Countdown to Zero traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs: nine nations possessing nuclear weapons capabilities with others racing to join them, leaving the world held in a delicate balance that could be shattered by an act of terrorism, failed diplomacy, or a simple accident. The film features an array of important international statesmen, including President Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pervez Musharraf and Tony Blair, and makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament; an issue more topical than ever with the Obama administration working to revive this goal in the present day.
Countdown to Zero premiered at Sundance and played at Cannes. The film was produced by Participant and distributed by Magnolia Pictures.
Here’s the trailer:
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
* Official Selection, Festival de Cannes 2010
* Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Seattle International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Deauville American Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Gent International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Tokyo International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Stockholm International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Moscow Film Festival 2011
* Nominee, Best Documentary, International Press Academy Satellite Film Awards 2010
* Nominee, International Green Film Award, Cinema For Peace Awards 2011
* Nominee, Arms Control Person(s) of the Year, Writer-Director Lucy Walker and her collaborators on COUNTDOWN TO ZERO, Arms Control Association 2010
DIRECTOR Q&A
This Q&A formed part of the COUNTDOWN TO ZERO’s press notes at the time of its release in 2010.
Q: What motivated you to make this film?
"Since the advent of the Nuclear Age, everything has changed save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe”, wrote Einstein. My motivation is to shake up these modes of thinking to stop this drift towards that unparalleled catastrophe.
With a nod to DR STRANGELOVE (a movie which I am so glad we are able to license and include), my motivation was to make a movie that you could subtitle "How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate The Bomb".
Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the US atomic bomb program, said in 1947: "I have been asked whether in the years to come would it be possible to kill 40 million American people in 20 largest towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night. I am afraid the answer to that question is yes. I have been asked if there are specific countermeasures to the atomic bomb. I know that the bombs we make in Los Alamos can not be exploded by such countermeasures. I have been asked if there is hope for the nation's security in keeping secret some of the knowledge which has gone in making the bombs. I am afraid there is no such hope. The only hope for our future safety must lie in a collaboration based on confidence and good faith with the other peoples of the world." I hope that this movie can serve such a collaboration.
Q: Was there a specific precipitant for your action?
‘Nuclear terrorism is a matter of when, not if’ – I just couldn't get that sentence out of my head.
It was 2002, and my first feature documentary, DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, about Amish teenagers, was coming out, and there was an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine about one of the subjects of my film struggling to decide whether or not he should be Amish. I was reading that story – and then the cover story of that same magazine was about a nuclear bomb being detonated in Times Square in New York City, where I was living at the time. And I was thinking – what’s the question? Let’s all join the Amish! We’d better all get out of New York right now, if a nuclear bomb was detonated here, we don’t want to stick around! It was the scariest thing I’ve ever read, to be told on exactly which blocks you would be vaporized, or burned to death, or smashed to bits, even in the boroughs you’d still be killed from blast and fallout could kill people all the way up to Boston, with a large enough warhead and the right prevailing winds.
The timeliness and urgency of the nuclear weapons issue can not be overstated.
Because as we look into the future, the scenarios only get scarier. Here are some maybe more far-fetched, but not impossible, scenarios that keep me awake at night: what if terrorists hacked the hundreds of Russian warheads that are poised for launch (still!) within one minute, and are all pointed at the USA? What if non-state actors started enriching their own uranium, and could make unlimited quantities of bombs? What if Al Qaeda got a hold of the Pakistani arsenal (of around a hundred warheads), and threatened to use them against the major cities in the world? For that matter, what if a single nuclear bomb was stolen by a terrorist organization - would you ever want to live in a city again? New research, by Alan Robock at Rutgers, shows that even a “modest” (by Cold War standards) exchange of fifty bombs would be enough to wipe out life on the planet – he uses new climate change models to factor in for the soot effect of mega cities being exploded.
The time to put the lid on this issue is right now, because once the genie has left the bottle, we can’t put it back. For various political and technical reasons, we are now at the last point where it is going to be possible to control the spread of nuclear weapons materials and technology.
Therefore this could not be a more timely issue, and I jumped into it with both feet the moment that the opportunity presented itself, when Courtney Sexton from Participant called me up and asked if I was interested in nuclear weapons.
Q: Did Obama’s speech to the UN Security Council affect your direction?
I am very impressed by the current president, and his thinking as regards nuclear weapons happen to chime perfectly with my own views, and the arguments of the movie. His policies on the nuclear weapons issue has been consistent and brilliant; we hope they'll be fulfilled.
Q: Do you see COUNTDOWN as a call to action?
Yes, and the clock is ticking.
In 2007 escalating dangers posed by nuclear weapons caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction – the figurative midnight. The last time the clock indicated such dread cause for alarm was 1984, when US-Soviet relations had reached their iciest point in decades.
Long gone are the decades of dread and popular protest movements that culminated in the 1980s ("The Day After", the Nuclear Freeze movement, the widespread discussions along the lines of "we're going to be nuked imminently, and even if we have a nuclear shelter we'd need to shoot our neighbors to keep them out of it, and we'd be better off just killing ourselves anyway, because either we'd die slowly of radiation sickness, or the planet would be so destroyed that life wouldn't be worth living"). The current zeitgeist feels more like "the bomb hasn't gone off in 65 years, so I don't have to worry about it".
It’s not that anyone likes nuclear weapons. the public is more pro-disarmament than ever before: in a recent poll 82% of Americans now favor elimination. But people wrongly assume that nuclear deterrence must work, or that popular protest efforts are a waste of energy and don’t result in policy change, or that climate change is the only thing that threatens our species and planet, or the problem has gone away as nuclear warheads must have disappeared along with the Cold War.
Unfortunately all these assumptions couldn't be farther from the truth – but people don't know the truth. A 2004 poll found that the average American thought that the U.S. nuclear stockpile, which then numbered more than 10,000 weapons, consisted of only 200. The media doesn’t help: concentrating on the tight, repetitive questions of WMD in Iraq rather than elucidating the global context of the weakening nonproliferation treaties that provide for weapons inspections, or investigating the tough issues surrounding the actual presence of WMD in Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and Israel.
Q: What do you hope it will accomplish?
I believe that nuclear weapons need to be eliminated globally, and that this film is part of this effort to make this happen before the world suffers a nuclear catastrophe. So my modest goal is quite literally to help save the world!
Q: Realistically, what can the average citizen do?
Realistically, I believe average citizens can and need to do anything they put their minds to. And I believe that all the brilliant work that so many people have contributed to prevent nuclear catastrophe - whether that is government agents securing loose nuclear materials, or mothers protesting the arms race, or politicians pushing progressive agendas – is paying off, the time is now ripening when this problem will be solved once and for all, and work must be continued.
The current US administration's policy is to work for a nuclear weapons free world. This is our only hope, this is a good part of the reason why President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and average citizens can and should be getting behind it immediately.
Q: Could you briefly address the three basic areas of concern raised in the film:
1. Rogue states making the bomb
If we don’t want other countries to have the bomb, how can we justify keeping it ourselves? It’s no good to reminisce about the old cold war scenario in which there was a nuclear club of five nuclear weapons states, and the posture of mutually assured destruction (MAD) kept things under control. The nonproliferation regime is failing, and I believe we are at the tipping point. If Iran gets the bomb, how many other states will follow? We have only two choices: a world in which nobody has nuclear weapons, or a world with rogue states and even non-state actors having them. Which would you prefer to live in?
2. Terrorists making the bomb
Every step that is necessary for terrorists to make a bomb not only could happen, but it has already happened. Just not all in one sequence… that we know of… yet. Terrorists do have the intent, they have recruited nuclear scientists, they have tried to buy nuclear materials, and smugglers have sold nuclear materials to terrorists… it seems as if all these steps haven’t yet connected into a continuous chain of events that results in an actual terrorist nuclear attack. But what’s to stop that happening? And don’t we want to do everything possible to prevent it? And if terrorists get the bomb, us having one will not help us. Terrorists are not bound by treaties and they cannot be retaliated against. They have no return address.
3. Human error setting off the bomb
I was fascinated to read Scott Sagan's book "The Limits of Safety" and articles about what he calls "the problem of redundancy problem"... I couldn't believe that more work was not being done, or being more widely disseminated, on the risks of nuclear accidents. It was fascinating to me that you could have theories about something as, well, accidental, as accidents. And then Bruce Blair started telling me his anecdotes about launch codes being misplaced or sent to the dry cleaners, or set to all zeroes, and I wanted people to understand that human fallibility does not cease to apply because the consequences are so grave. The possibility of an accident or error can never be zero. And if the risk isn’t zero, as time goes on, something terrible will eventually happen. That is a statistical fact.
Q: Why did you conceive this as a theatrical documentary instead of an offering on PBS or one of the cable networks?
There is nothing small-screen about the colossal scale of a nuclear weapon, which can destroy an entire city. I think of this as a non-fiction horror movie about the single most immediate threat facing humanity, and I want it to have the biggest impact imaginable.
Q; Why do you believe people will pay to see this film? What do you think your target audience will be? Age range? Psychographic? Do you think this will appeal to faith-based audiences?
I hope the film will serve as a primer for everyone to feel confident that they have a firm grasp of all the salient aspects of this critical issue. Something that I thought that other Participant doc AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH achieved so brilliantly was that everyone who watched it was given a solid, confident grasp of the subject. And was totally convinced of the reality of climate change.
I hope that younger people will get to grips with an issue that hasn't been sufficiently discussed in recent years, and that older people will be able to reconnect with an issue they felt very strongly about during the Cold War, and know hasn't gone away, but haven't had an opportunity to engage with recently.
Nuclear weapons are a moral and religious issue because of the scale of the devastation they cause. They are inevitably an instrument of mass murder. I was heartened that so many religious leaders supported the film and appear in it – for example the brilliant Richard Cizik.
Q: Do you think there will ever be an opportunity for this film to be shown to representatives from countries such as North Korea or Iran , countries that have not yet signed non-proliferation pacts?
North Korea is not an easy place to arrange screenings of one's political movie in! And I have no plans to sneak around the DMZ with DVDs in my pockets, that's for sure. But we are fortunate in having the best team imaginable to get the film shown as widely as possible.
This film needs to be seen and discussed as widely as possible, as soon as possible.
Q: You have interviewed at least a dozen subjects for COUNTDOWN? How did you secure their participation? Why did you choose these particular individuals?
A lot more than a dozen! I interviewed eighty-four people, from Dick Garwin, who developed the first hydrogen device (although he did not get the credit) as a twenty-year-old PhD candidate from Fermi's lab while on a summer internship at Los Alamos ; to Frits Veerman, AQ Khan's best friend, who noticed that he was spying and tried to alert his bosses at the uranium enrichment facility in the Netherlands in the mid 1970s. I even conducted several phone interviews with AQ Khan himself: his opening line was "Madam, are you looking for a villain for your movie?". He's no fool, unfortunately. We've got a lot of material for DVD extras!
For research and development, I met with or spoke with with over a hundred additional experts and trawled through hundreds of books and articles, and sifted an incalculable deluge of information and attended conferences all over the world in order to bring you the most interesting voices with the most important points across the whole subject area.
Q: Were there people you wanted to include who turned you down? Why aren’t the other three living past Presidents (Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2) and/or their policies on nuclear arms represented here?
We had to cover a lot of ground, and wanted to include only the most urgent and vital information – and the policies of those previous three Presidents didn't make the cut.
The good news is that President Obama's policies on nuclear weapons are bold and brilliant, and happen to chime exactly with the point of view of the film, and I hope that this movie will help educate the public so that they see how he came to arrive at his policies.
The more I came to understand about terrorism and proliferation, the more I understood that even for people who thought that nuclear weapons were a useful deterrent during the cold war, should recognize that we are now at that point where it is more dangerous to have nuclear weapons than to eliminate them. Now is the critical moment, and currently we have a president who is listening to the experts and responding with the leadership that our times demand.
One person – and a President at that - who I wish we could have included, but has sadly passed away of course, is President Reagan. I am fascinated by the 1986 Reykjavik summit, when Reagan (supposedly freaked out by the 1983 TV Movie THE DAY AFTER) and Gorbachev (alarmed by Chernobyl, and hoping to free up some cash for his economic reforms) went against their advisors to propose all-out abolition. They may not have succeeded – although it did succeed in turning the arms race around - but to me this demonstrates that it took only the political will of two leaders to slice through any amount of bureaucracy, inertia, fear and opposition. That’s something for President Obama to think about right now, if you ask me.
Back in 1986, apparently Reagan had said "it would be fine with [me] if we eliminated all nuclear weapons." And Gorbachev responded, "We can do that. We can eliminate them." And at this point, the normally sober, impassive Shultz burst out, "Let's do it!" The conversation continued, as was transcribed in recently declassified official memos of comments, with Reagan saying that “Ten years from now, when President Reagan would be a very old man, he and Gorbachev would come to Iceland and each of them would bring the last nuclear missile from each country with them. And they would give a tremendous party for the whole world. He would be very old by then, and Gorbachev would not recognize him. So he would say, “Hello, Mikhail”. And Gorbachev would say “Ron, is that you?”. And then they would destroy the last missiles”.
I may not be starstruck, but I am sometimes awestruck by where my work takes me. And to find myself discussing Reykjavik with some of those who were there – Shevardnadze (who claims the whole idea was his) and Gorbachev – blows my mind. And I’m just sad that President Reagan isn’t around for his “tremendous party for the whole world” – but I hope that we will be.
Q: Was securing your spokespersons a collective effort (e.g. Walker, Bender and Participant)? Who did the actual interviewing? Were there questions about things you really wanted to know that did not get answered?
Yes, securing interviews was most certainly a team effort in which we used all our collective resources and relationships – myself, the producer Lawrence Bender, Participant, and also Matt Brown and Bruce Blair of Global Zero.
I did the actual interviewing myself – it's a part of the process that I enjoy, and in this movie it was particularly challenging. Nobody is going to say anything candid or private about nuclear weapons: it's the most clandestine, sensitive, confidential subject I can think of.
Some of the leaders gave us only very short interviews, so it was a challenge to get more than a couple of basic questions answered, and some folks also vetoed certain topics – for example former President Musharraf did not want to talk about AQ Khan, as a condition of granting the interview.
The interview I conducted with Secretary Robert McNamara was a very emotional one as it was clear to us all that this was going to be his last interview. He was obviously aging, but he was wagging his finger at me, determined to make his point heard, that nations would be destroyed if we did not destroy nuclear weapons.
Q: Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute is one of your interview subjects, and he’s also an executive producer. What roles did he play in this project, e.g. making introductions, vetting information, etc. Were other non-proliferation organizations of service?
Bruce Blair and Matt Brown of Global Zero were both a tremendous source of information and inspiration in all aspects of making the film.
I realized about half-way through making the film that Bruce was important to have on-screen and not just off-screen, because he was a unique spokesman in his field of expertise. As a former launch control officer, he had seen command-and-control weaknesses first-hand, and then awakened to the dangers he'd witnessed, he'd done the best research on the terrifying dangers of launch-on warning. It blows my mind that the US and Russia still have as many as three thousand warheads poised on hair-trigger alert for launch on warning. As Bruce says, they don’t call them Minutemen for nothing. This is exactly what Einstein was warning us about when he says that we are drifting towards catastrophe because nobody has changed their modes of thinking.
Many, many, many other organizations were of tremendous service. RAND, the IAEA, the CTBTO, the FAS, the NRDC, the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security… so many people we can’t thank enough… and we owe a special debt of thanks to Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund, who is as wonderful off-camera as he is on-camera.
Q: Did you travel to your interview subjects or did they come to you? e.g. Did you do Tony Blair in the UK , Gorbachev in Russia, Musharraf in Pakistan ?
Mostly I had to travel to interview subjects, unfortunately (I say unfortunately because I am conscious of the climate consequences of long-haul travel).
If I never travel again anywhere, it will be too much travel too soon :0) It may sound exciting going to all these places, but carrying the equipment myself, pleading with excess baggage handlers, dealing with the nuclear weapons establishment, and working so hard for so long on such an unyielding subject was the most depleting experience imaginable. At this point my idea of a good time is staying home and watching paint dry. And I don’t recommend spending the entire Christmas season working outside with the NYPD counter-terrorism unit, culminating in New Years filming in ten degrees and snow til four in the morning in the middle of Times Square, trying not to lose any of the equipment that you are carrying as you battle through the crowds and realize there's not a chance of getting to a bathroom – oh, the glamour of filmmaking!
Q: Did you go to Georgia to interview the chief investigator of the Georgia Anti-Smuggling Division and Khinsagov?
I did indeed go to Georgia – to both Georgias! I like to joke that I went everywhere from Georgia the country (to investigate nuclear smuggling in Tblisi and all around the borders with Russia and Azerbaijan and the Black Sea) to Georgia the state (to interview President Carter in Atlanta) to make this movie.
Probably the biggest journalistic coup in the movie is the first and only interview with Oleg Khinsagov, which took a serious amount of networking in Tblisi! I spent nights out drinking with government ministers and senior policemen to secure the support of the Interior Ministry in order to get access to Oleg Khinsagov, who is a real life nuclear smuggler. He actually had weapons-grade bomb material, and he actually sold it to a man he thought was Al Qaeda (even though it turned out to be a sting operation, and the buyer was an undercover cop).
When I was interviewing Oleg, I had a chilling feeling that it may have been a bit like interviewing Mohammed Atta before the 9/11 attacks (which I witnessed from my apartment in downtown New York, and which had killed friends of mine). Here was somebody who was actively trying to sell nuclear weapons material to terrorists who whose stated goal was to kill four million Americans using a nuclear device. The undercover cop introduced himself to Oleg as “a muslim man from a serious organization” – in other words, Oleg thought he was selling bom-grade material to Al Qaeda. In the interview, Oleg told me that when he watched the twin towers fall on TV he had celebrated, and he talked excitedly about how "nine grams can bring down the elephant" – meaning that a tiny amount of nuclear material could bring down the entire United States. And that was his goal. I am generally the most compassionate interviewer, and try to always put myself in the shoes of anyone I interview, in order to best bring out their most intimate and heartfelt views and experiences for the camera, and it was really, really, really hard to nod along as I listened to this.
The good guy in this story, at the opposite extreme of the evildoer-hero spectrum, is the top cop of Georgia's radioactive smuggling unit. I couldn't believe how smart, effective, and helpful he was – it blows my mind that people so talented are so generous as to put their lives at risk to keep the rest of the world safe, and nobody ever even hears about them, much less thanks them. If it wasn't for this genius Georgian cop and his team, there would, without doubt, be a whole lot of materials for nuclear and dirty bombs on the black market around the world.
I feel the same way about the folks I met who run the US Department of Energy programs to secure loose nukes and secure ports and borders worldwide from nuclear smuggling. It's the toughest and most important job in the world, and I can't say enough good things about these folks like Dave Huizinga and Igor Bolshinsky and Tracy Mustin, who are my absolute personal heroes. And not only do they serve us all so selflessly, they let me film, too!
Q: How about the Luch Uranium Enrichment Facility? Did you speak with the guy who explained his ongoing theft of HEU as “I just needed a new refrigerator”?
I believe this question refers to some archival material. We didn't shoot it, we licensed it.
Q: Did you have problems with security, cooperation and/or red tape? Where? Anecdotes are welcomed.
I am grateful for the generous co-operation of the Department of Energy, who are in charge of the US nuclear weapons (not the Dept of Defense, as a lot of people might assume). Meantime the Department of Defense took a year to even acknowledge our request, and a lot of people seem to think that it's better for audiences to be totally ignorant.... I disagree!
Of course we had a lot of fun and games with permIssions. An awful lot of "no"s. There were ten days of cooling our heels – or not – at the un-air-conditioned Pakistani consulate, dressed from head-to-toe and head covered, in a heatwave in August in Dubai with temperatures of 120 degrees, drinking hot tea and trying to secure our Pakistani visas, after President Musharraf was impeached on the eve of our scheduled trip to Pakistan, when we were already most of the way to Islamabad, stopped over in Dubai. Eventually we secured an interview with President Musharraf, but months later, when he was in London. And as for Dubai, let's just say I'm not sure I'd accept an invitation from the Dubai film festival, no matter how fabulous its reputation, it wasn't the most rewarding period of my life. The DP valiantly shot b-roll - this was, after all, the port town where parts for the AQ Khan network were shipped through – and as he’d say "wait, I think I see a good shot, over there" and we trudged towards it, sweating like I didn't believe was possible, I was wondering whether he was really seeing a shot or it was just a shimmering mirage in the outrageous desert heat. Turns out the dailies were awesome and he not only saw a shot, he could get it.
And then all the hard work paid off in the most magnificent breakthroughs. Like when I finally got the email from Gorbachev's aide Pavel Palazhchenko granting me an interview date, I forwarded the email to the team and realized that it was the longest email chain I'd ever seen, dozens of pages long – I'd been pursuing him for over eighteen months, and had met him twice already without being allowed to film, and finally that persistence paid off with a phenomenal interview.
FILMMAKING
Q: How did you try to balance the tremendous amount of information you needed to convey with the mandate to create a theatrical experience?
That was the challenge! My friends PanOptic did a beautiful job with the graphics and animation, and my hat is off to the cinematographers who made the film look so good.
How long was the shoot? In how many locations? How much time did you spend on average with each interview subject? How many questions did you have to ask before getting the answers you wanted to hear/use?
We were shooting for over a year, but only sporadically. Often our interviews were very short, sometimes as short as twenty minutes, particularly with the VIPs. Long interviews are much easier for warming people up and covering a lot of ground, so this was an excellent challenge for my interview skills to prioritize the questions and deliver candid exclusive insights on sensitive topics in very limited windows of time. I really enjoyed the challenge and am very proud of the interviews we secured and conducted.
And it’s lucky I’m not starstruck, because our list of interviewees is like the list of the masters of the universe! Former leaders included President Carter, President Gorbachev, former President De Klerk, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, former President Shevardnadze, former President Musharraf… etc etc etc.
Q: How many people were on the crew for these interviews (and please give job descriptions)?
The entire team comprised cinematographer and myself (I recorded the sound msyelf). So the filming crew is ultra-pared-down, and only occasionally would we even have a third pair of hands to round out the team to meet the needs of a particular situation. I find it so effective and efficient to work in a team of just one other person and myself.
Q: You have four cinematographers – did you pick them up on an “as needed” basis due to the sporadic nature of your schedule?
The nature of our subject, which had to accommodate the schedules of world leader interviews and nuclear facilities clearances, made for the most sporadic and peripatetic shoot imaginable. We were shooting an hour here (with "here" meaning, say, in Washington DC), and an hour there (say, in Moscow) for over a year. It was a line producer's worst nightmare – fortunately we had Co-Producer Lisa Remington in charge, who did a spectacular job.
Q: Was this also the case with sound recordists?
I recorded almost all of the sound myself, which I prefer for three extremely important reasons: it reduces our budget; it makes for a more intimate shoot; and, given all the travel involved, it reduces our carbon footprint.
Q: Are any of these people regulars on your production team?
I hope to work with all these wonderful DPs again, but this was the first time with all of them (note: I'm actually not sure who is credited – if Aaron Phillips is one of those credited, he is a regular for me, I've worked with him on a ton of productions – everyone else it's the first time but not the last time I'll be working with them). Again, I recorded sound myself, for the most part. The genius animation/design team, PanOptic, are old pals from when I lived in New York, and have worked on many of my films, so they are regulars.
Q: Did you have a second unit?
Not really – a small number of pick-ups were shot without me, but I probably wouldn't describe it as a second unit.
Q: Assuming the budget cannot be disclosed, could you ballpark the percentage of overall dollars spent on the actual filming of interviews (including crew salaries, equipment rental, travel and accommodations), vs. licensing of footage.
Those are actually quite complicated calculations... which I don't know and I couldn't even guess the answers to... but I can say I always strive to stretch the budget by being supremely frugal with filming costs, which meant that we bought and then re-sold the equipment, minimized the crew to just one DP and myself (recording sound, organizing our travel, doing research, writing the questions, and conducting interviews etc myself), we generally did not stay in hotels but instead stayed with my friends for free (friends such as the musician Moby and fellow filmmakers Jess Search and Tanya Selvaratnam were particularly generous in loaning their apartments for weeks).
Q: How much time did it take to research and prepare this film?
The research was a massive amount of work, given the nature of the subject – which couldn’t be more technical, broad, complicated, sensitive and classified!
I literally can’t imagine a bigger research job. I needed to make myself expert in the history, science, and politics of these weapons – from understanding North Korea, to following developments in Iran, to tracking down nuclear smugglers in Tblisi, to understanding the physics of fissile materials, to grasping policy arguments… so forgive me if I ever get mixed up on a detail... I can't imagine a subject that requires more research to grasp and master and communicate!
I was very grateful for many wonderful conversations and conference introductions and reading suggestions from so many people in the world of nuclear weapons, from the Department of Energy to the IAEA to nuclear weapons labs scientists to anti-nuclear activists to retired generals, even the real inventor of the hydrogen bomb – everyone helped sharpen my thinking and point me to the most urgent points.
Q: Who wrote the pitch/presentation that led to Participant’s underwriting the film? Who, if anyone, will get a screenplay credit?
I did, and I believe that I will.
Q: Were you countlessly revising as world events changed around you?
This issue is on the front page of newspapers around the world every day. Iran's uranium enrichment program, the bombing of the Syrian reactor, Gaddaffi's decision to give us the Libyan program, negotiations in North Korea, the Talibanization of the Pakistani military, President Obama's policies and speeches, court cases related to the AQ Khan network in Switzerland, the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan, incidents such as the six nuclear warheads mistakenly flown on a B-52 bomber from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., in August 2007, treaties with India, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ratification...
... not a day goes by that the news doesn't tell me that this movie could not be more important or more timely!
On the other hand, we knew we couldn't be merely "newsy" as we can't compete with the news cycle, and a movie deserves a long shelf life. I know that I still get a great deal out of older movies about nuclear weapons from DR STANGEGLOVE to THE DAY AFTER, THREADS, WHEN THE WIND BLOWS, DARK CIRCLE... so much great work and more. So it was about sifting every piece of information to give audiences the tools to understand the news events as they continue to unfold. For example the role of gas centrifuge enrichment of uranium – what it is, how it can be used to enrich uranium for either nuclear weapons or nuclear energy purposes, and why it is the game-changer for proliferation – helps us to understand the news that is coming out of Iran every day.
The really bad news is that all the research that I've done and all the conclusions that I've drawn have only ever been borne out by unfolding events. Everything seems to be happening exactly as I've learned that it will. It makes me truly afraid that the worst fears that so many experts share – as regards nuclear terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear accidents – will also come true.
Something that happened during production was that our local "fixer" in Pakistan would not let us stay at the Islamabad Marriott, specifically because this hotel was a potential target for terrorist attacks. This seemed a little paranoid to me, especially since Islamabad had famously scarcely been touched by terrorist attacks, but I always value expert advice, so we booked our stay at a different hotel. Then the next month came the terrible terrorist attack on the Islamabad Marriott, the very hotel that we'd been warned was risky.
As I read about the attack I wasn't only horrified about this particular attack, but it also reminded me that sometimes the things that experts warn you about do come to pass. And having spent over two years immersed in learning about nuclear weapons, there’s a lot to think about.
In the January 5, 2008 Democratic Debate in New Hampshire, the top nuclear experts predicted that there’s a 30% chance that America’s current president will have to deal with a nuclear attack on an American city. Graham Allison (Professor and founding Dean of Harvard’s School of Govt, special advisor to the secretary of defense under President Reagan, assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton) says that this risk is over 50%. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans offers us no encouragement that the impact of a nuclear explosion in a U.S. city would be met with a swift, effective, prepared response. And radiation is a lot harder to clean up than water.
Q: Start to finish (lock picture), how much time did you devote to this project?
I started talking to Participant and Lawrence Bender in October 2007, and the world premiere is January 2010.
Q: What’s next?
Perhaps "next" is the wrong word, since it is premiering the day before, but I directed a second feature documentary entitled WASTE LAND that is also making its world premiere at Sundance 2010 and then going on to the Berlin film festival. Launching these two will keep me out of trouble for a while, and I also have some new projects, but these are top secret!
Q: Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
It is a privilege to be working with a company like Participant that is not only making the best movies on the world's most important topics, but is also working through the most cutting edge media strategies, outreach campaigns and the website takepart.com to maximize the movie's impact.
As with so many of the brilliant scientists involved with the development of nuclear weapons, Einstein recognized their dangers and admitted that “I made one great mistake in my life... when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made". It’s time to correct this mistake. And I believe Einstein himself would come see the movie and salute our whole team for taking an active part in the struggle to change our modes of thinking and thus to avert a nuclear catastrophe.
Interviewees include
Tony Blair
Jimmy Carter
Mikail Gorbachev
Henry Kissinger
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Fredrik Willem de Klerk
James Baker, III
Frank von Hippel
Abdul Qadeer Khan
Valerie Plame Wilson
Countdown to Zero premiered at Sundance and played at Cannes. The film was produced by Participant and distributed by Magnolia Pictures.
Here’s the trailer:
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
* Official Selection, Festival de Cannes 2010
* Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Seattle International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Deauville American Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Gent International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Tokyo International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Stockholm International Film Festival 2010
* Official Selection, Moscow Film Festival 2011
* Nominee, Best Documentary, International Press Academy Satellite Film Awards 2010
* Nominee, International Green Film Award, Cinema For Peace Awards 2011
* Nominee, Arms Control Person(s) of the Year, Writer-Director Lucy Walker and her collaborators on COUNTDOWN TO ZERO, Arms Control Association 2010
DIRECTOR Q&A
This Q&A formed part of the COUNTDOWN TO ZERO’s press notes at the time of its release in 2010.
Q: What motivated you to make this film?
"Since the advent of the Nuclear Age, everything has changed save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe”, wrote Einstein. My motivation is to shake up these modes of thinking to stop this drift towards that unparalleled catastrophe.
With a nod to DR STRANGELOVE (a movie which I am so glad we are able to license and include), my motivation was to make a movie that you could subtitle "How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate The Bomb".
Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the US atomic bomb program, said in 1947: "I have been asked whether in the years to come would it be possible to kill 40 million American people in 20 largest towns by the use of atomic bombs in a single night. I am afraid the answer to that question is yes. I have been asked if there are specific countermeasures to the atomic bomb. I know that the bombs we make in Los Alamos can not be exploded by such countermeasures. I have been asked if there is hope for the nation's security in keeping secret some of the knowledge which has gone in making the bombs. I am afraid there is no such hope. The only hope for our future safety must lie in a collaboration based on confidence and good faith with the other peoples of the world." I hope that this movie can serve such a collaboration.
Q: Was there a specific precipitant for your action?
‘Nuclear terrorism is a matter of when, not if’ – I just couldn't get that sentence out of my head.
It was 2002, and my first feature documentary, DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, about Amish teenagers, was coming out, and there was an article in the New York Times Sunday magazine about one of the subjects of my film struggling to decide whether or not he should be Amish. I was reading that story – and then the cover story of that same magazine was about a nuclear bomb being detonated in Times Square in New York City, where I was living at the time. And I was thinking – what’s the question? Let’s all join the Amish! We’d better all get out of New York right now, if a nuclear bomb was detonated here, we don’t want to stick around! It was the scariest thing I’ve ever read, to be told on exactly which blocks you would be vaporized, or burned to death, or smashed to bits, even in the boroughs you’d still be killed from blast and fallout could kill people all the way up to Boston, with a large enough warhead and the right prevailing winds.
The timeliness and urgency of the nuclear weapons issue can not be overstated.
Because as we look into the future, the scenarios only get scarier. Here are some maybe more far-fetched, but not impossible, scenarios that keep me awake at night: what if terrorists hacked the hundreds of Russian warheads that are poised for launch (still!) within one minute, and are all pointed at the USA? What if non-state actors started enriching their own uranium, and could make unlimited quantities of bombs? What if Al Qaeda got a hold of the Pakistani arsenal (of around a hundred warheads), and threatened to use them against the major cities in the world? For that matter, what if a single nuclear bomb was stolen by a terrorist organization - would you ever want to live in a city again? New research, by Alan Robock at Rutgers, shows that even a “modest” (by Cold War standards) exchange of fifty bombs would be enough to wipe out life on the planet – he uses new climate change models to factor in for the soot effect of mega cities being exploded.
The time to put the lid on this issue is right now, because once the genie has left the bottle, we can’t put it back. For various political and technical reasons, we are now at the last point where it is going to be possible to control the spread of nuclear weapons materials and technology.
Therefore this could not be a more timely issue, and I jumped into it with both feet the moment that the opportunity presented itself, when Courtney Sexton from Participant called me up and asked if I was interested in nuclear weapons.
Q: Did Obama’s speech to the UN Security Council affect your direction?
I am very impressed by the current president, and his thinking as regards nuclear weapons happen to chime perfectly with my own views, and the arguments of the movie. His policies on the nuclear weapons issue has been consistent and brilliant; we hope they'll be fulfilled.
Q: Do you see COUNTDOWN as a call to action?
Yes, and the clock is ticking.
In 2007 escalating dangers posed by nuclear weapons caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction – the figurative midnight. The last time the clock indicated such dread cause for alarm was 1984, when US-Soviet relations had reached their iciest point in decades.
Long gone are the decades of dread and popular protest movements that culminated in the 1980s ("The Day After", the Nuclear Freeze movement, the widespread discussions along the lines of "we're going to be nuked imminently, and even if we have a nuclear shelter we'd need to shoot our neighbors to keep them out of it, and we'd be better off just killing ourselves anyway, because either we'd die slowly of radiation sickness, or the planet would be so destroyed that life wouldn't be worth living"). The current zeitgeist feels more like "the bomb hasn't gone off in 65 years, so I don't have to worry about it".
It’s not that anyone likes nuclear weapons. the public is more pro-disarmament than ever before: in a recent poll 82% of Americans now favor elimination. But people wrongly assume that nuclear deterrence must work, or that popular protest efforts are a waste of energy and don’t result in policy change, or that climate change is the only thing that threatens our species and planet, or the problem has gone away as nuclear warheads must have disappeared along with the Cold War.
Unfortunately all these assumptions couldn't be farther from the truth – but people don't know the truth. A 2004 poll found that the average American thought that the U.S. nuclear stockpile, which then numbered more than 10,000 weapons, consisted of only 200. The media doesn’t help: concentrating on the tight, repetitive questions of WMD in Iraq rather than elucidating the global context of the weakening nonproliferation treaties that provide for weapons inspections, or investigating the tough issues surrounding the actual presence of WMD in Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, and Israel.
Q: What do you hope it will accomplish?
I believe that nuclear weapons need to be eliminated globally, and that this film is part of this effort to make this happen before the world suffers a nuclear catastrophe. So my modest goal is quite literally to help save the world!
Q: Realistically, what can the average citizen do?
Realistically, I believe average citizens can and need to do anything they put their minds to. And I believe that all the brilliant work that so many people have contributed to prevent nuclear catastrophe - whether that is government agents securing loose nuclear materials, or mothers protesting the arms race, or politicians pushing progressive agendas – is paying off, the time is now ripening when this problem will be solved once and for all, and work must be continued.
The current US administration's policy is to work for a nuclear weapons free world. This is our only hope, this is a good part of the reason why President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and average citizens can and should be getting behind it immediately.
Q: Could you briefly address the three basic areas of concern raised in the film:
1. Rogue states making the bomb
If we don’t want other countries to have the bomb, how can we justify keeping it ourselves? It’s no good to reminisce about the old cold war scenario in which there was a nuclear club of five nuclear weapons states, and the posture of mutually assured destruction (MAD) kept things under control. The nonproliferation regime is failing, and I believe we are at the tipping point. If Iran gets the bomb, how many other states will follow? We have only two choices: a world in which nobody has nuclear weapons, or a world with rogue states and even non-state actors having them. Which would you prefer to live in?
2. Terrorists making the bomb
Every step that is necessary for terrorists to make a bomb not only could happen, but it has already happened. Just not all in one sequence… that we know of… yet. Terrorists do have the intent, they have recruited nuclear scientists, they have tried to buy nuclear materials, and smugglers have sold nuclear materials to terrorists… it seems as if all these steps haven’t yet connected into a continuous chain of events that results in an actual terrorist nuclear attack. But what’s to stop that happening? And don’t we want to do everything possible to prevent it? And if terrorists get the bomb, us having one will not help us. Terrorists are not bound by treaties and they cannot be retaliated against. They have no return address.
3. Human error setting off the bomb
I was fascinated to read Scott Sagan's book "The Limits of Safety" and articles about what he calls "the problem of redundancy problem"... I couldn't believe that more work was not being done, or being more widely disseminated, on the risks of nuclear accidents. It was fascinating to me that you could have theories about something as, well, accidental, as accidents. And then Bruce Blair started telling me his anecdotes about launch codes being misplaced or sent to the dry cleaners, or set to all zeroes, and I wanted people to understand that human fallibility does not cease to apply because the consequences are so grave. The possibility of an accident or error can never be zero. And if the risk isn’t zero, as time goes on, something terrible will eventually happen. That is a statistical fact.
Q: Why did you conceive this as a theatrical documentary instead of an offering on PBS or one of the cable networks?
There is nothing small-screen about the colossal scale of a nuclear weapon, which can destroy an entire city. I think of this as a non-fiction horror movie about the single most immediate threat facing humanity, and I want it to have the biggest impact imaginable.
Q; Why do you believe people will pay to see this film? What do you think your target audience will be? Age range? Psychographic? Do you think this will appeal to faith-based audiences?
I hope the film will serve as a primer for everyone to feel confident that they have a firm grasp of all the salient aspects of this critical issue. Something that I thought that other Participant doc AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH achieved so brilliantly was that everyone who watched it was given a solid, confident grasp of the subject. And was totally convinced of the reality of climate change.
I hope that younger people will get to grips with an issue that hasn't been sufficiently discussed in recent years, and that older people will be able to reconnect with an issue they felt very strongly about during the Cold War, and know hasn't gone away, but haven't had an opportunity to engage with recently.
Nuclear weapons are a moral and religious issue because of the scale of the devastation they cause. They are inevitably an instrument of mass murder. I was heartened that so many religious leaders supported the film and appear in it – for example the brilliant Richard Cizik.
Q: Do you think there will ever be an opportunity for this film to be shown to representatives from countries such as North Korea or Iran , countries that have not yet signed non-proliferation pacts?
North Korea is not an easy place to arrange screenings of one's political movie in! And I have no plans to sneak around the DMZ with DVDs in my pockets, that's for sure. But we are fortunate in having the best team imaginable to get the film shown as widely as possible.
This film needs to be seen and discussed as widely as possible, as soon as possible.
Q: You have interviewed at least a dozen subjects for COUNTDOWN? How did you secure their participation? Why did you choose these particular individuals?
A lot more than a dozen! I interviewed eighty-four people, from Dick Garwin, who developed the first hydrogen device (although he did not get the credit) as a twenty-year-old PhD candidate from Fermi's lab while on a summer internship at Los Alamos ; to Frits Veerman, AQ Khan's best friend, who noticed that he was spying and tried to alert his bosses at the uranium enrichment facility in the Netherlands in the mid 1970s. I even conducted several phone interviews with AQ Khan himself: his opening line was "Madam, are you looking for a villain for your movie?". He's no fool, unfortunately. We've got a lot of material for DVD extras!
For research and development, I met with or spoke with with over a hundred additional experts and trawled through hundreds of books and articles, and sifted an incalculable deluge of information and attended conferences all over the world in order to bring you the most interesting voices with the most important points across the whole subject area.
Q: Were there people you wanted to include who turned you down? Why aren’t the other three living past Presidents (Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2) and/or their policies on nuclear arms represented here?
We had to cover a lot of ground, and wanted to include only the most urgent and vital information – and the policies of those previous three Presidents didn't make the cut.
The good news is that President Obama's policies on nuclear weapons are bold and brilliant, and happen to chime exactly with the point of view of the film, and I hope that this movie will help educate the public so that they see how he came to arrive at his policies.
The more I came to understand about terrorism and proliferation, the more I understood that even for people who thought that nuclear weapons were a useful deterrent during the cold war, should recognize that we are now at that point where it is more dangerous to have nuclear weapons than to eliminate them. Now is the critical moment, and currently we have a president who is listening to the experts and responding with the leadership that our times demand.
One person – and a President at that - who I wish we could have included, but has sadly passed away of course, is President Reagan. I am fascinated by the 1986 Reykjavik summit, when Reagan (supposedly freaked out by the 1983 TV Movie THE DAY AFTER) and Gorbachev (alarmed by Chernobyl, and hoping to free up some cash for his economic reforms) went against their advisors to propose all-out abolition. They may not have succeeded – although it did succeed in turning the arms race around - but to me this demonstrates that it took only the political will of two leaders to slice through any amount of bureaucracy, inertia, fear and opposition. That’s something for President Obama to think about right now, if you ask me.
Back in 1986, apparently Reagan had said "it would be fine with [me] if we eliminated all nuclear weapons." And Gorbachev responded, "We can do that. We can eliminate them." And at this point, the normally sober, impassive Shultz burst out, "Let's do it!" The conversation continued, as was transcribed in recently declassified official memos of comments, with Reagan saying that “Ten years from now, when President Reagan would be a very old man, he and Gorbachev would come to Iceland and each of them would bring the last nuclear missile from each country with them. And they would give a tremendous party for the whole world. He would be very old by then, and Gorbachev would not recognize him. So he would say, “Hello, Mikhail”. And Gorbachev would say “Ron, is that you?”. And then they would destroy the last missiles”.
I may not be starstruck, but I am sometimes awestruck by where my work takes me. And to find myself discussing Reykjavik with some of those who were there – Shevardnadze (who claims the whole idea was his) and Gorbachev – blows my mind. And I’m just sad that President Reagan isn’t around for his “tremendous party for the whole world” – but I hope that we will be.
Q: Was securing your spokespersons a collective effort (e.g. Walker, Bender and Participant)? Who did the actual interviewing? Were there questions about things you really wanted to know that did not get answered?
Yes, securing interviews was most certainly a team effort in which we used all our collective resources and relationships – myself, the producer Lawrence Bender, Participant, and also Matt Brown and Bruce Blair of Global Zero.
I did the actual interviewing myself – it's a part of the process that I enjoy, and in this movie it was particularly challenging. Nobody is going to say anything candid or private about nuclear weapons: it's the most clandestine, sensitive, confidential subject I can think of.
Some of the leaders gave us only very short interviews, so it was a challenge to get more than a couple of basic questions answered, and some folks also vetoed certain topics – for example former President Musharraf did not want to talk about AQ Khan, as a condition of granting the interview.
The interview I conducted with Secretary Robert McNamara was a very emotional one as it was clear to us all that this was going to be his last interview. He was obviously aging, but he was wagging his finger at me, determined to make his point heard, that nations would be destroyed if we did not destroy nuclear weapons.
Q: Bruce Blair of the World Security Institute is one of your interview subjects, and he’s also an executive producer. What roles did he play in this project, e.g. making introductions, vetting information, etc. Were other non-proliferation organizations of service?
Bruce Blair and Matt Brown of Global Zero were both a tremendous source of information and inspiration in all aspects of making the film.
I realized about half-way through making the film that Bruce was important to have on-screen and not just off-screen, because he was a unique spokesman in his field of expertise. As a former launch control officer, he had seen command-and-control weaknesses first-hand, and then awakened to the dangers he'd witnessed, he'd done the best research on the terrifying dangers of launch-on warning. It blows my mind that the US and Russia still have as many as three thousand warheads poised on hair-trigger alert for launch on warning. As Bruce says, they don’t call them Minutemen for nothing. This is exactly what Einstein was warning us about when he says that we are drifting towards catastrophe because nobody has changed their modes of thinking.
Many, many, many other organizations were of tremendous service. RAND, the IAEA, the CTBTO, the FAS, the NRDC, the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security… so many people we can’t thank enough… and we owe a special debt of thanks to Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund, who is as wonderful off-camera as he is on-camera.
Q: Did you travel to your interview subjects or did they come to you? e.g. Did you do Tony Blair in the UK , Gorbachev in Russia, Musharraf in Pakistan ?
Mostly I had to travel to interview subjects, unfortunately (I say unfortunately because I am conscious of the climate consequences of long-haul travel).
If I never travel again anywhere, it will be too much travel too soon :0) It may sound exciting going to all these places, but carrying the equipment myself, pleading with excess baggage handlers, dealing with the nuclear weapons establishment, and working so hard for so long on such an unyielding subject was the most depleting experience imaginable. At this point my idea of a good time is staying home and watching paint dry. And I don’t recommend spending the entire Christmas season working outside with the NYPD counter-terrorism unit, culminating in New Years filming in ten degrees and snow til four in the morning in the middle of Times Square, trying not to lose any of the equipment that you are carrying as you battle through the crowds and realize there's not a chance of getting to a bathroom – oh, the glamour of filmmaking!
Q: Did you go to Georgia to interview the chief investigator of the Georgia Anti-Smuggling Division and Khinsagov?
I did indeed go to Georgia – to both Georgias! I like to joke that I went everywhere from Georgia the country (to investigate nuclear smuggling in Tblisi and all around the borders with Russia and Azerbaijan and the Black Sea) to Georgia the state (to interview President Carter in Atlanta) to make this movie.
Probably the biggest journalistic coup in the movie is the first and only interview with Oleg Khinsagov, which took a serious amount of networking in Tblisi! I spent nights out drinking with government ministers and senior policemen to secure the support of the Interior Ministry in order to get access to Oleg Khinsagov, who is a real life nuclear smuggler. He actually had weapons-grade bomb material, and he actually sold it to a man he thought was Al Qaeda (even though it turned out to be a sting operation, and the buyer was an undercover cop).
When I was interviewing Oleg, I had a chilling feeling that it may have been a bit like interviewing Mohammed Atta before the 9/11 attacks (which I witnessed from my apartment in downtown New York, and which had killed friends of mine). Here was somebody who was actively trying to sell nuclear weapons material to terrorists who whose stated goal was to kill four million Americans using a nuclear device. The undercover cop introduced himself to Oleg as “a muslim man from a serious organization” – in other words, Oleg thought he was selling bom-grade material to Al Qaeda. In the interview, Oleg told me that when he watched the twin towers fall on TV he had celebrated, and he talked excitedly about how "nine grams can bring down the elephant" – meaning that a tiny amount of nuclear material could bring down the entire United States. And that was his goal. I am generally the most compassionate interviewer, and try to always put myself in the shoes of anyone I interview, in order to best bring out their most intimate and heartfelt views and experiences for the camera, and it was really, really, really hard to nod along as I listened to this.
The good guy in this story, at the opposite extreme of the evildoer-hero spectrum, is the top cop of Georgia's radioactive smuggling unit. I couldn't believe how smart, effective, and helpful he was – it blows my mind that people so talented are so generous as to put their lives at risk to keep the rest of the world safe, and nobody ever even hears about them, much less thanks them. If it wasn't for this genius Georgian cop and his team, there would, without doubt, be a whole lot of materials for nuclear and dirty bombs on the black market around the world.
I feel the same way about the folks I met who run the US Department of Energy programs to secure loose nukes and secure ports and borders worldwide from nuclear smuggling. It's the toughest and most important job in the world, and I can't say enough good things about these folks like Dave Huizinga and Igor Bolshinsky and Tracy Mustin, who are my absolute personal heroes. And not only do they serve us all so selflessly, they let me film, too!
Q: How about the Luch Uranium Enrichment Facility? Did you speak with the guy who explained his ongoing theft of HEU as “I just needed a new refrigerator”?
I believe this question refers to some archival material. We didn't shoot it, we licensed it.
Q: Did you have problems with security, cooperation and/or red tape? Where? Anecdotes are welcomed.
I am grateful for the generous co-operation of the Department of Energy, who are in charge of the US nuclear weapons (not the Dept of Defense, as a lot of people might assume). Meantime the Department of Defense took a year to even acknowledge our request, and a lot of people seem to think that it's better for audiences to be totally ignorant.... I disagree!
Of course we had a lot of fun and games with permIssions. An awful lot of "no"s. There were ten days of cooling our heels – or not – at the un-air-conditioned Pakistani consulate, dressed from head-to-toe and head covered, in a heatwave in August in Dubai with temperatures of 120 degrees, drinking hot tea and trying to secure our Pakistani visas, after President Musharraf was impeached on the eve of our scheduled trip to Pakistan, when we were already most of the way to Islamabad, stopped over in Dubai. Eventually we secured an interview with President Musharraf, but months later, when he was in London. And as for Dubai, let's just say I'm not sure I'd accept an invitation from the Dubai film festival, no matter how fabulous its reputation, it wasn't the most rewarding period of my life. The DP valiantly shot b-roll - this was, after all, the port town where parts for the AQ Khan network were shipped through – and as he’d say "wait, I think I see a good shot, over there" and we trudged towards it, sweating like I didn't believe was possible, I was wondering whether he was really seeing a shot or it was just a shimmering mirage in the outrageous desert heat. Turns out the dailies were awesome and he not only saw a shot, he could get it.
And then all the hard work paid off in the most magnificent breakthroughs. Like when I finally got the email from Gorbachev's aide Pavel Palazhchenko granting me an interview date, I forwarded the email to the team and realized that it was the longest email chain I'd ever seen, dozens of pages long – I'd been pursuing him for over eighteen months, and had met him twice already without being allowed to film, and finally that persistence paid off with a phenomenal interview.
FILMMAKING
Q: How did you try to balance the tremendous amount of information you needed to convey with the mandate to create a theatrical experience?
That was the challenge! My friends PanOptic did a beautiful job with the graphics and animation, and my hat is off to the cinematographers who made the film look so good.
How long was the shoot? In how many locations? How much time did you spend on average with each interview subject? How many questions did you have to ask before getting the answers you wanted to hear/use?
We were shooting for over a year, but only sporadically. Often our interviews were very short, sometimes as short as twenty minutes, particularly with the VIPs. Long interviews are much easier for warming people up and covering a lot of ground, so this was an excellent challenge for my interview skills to prioritize the questions and deliver candid exclusive insights on sensitive topics in very limited windows of time. I really enjoyed the challenge and am very proud of the interviews we secured and conducted.
And it’s lucky I’m not starstruck, because our list of interviewees is like the list of the masters of the universe! Former leaders included President Carter, President Gorbachev, former President De Klerk, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, former President Shevardnadze, former President Musharraf… etc etc etc.
Q: How many people were on the crew for these interviews (and please give job descriptions)?
The entire team comprised cinematographer and myself (I recorded the sound msyelf). So the filming crew is ultra-pared-down, and only occasionally would we even have a third pair of hands to round out the team to meet the needs of a particular situation. I find it so effective and efficient to work in a team of just one other person and myself.
Q: You have four cinematographers – did you pick them up on an “as needed” basis due to the sporadic nature of your schedule?
The nature of our subject, which had to accommodate the schedules of world leader interviews and nuclear facilities clearances, made for the most sporadic and peripatetic shoot imaginable. We were shooting an hour here (with "here" meaning, say, in Washington DC), and an hour there (say, in Moscow) for over a year. It was a line producer's worst nightmare – fortunately we had Co-Producer Lisa Remington in charge, who did a spectacular job.
Q: Was this also the case with sound recordists?
I recorded almost all of the sound myself, which I prefer for three extremely important reasons: it reduces our budget; it makes for a more intimate shoot; and, given all the travel involved, it reduces our carbon footprint.
Q: Are any of these people regulars on your production team?
I hope to work with all these wonderful DPs again, but this was the first time with all of them (note: I'm actually not sure who is credited – if Aaron Phillips is one of those credited, he is a regular for me, I've worked with him on a ton of productions – everyone else it's the first time but not the last time I'll be working with them). Again, I recorded sound myself, for the most part. The genius animation/design team, PanOptic, are old pals from when I lived in New York, and have worked on many of my films, so they are regulars.
Q: Did you have a second unit?
Not really – a small number of pick-ups were shot without me, but I probably wouldn't describe it as a second unit.
Q: Assuming the budget cannot be disclosed, could you ballpark the percentage of overall dollars spent on the actual filming of interviews (including crew salaries, equipment rental, travel and accommodations), vs. licensing of footage.
Those are actually quite complicated calculations... which I don't know and I couldn't even guess the answers to... but I can say I always strive to stretch the budget by being supremely frugal with filming costs, which meant that we bought and then re-sold the equipment, minimized the crew to just one DP and myself (recording sound, organizing our travel, doing research, writing the questions, and conducting interviews etc myself), we generally did not stay in hotels but instead stayed with my friends for free (friends such as the musician Moby and fellow filmmakers Jess Search and Tanya Selvaratnam were particularly generous in loaning their apartments for weeks).
Q: How much time did it take to research and prepare this film?
The research was a massive amount of work, given the nature of the subject – which couldn’t be more technical, broad, complicated, sensitive and classified!
I literally can’t imagine a bigger research job. I needed to make myself expert in the history, science, and politics of these weapons – from understanding North Korea, to following developments in Iran, to tracking down nuclear smugglers in Tblisi, to understanding the physics of fissile materials, to grasping policy arguments… so forgive me if I ever get mixed up on a detail... I can't imagine a subject that requires more research to grasp and master and communicate!
I was very grateful for many wonderful conversations and conference introductions and reading suggestions from so many people in the world of nuclear weapons, from the Department of Energy to the IAEA to nuclear weapons labs scientists to anti-nuclear activists to retired generals, even the real inventor of the hydrogen bomb – everyone helped sharpen my thinking and point me to the most urgent points.
Q: Who wrote the pitch/presentation that led to Participant’s underwriting the film? Who, if anyone, will get a screenplay credit?
I did, and I believe that I will.
Q: Were you countlessly revising as world events changed around you?
This issue is on the front page of newspapers around the world every day. Iran's uranium enrichment program, the bombing of the Syrian reactor, Gaddaffi's decision to give us the Libyan program, negotiations in North Korea, the Talibanization of the Pakistani military, President Obama's policies and speeches, court cases related to the AQ Khan network in Switzerland, the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan, incidents such as the six nuclear warheads mistakenly flown on a B-52 bomber from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., in August 2007, treaties with India, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ratification...
... not a day goes by that the news doesn't tell me that this movie could not be more important or more timely!
On the other hand, we knew we couldn't be merely "newsy" as we can't compete with the news cycle, and a movie deserves a long shelf life. I know that I still get a great deal out of older movies about nuclear weapons from DR STANGEGLOVE to THE DAY AFTER, THREADS, WHEN THE WIND BLOWS, DARK CIRCLE... so much great work and more. So it was about sifting every piece of information to give audiences the tools to understand the news events as they continue to unfold. For example the role of gas centrifuge enrichment of uranium – what it is, how it can be used to enrich uranium for either nuclear weapons or nuclear energy purposes, and why it is the game-changer for proliferation – helps us to understand the news that is coming out of Iran every day.
The really bad news is that all the research that I've done and all the conclusions that I've drawn have only ever been borne out by unfolding events. Everything seems to be happening exactly as I've learned that it will. It makes me truly afraid that the worst fears that so many experts share – as regards nuclear terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear accidents – will also come true.
Something that happened during production was that our local "fixer" in Pakistan would not let us stay at the Islamabad Marriott, specifically because this hotel was a potential target for terrorist attacks. This seemed a little paranoid to me, especially since Islamabad had famously scarcely been touched by terrorist attacks, but I always value expert advice, so we booked our stay at a different hotel. Then the next month came the terrible terrorist attack on the Islamabad Marriott, the very hotel that we'd been warned was risky.
As I read about the attack I wasn't only horrified about this particular attack, but it also reminded me that sometimes the things that experts warn you about do come to pass. And having spent over two years immersed in learning about nuclear weapons, there’s a lot to think about.
In the January 5, 2008 Democratic Debate in New Hampshire, the top nuclear experts predicted that there’s a 30% chance that America’s current president will have to deal with a nuclear attack on an American city. Graham Allison (Professor and founding Dean of Harvard’s School of Govt, special advisor to the secretary of defense under President Reagan, assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton) says that this risk is over 50%. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans offers us no encouragement that the impact of a nuclear explosion in a U.S. city would be met with a swift, effective, prepared response. And radiation is a lot harder to clean up than water.
Q: Start to finish (lock picture), how much time did you devote to this project?
I started talking to Participant and Lawrence Bender in October 2007, and the world premiere is January 2010.
Q: What’s next?
Perhaps "next" is the wrong word, since it is premiering the day before, but I directed a second feature documentary entitled WASTE LAND that is also making its world premiere at Sundance 2010 and then going on to the Berlin film festival. Launching these two will keep me out of trouble for a while, and I also have some new projects, but these are top secret!
Q: Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
It is a privilege to be working with a company like Participant that is not only making the best movies on the world's most important topics, but is also working through the most cutting edge media strategies, outreach campaigns and the website takepart.com to maximize the movie's impact.
As with so many of the brilliant scientists involved with the development of nuclear weapons, Einstein recognized their dangers and admitted that “I made one great mistake in my life... when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made". It’s time to correct this mistake. And I believe Einstein himself would come see the movie and salute our whole team for taking an active part in the struggle to change our modes of thinking and thus to avert a nuclear catastrophe.
Interviewees include
Tony Blair
Jimmy Carter
Mikail Gorbachev
Henry Kissinger
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Fredrik Willem de Klerk
James Baker, III
Frank von Hippel
Abdul Qadeer Khan
Valerie Plame Wilson