Hope Grows Greener...

If you are deeply concerned with the swiftly changing state of the earth's ecosystems and how, as humans, we can adapt our way of living to become more sustainable (less taxing and toxic), you are not alone.

I began writing Future Weather in 2006. I had just read a series of New Yorker articles by climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert. (You can now find them in her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe.) They were brilliant (check out Elizabeth on Grist) but also terrifying and heartbreaking, and they started to affect me.

At the same time a screenplay idea was beginning to gestate… something about a nerdy, misanthropic little girl in a codependent relationship with her former majorette, make-up-artist-wannabe mother. The girls' name is Laduree… (an amalgam of faux-french and cosmetics-counterese). I knew she lived in the country and had a green thumb. I knew her mother ran away from home. So I made an intuitive leap. What if global warming was something that Laduree was also concerned with, from her sheltered vantage point living in a mobile home in the middle of nowheresville?

I wanted to study this complicated environmental issue through the lens of a family drama and make a film that will get people, specifically Americans, to connect with it on a personal level. Maybe even engage in some dialogue about it and the issues it collides with. What is your relationship to the natural world? What happens to the impulse to reproduce when you're faced with the knowledge that thirty years from now, the world will be a vastly different place due to climate change? What do you say to children who live in fear of an unknowable future? In essence, how will we have to evolve to survive such fragile times?

Kind of heavy. But people continue to tell me that these are their concerns, too, so I don't think I'm alone in asking.

You might be wondering what the point of this blog is. Aren't you trying to make a movie? A resounding yes. But I also want to figure out how to run our upcoming production as sustainably as possible. We've got to change the way we live and work, and it's so much less daunting to do it as a community. I also need a way to stay creative while I track down funding. And a way to connect with people. Trying to get a film off the ground can be incredibly lonely. In short, it's time to get Future Weather out of the house. So we got her on the internet.

Talk to us. We have a gajillion entertaining green stories and guest bloggers planned for the coming months, but we want to cover the questions, conundrums and limitations that you face, too. We hope this becomes a forum and a resource not just for green filmmakers, but for anyone who wants to make a difference but sometimes feels overwhelmed by it all. So write to us if you'd like to contribute, or check back frequently and share it with your friends.