q&A questions in the audience were all about the unprecedented fires in Canada, which is a cool climate country.
Dana Thomas: Now there's fires in the Arctic, right?
Eva Orner: Yeah, there's nowhere being spared. And yet we're still having governments denying the existence of climate change, and we're having a lot of trouble legislating to do something about it on a serious global level.
Dana Thomas: One of the things I found really interesting was that this hero you mentioned, the former fire commissioner, Greg Mullins, who's been fighting these fires for 50 years, he wrote to Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison in April before the fires kicked off, saying “We are in danger of an unprecedented disaster.” And he got no response.
Eva Orner: Yeah, it's pretty typical from the Australian government. I mean, unfortunately for the last few decades, Australia, I mean, look, we've had moments of respite with liberal governments but Australia's super conservative. And part of the reason that I've made a few films being very critical of the government's really draconian policies on refugees and asylum seekers and climate change is because I feel like the world thinks Australia is kind of cool and Australians are fun and laid back and you know —
Dana Thomas: — which they are.
Eva Orner: But also, I think people think we're quite progressive, but it's actually a really conservative country and going more and more that way. I mean, our current government is Trump-like, and I wanted the world to know that, and I wanted to really humiliate the government policies because we in terms of climate change, you know, we are lumped in with like Russia, India, Brazil, China, the worst climate offenders on the globe.
Australia is in that camp, and we should be leading the way in renewables. And we talk about in the film, Australia has the most natural resources. We could power the world practically just with our sun alone. Yet what we do is dig for coal endlessly and continue to do so. We're very, very, very behind.
Dana Thomas: Now did you have pushback from the government regarding your film, either while you were making it or since it's been released?
Eva Orner: No, they tend to ignore me. I've made quite a few pretty tough films on the government and on this one, no, I didn't get anything —
Dana Thomas: — but they didn't talk to you either.
Eva Orner: No, they’ll never talk to me. Scott Morrison has declined to be interviewed by me for my films several times. I don't think he'll ever talk to me.
Their performance at the COP in Glasgow was really abysmal. I mean, they just agreed to this very vague, you know, Net Zero 2050 with no plan, no legislation, just just bullshit and words, basically, when the whole world was crying out that we had to have it by 2030. They're doing kind of less than the absolute minimum required. And they keep investing in fossil fuels and coal, and the government's really in the pockets of all the lobbyists in the coal industry. It's a very corrupt situation, and the only chance really is, concerned people and the younger generation need to vote these people out. But you know, there's an election coming up in the next six months, and I put some pretty serious money on the fact that the Morrison government will get back in.
And if that's what Australia votes for, they deserve everything they get. I have zero patience anymore for people who vote in governments that just don't care about climate change. And you know, part of the message of this film is, climate change needs to be our number one voting issue now. The economy doesn't matter anymore. If we don't stop the ravages of climate change and what's happening —
Dana Thomas: — we won't have an economy, right?
Eva Order: Exactly. And so to me, I just…I cannot believe that people are more frightened by this.
Dana Thomas: The only two major issues that are going on today that we really need to worry about are germs and climate. And they're borderless, they're not political. Those are the things we need to think about and not worry about tariffs and and immigrants and all the rest of that. It's germs and climate.
Eva Order: It’s so true.
Dana Thomas: And the pandemic just proved us that. And the Black Summer.
Eva Orner: It’s so true, and we're failing at both of them because of stupidity and not listening to the science. If we listened to the science globally on COVID, we would be in a much better situation. You can see ways to make things better. When the governments all came together for the COP in Glasgow, they couldn't agree on anything. I found it quite crushing and disappointing. We talk about this in the film. I mean, I think the point of where we are now with climate change, and this is the positive to give people some hope and what gives me hope is, governments are failing us, but what is leading the way now are communities, local governments, and industry. And it's kind of surprising how much industry has, whether by goodwill or by sheer force and guilt is having to adopt —
Dana Thomas: — or fear of losing their shirts.
Eva Orner: Right, and so they have to sort of adopt fairly aggressive climate change policies with their companies, and there are so many entrepreneurs doing great work. Mike Cannon-Brookes who's in the film, he's sort of Australia's Elon Musk, but without the, you know, dickery. He’s a young billionaire, self-made, who puts a lot of money into science and solving climate change in industry. And he says it's really up to us to lead the way and ultimately government will have to follow. And I think that's what we're going to see over the next decade. We can't rely on government to legislate and combat climate change aggressively. I think we have to do it ourselves.
Dana Thomas: You grew up in Melbourne. Do you remember bushfires as a child?
Eva Orner: Yeah, it was in the 80s. The big first one I remember was Ash Wednesday. I remember the day really well. It was like, in the low 40s. It was really hot and dry and windy. I think it was in probably in February, I'm guessing, —
Dana Thomas: — which means like, more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Eva Orner: Yeah, we didn't go to school and it was a really big fire. A lot of Victoria burned, but compared to what happened in Black Summer, it was like pretty small. Everyone remembers that from their childhood or from their adult life. And every summer there are significant fires. But what happened in the Black Summer was off the charts. It was just something we'd never seen before. There were wet weather patterns we'd never seen before. The fires were so big that they sort of created this whole weather system themselves. And it was sort of unstoppable. And, you know, mega-fires merged, and it went on for months and months and months. And the scale of the damage, you see it in the film, it’s shocking. And also, the whole world watched because I think the scale of it was unprecedented, and I think that had a lot to do with it, the amount of animals that were killed. You know, people love Australia’s animals.
Dana Thomas: Absolutely. When you saw cute koalas dying and cute kangaroos dying, that that started pulling heartstrings of people around the world.
Eva Orner: Yeah, and that's also I think why, you know, we thought a global streamer would be interested in the film, because it had a global audience. And I thought, in a year from now, people are going to want to see the story of this and how it happened, and that was, again, what sort of gave me the impetus to make the film.
Dana Thomas: If you are enjoying this conversation, you’ll love my sister podcast on the Wondercast Network, Fashion Conversations with Bronwyn Cosgrave. Fashion Conversations is fashion’s equivalent to Inside the Actors Studio—an in-depth interview podcast with fashion and luxury’s leading creators that explores their craft and creative process as well as their personal journeys. Find Fashion Conversations wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women’s fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website AnotherTomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
I’m Dana Thomas and you’re listening to The Green Dream. Let’s return to our interview with Eva Orner, the award-winning documentary director of Burning, about the Australian bushfires in December 2019 and January 2020. The film is now streaming on Amazon Prime worldwide.
As you may have gathered by now, Burning can be pretty upsetting. But Orner also found a host of optimistic activists who urge us to learn from history — like those Black Summer fires and the policies that inflamed them — so such disasters are never repeated. In this clip from the film, we’ll hear from a young climate leader named Daisy Jeffery, a passionate, powerful teenage activist from Sydney, speaking at a rally and in an interview with Orner.
Daisy Jeffery: (At the rally, with cheers:) "We are on the outskirts of the biggest
catastrophe humanity has ever faced, and our government is doing nothing."
(Interview:) "It's almost like you're conducting an orchestra.
(At the rally:) "We want a safe future. Who's with me?”
(Interview:) "That crowd becomes the music, becomes the energy, and that drive, like, wave of hope. That wave just kept crashing over the crowd, like people were really excited."
Still shot of Daisy Jeffrey, from the documentary “Burning”
Dana Thomas: Now how did you get into documentary filmmaking, and most particularly, political documentary filmmaking?
Eva Orner: I've been doing it for God. I'm trying to think now. I mean, I've been doing it for over 25 years, I think, which is kind of amazing.
Dana Thomas: But what made you want to be a documentary filmmaker?
Eva Orner: I was from a pretty conservative family, and I went to a pretty conservative school. And our big options were like, be a doctor or a lawyer. Doing something creative, it wasn't even on the table, and there wasn't the internet, so you couldn't kind of research as easily. You'd go to a library and look at a 20-year-old book about careers. So I kind of fell into filmmaking at university.
Dana Thomas: Yeah, remember when we had career festivals>
Eva Orner: Yeah, sorry, guys, we sound like dinosaurs.
Dana Thomas: Or take your daughter to work so you could see what people actually did in jobs.
Eva Orner: You know, a few years ago, I found my old high school yearbook and it said under, you know, ambitions it said I wanted to write screenplays, and I was like, Where did I get that from? At like, 17, I wrote that. And I mean, I was really into movies. I was a real movie buff, and used to go to art house cinema all the time, and the documentary wasn't so on my scale. I was very interested in journalism, and I started making films with a gang of people I met at university, like really terrible films.
Dana Thomas: And that was in Melbourne?
Eva Orner: Yeah, Monash University, and I never did law. I deferred a lot. I was meant to do law, but I never did. I just did a general, you know, arts degree, and I came out and started working in horrible industrial corporate videos, and a friend and I who had gone to film school, we applied and miraculously got funding and made our first documentary. And it was the easiest funding I've ever had in my entire life. And it gave me really unrealistic expectations of how easy it would be to work in the film industry. And then after we made our first film and we were crushed with how hard it was to get funding after that.
Dana Thomas: And what was the first film?
Eva Orner: It was called “Untold desires,” and it was about people with physical disabilities and sexuality. So it was really, for it’s day, 25 years ago, it was pretty confronting and kind of raunchy, and we got all these people with physical disabilities to act out some of their sexual fantasies, like it was kind of out there, and it was really successful and it won all these awards and sold all around the world. And so it was really kind of a great start.
But we didn't really know what we were doing. We were pretty young. And then I went off and worked in television because I needed to get experience and did a lot of scripted work. But I came back to documentary, and my parents were born in 1937 in Poland. Jewish. I'm from a Holocaust fat family that did not do well. You know, out of two very big families, very few people emerged. Three of my four grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. So my parents came to Australia in the 50s, I had a really lovely upbringing, growing up in a free country with, you know, pre-climate change that was pretty comfortable and had a great education and freedom and safety and security. And I think there’s something in there.
Dana Thomas: Australia was about as far away from the Holocaust as you could get, wasn’t it?
Eva Orner: Exactly. And a lot of Eastern European Jews ended up there. It's a very small community in terms of numbers, but it's very Holocaust heavy. It was very much Poles and Hungarians came to Australia in the 50s, and I think as I got older when journalists would ask me why I do the work that I do, I kind of I sort somehow I thought I think I grew up knowing from a very young age that bad things happen to good people and that the world can be a very unjust place. You know, my parents had accents. A lot of their friends had been through the same experience. I didn't have any cousins or aunts, you know, a really small family. I just feel like something kind of stuck in me, very young. And I was always wanted to be like a voice for the underrepresented or the underdogs, or there's something in there that stuck with me. And I think with these sort of stories I tell, when I see something wrong, I feel like if I can shine a light on it, it's worth doing. I feel really lucky to be able to do that. And, you know, I'm never afraid to take on a corrupt politician. I quite enjoy that.
Dana Thomas: Now you still do produce movies, including the 2008 Best Feature Documentary Oscar winner “Taxi to the Dark Side” with Alex Gibney. Tell me a bit about that movie. What possessed you to to get involved with it, and how was it to make it? Because it’s a very difficult subject, U.S. policy on torture following 9-11, and I imagine you probably got some pushback and it was hard to make. Why did you decide to do it?
Eva Orner: Yeah. I mean, that was very much an Alex Gibney film. You know, when I when I moved to New York in 2004, I quite quickly was lucky enough to meet Alex Gibney. And he had just made his first big feature doc as a director, which was called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which got nominated for an Academy Award. And since then, he's made millions of films. He's super prolific.
I worked with him for a couple of years in New York, and we made, I think, four or five films together. And this was his idea. It was around 2005, 2006, and it was right at the height of the Bush administration, post 9-11. And you know, all that Abu Ghraib stuff came out about the torture. Guantanamo was obviously, you know, at its height, the abuse of Bagram had happened. And it just seemed like the rule of law had just been completely undermined.
I feel like almost looking back now. I mean, it was the beginning of where we are now in terms of American government going rogue. It was just very much this feeling of we have to expose this story. What's happened here is unprecedented in America and horrendous. So it was definitely tough and it was pretty much privately financed. HBO came on at the end. But it was not easy to finance, but a group of liberal, committed wealthy people put money into it and we sort of made it pretty quietly and underground, and we didn't have any pushback from government.
But it was also when we were making the film, the wire-tapping story came out where the government was wiretapping a lot of individuals who were traveling to difficult places. And it turned out that we'd been wiretapped, and our phones were being listened to. And, when we traveled, we were pretty careful about being detained and, you know, filmmakers were being detained. So it was definitely not the most comforting time. But it was really great that the film got so much exposure and accolades when it came out.
I think working with Alex really inspired me to tell the truth and go after tough stories and be fearless. Quite often when I do films, I'll send him a note and say, you know, another another film inspired by, you know, some of the work that we do together.
Dana Thomas: On “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Where did the title come from?
Eva Orner: Alex stumbled across a story about this, this Afghan taxi driver from Khost, which is in a sort of rural area of Afghanistan. And he was arrested for no reason. He was completely innocent.
Dana Thomas: He was never charged with a crime?
Eva Orner: You know, he had some stuff in the trunk of his car. Sort of bounties on everyone's head and if you brought in anyone who was suspected Taliban or anything like that after 9-11, you know, you'd get a big reward. And so this taxi driver called Dilawar ended up in Guantanamo, and then he ended up dead from being tortured by American military guards there. He was basically pummeled to death. And so it was sort of his story. And Dick Cheney used to talk about the dark side all the time and Donald Rumsfeld and we used a lot of their references.
Dana Thomas: They surely did.
Eva Orner: Yeah. So it was sort of this, you know, innocent taxi driver who got caught up in this world and ended up dead. It's a horrendous story.
Dana Thomas: Climate movies are becoming a major film genre. The first really impactful one was An Inconvenient Truth, which was seen by more than four million Americans in theaters and tens of millions more at home. Do you feel like this is an area that's going to keep growing in cinema, that we're going to see more and more films about climate change?
Eva Orner: I mean, I hope so. I'm aware that it's not the easiest sell in the world. And I think, you know, particularly coming out of COVID, I was super aware that we had to give the audience some hope, which is why, you know, I think the third act of the film is really about the future and the things that we can do to combat this and to win this war, essentially. These films are always tough, but there's a growing audience. The key to making these films palatable is giving them a good story and good characters. And so I think that's really important. I mean, I think what we're seeing in the minute, the film Don't Look Up that Adam McKay just made on Netflix.
Dana Thomas: Let's stop here for a sec and explain Don’t Look Up. It’s an Oscar-nominated, star-packed satire about how a meteor is going to wipe out Earth, but the meteor is actually a metaphor for climate change.
Eva Orner: Yeah, it's really controversial, because a lot of people really hate it and a lot of people love it. And it's the second highest watched film ever on Netflix. So to me, that is a win. But I think at the end of the day, if you want to make change, you just have to scream and shout about issues. You know, you've just got to keep pushing and pushing and try and get people to engage and talk about the issue and whether it's books or podcasts or films, it’s so important.
Dana Thomas: And I think that we need to show that documentary and play our podcast for your neighbor with the leaf blower. Thank you so much, Eva, for being on the Green Dream. Here's to making the world a better, greener place.
Eva Orner: Thank you so much.
Dana Thomas: New episodes of the Green Dream come out the first and third Tuesday of the month. This episode of the Green Dream was sponsored by the sustainable fashion brand Another Tomorrow. Written by Dana Thomas, recorded by Alfie Thompson of Heavy Entertainment, from Talkbox Productions with executive producer Tavila Gilbert, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Tennessee. The Green Dream is a production of Wondercast Studio in association with Mortimer House. You can find us online at wondercast.studio through your smart speaker on Wondercast Radio. I’m Dana Thomas, the European sustainability editor for British Vogue. You can read my monthly column, also called The Green Dream, in the magazine or online at Vogue.co.uk. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter where my handle for both is @DanaThomasParis. Thank you for listening.
