November 23, 2021 • 46 mins
(Recorded September 2021) British documentarian Lucy Walker is asking big questions with her latest film, Bring Your Own Brigade. Specifically, why are there more catastrophic wildfires worldwide, and what could mitigate the destruction? Her gripping film focuses on real people impacted by two 2018 California wildfires, “The Camp Fire,” which killed 85 and nearly destroyed the town of Paradise, and “The Woolsey Fire,” which devastated parts of Malibu. Lucy’s camera takes you from the horror of people struggling to escape the wildfires to disbelief as residents reject steps that could limit future destruction. Lucy Walker’s other films include The Crash Reel, Countdown to Zero, Waste Land, Blindsight, and Devil’s Playground.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. British documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker
has been compared to legendary director and Here's the Thing
guest Errol Morris. She's made five feature films and been
nominated for an Academy Award twice, first for Waste Land,
(00:25):
about an artist who works with materials found in landfills
in Brazil, and the second time for a short doc
called The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, about the two
thousand eleven Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster. Her critically acclaimed
two thousand thirteen film The Crash Wheel followed snowboarder Kevin
(00:46):
Pierce after he suffered a traumatic brain injury while training
for the Winter Olympics. Lucy Walker's latest film is Bring
your Own Brigade, a reference to wealthy residents who hire
their own but firefighters to protect property during forest fires.
The film focuses on two two thousand eighteen California wildfires,
(01:10):
the camp Fire, which nearly destroyed the town of Paradise
and killed people, and the Woolsey Fire, which erupted on
the same day, and destroyed large parts of Malibu. Bring
your Own Brigade attempts to answer an urgent question, why
are there more catastrophic wildfires, not just in California but
(01:31):
around the world, and what can we do to mitigate
their destruction. Walker's film says these fires can be blamed
on more than just climate change. When she started her reporting,
she followed several firefighters and learned a great deal about
their work, including how these fires get named. You know,
when a fire breaks out, the operating commands just pick
(01:54):
a name quite quickly, and it's not a great deal
of thought that goes into it. They just instantly need
names for incidents, especially because with California often with the
wind events driving multiple incidents all at once. You just
need to know that the Dixie fire isn't the Wolsey fire,
isn't the campfire. And they'll often name them for the
(02:14):
road that they break out on or a facility nearby.
For example, Camp the Campfire came from Camp Creek Road,
which was where the fire was first spotted. So it's
kind of a loose improvisation that they come up with
these names. And then, in the case of the campfire,
which became later on the most deadly in history. It
(02:35):
was obviously achieved a great sort of notoriety that name,
but that their their coin very quickly. You first became
aware of this story when were you living in southern California. Then, Yeah,
I'm originally from England. And the Great Fire of London,
which actually followed the plague and kind of put out
the plague, so to speak, because it killed all the rats,
was in sixteen sixty six, and you think of fire
(02:58):
as a medieval problem in London. And then I moved
to New York house in film school and grad school
in New York, and again you think of urban fires,
but you think of it as a problem that we've
come together to solve. And then I moved to California,
and I was confused because the hillside was on fire
and people were driving down the freeway as if this
(03:18):
was just business as usual, and I was scared. I
just knew there was a thread that if you tugged
on it, there was a cognitive dissonance. I didn't know
what was wrong, but I knew that I had a
feeling that fire shouldn't be burning and there must be
(03:38):
a problem because houses were burning and people were dying,
and this fire problem, actually since I moved here in
the two thousands, kept getting worse and worse and worse.
The fires seemed to be getting bigger and I wasn't
imagining it. And finally there was the biggest fire ever
in California at the time, that Thomas Fire, and I
(04:00):
had some friends that were caught up in it, both
on the resident side and the firefighter side. I have.
That was all around Santa Barbara, Oh, High Ventura, sort
of just north of Los Angeles. It began in December
twenty seventeen, so very late, at the time when the
rains would normally have come. And you start to learn
(04:20):
about the climate in southern California and that the real
danger zone in southern California is when the winds kick up,
the seasonal winds kick up, but the rains have not
yet arrived. And what's been happening increasingly with climate change
is that the winds are arriving, but the fuels are
still dry, and there's only a few rain events in
(04:42):
southern California. I think on average about five times you
get these big rains, but it will only rain about
a few times a year. And obviously there's normally a
variability in that because statistically it's there's always going to
be a variance. It's not always five a year, it's
never been that. It's has been on average that. But
with climate change mixing things up more and more and
(05:04):
the ongoing drought that we've had, there's less and less rain,
and the winds are actually more because the temperature gradients
actually tend to push up and make stronger wind events
that are really drive these really out of control. Big
fires always have a huge wind event at their back.
They don't just happen on an ordinary day. They'll happen
(05:25):
when the wind conditions are at their worst. And so
you start to learn that the full season in southern
California is the worst. It's a little different in other
states where you get far as earlier in the season.
You'll get winds earlier in Arizona and northern California, in
Oregon and Washington, the western United States, it's not necessarily
quite so late in southern California, where the rains come
(05:47):
really quite late. That's how the season moves. My brother
lives in Santa Barbara, and he has moved and kind
of hopped between Monte Cedar, when Santa Barbara itself and
the in that area. He's been there for many, many years.
The mud slides were the next act after that. That's
exactly right, the mudslides that came pouring through and crushed
(06:09):
many homes and killed a couple, killed twenty two rain
mud slide exactly, and I had friends in Montecito, and
that was exactly what made me get up and stopped
being a spectator and start to say, where is the
documentary film about this? Because for me, documentary films are
the best, single, best way I have as a viewer
(06:32):
to understand a complex issue. When I see a great
documentary made by one of my colleagues, I really feel
like I know the story inside out. If the reporting
is good, if the story and the characters really get
me in there, I feel like I get my arms
around the issue. I really understand in three sixty what's
really going on. And there are so many complicated issues
that I've really understood for the first time because of
(06:53):
a great documentary film, and there wasn't one about fires,
And finally I thought, my gosh, if there isn't one,
I'm going to have to do it. Because when that
mud slide. The debrief flow happened. It was the end
of that same fire I was talking about, and started
in December seventeen and then January. This like just greight train,
but you know, you can't even describe that, Like the
(07:15):
hillside came with boulders embedded inside. Exactly, there were boulders
inside the mass. That was horrifying, Yes, exactly. Sort of
this gigantic, epic, tragic sliding down of the beautiful mountain
side because after the fire, the all the roots had
been um the trees have been burned, and you get
(07:37):
all this slickness, and when the rain comes down, you're
a great risk of the mud slides because there's nothing
to stick the earth the side of the mountain, and
it all comes down and kind of cannonballs and snowballs
and and builds up such momentum that houses, you know,
were actually lost into the ocean and never found. I mean,
just such momentum. And over twenty people were killed in
(07:59):
the most horrifying way. I mean, I've been in many
traumatic disaster zones and I've never been quite so shocked
and stunned as what I saw in Montecito. And I'm
so sorry your brother was affected because that whole community
was just so kids at the school, yeah, devastating, and
I thought, my goodness, what is going on? And I
(08:21):
had friends who are both firefighters and residents, and I thought,
somebody has to tell this story. Somebody has to I
couldn't understand that even as close as Los Angeles and
with all the filmmakers in California, that no one was
really describing the awful, intense tragedy that these people were
going through. And I thought, Okay, well, I'll step up.
(08:43):
I want to understand what is happening with these fires
and then the debris flows that can sometimes be they're
kind of kicking the tail, and let's really get to
the bottom of this and understand what the residents and
the responders are going through because it's getting worse and
I don't like it, and are we safe here? And
(09:03):
let's find out is there anything that we can do
about it? And my initial assumption had been that it
was all climate change, because it really made sense, right,
we have the worst fires ever and we have the
hottest summers ever, and the climate change that I follow,
the science on these trends really point to that, and
(09:24):
initially I thought that was the only thing driving these fires,
and so I thought that the cause wasn't going to
be too hard to pin down. But actually, while climate
change is happening and climate change is exacerbating the problem,
for sure, there are other factors. And that's actually great
(09:44):
because there are some things that we could do now.
Whether or not we do do them is something that
you've touched on. And the film really blew my mind
as I was making it, understanding how things actually happen.
Even when you can fix things, it's not true that
they do get fixed. And so I sort of went
(10:07):
on a whole journey filmmaker Lucy Walker. If you enjoy
conversations about the challenges of making documentary films, check out
my episode with the directors of Making a Murderer. The
controversial series explored the case of Stephen Avery, Wisconsin, man
(10:27):
who was wrongly convicted of rape, released after two decades
in prison, and then convicted of murder. The series was
written and directed by Laura Richardi and Moira Dimas. It
just seemed like, you know, he was this incredible window
through which to look at our system. You know, if
we followed this man's story, we would go from one
(10:49):
extreme of the system to the other. So as I
was saying, you know, we had no money, but what
we what we could put into it with time, which
is actually an incredibly valuable asset. And after doing a
preliminary week of shooting in December, realized this was something
we wanted to pursue, and we sublet our apartment in
New York. We've got an apartment in Mantuak and we
(11:10):
lived there, you know, more on than off, for close
to two years. To hear more of my conversation with
the filmmakers behind Making a Murderer, go to Here's the
Thing dot org. After the break, Lucy Walker explains why
some California residents resist taking even basic steps to prevent
(11:32):
forest fires. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to
Here's the Thing. Lucy Walker is originally from the UK.
She moved to Los Angeles and two thousand eight and
quickly began exploring what was causing the huge fires around California.
(11:56):
I've been observing these fires and wondering and and been frightened.
But that fire, the largest ever far in California, the
Thomas Fire, with the terrible debris law in Montecito in
I thought, oh my goodness, I'm going to have to
make a film about this, and I began to make
the film. Then the film actually features fires that happened
(12:18):
later in Malibu and Paradise. But I've already been working
on the film for a year at that point when
those fires came along. Now, you were, I don't know
if this is the word, monitoring the fire situation in
southern California. So when Paradise happens, when Malibu happens, you're
you're already there monitoring those that kind of activity. Curry exactly.
(12:40):
And I've already been filming a great deal and already
made friends with these incredible firefighters, actually the incredible firefighters
in the Montecito Fire Department, and been embedded with them
on various fires and cools and knew just who to
cool up. And when the as far as broke out
(13:01):
in Malibu and Paradise, actually I saw it on Twitter
early that morning, and I instantly was able to cool
out the firefighter zone that I knew actually in Montecito
and hopping with them as they were being deployed down
to the fire in Malibu, and we knew the fire command,
and we were able to really film within those incidents
(13:23):
immediately and know what we're looking at and know how
to film it because we've been doing a lot of
preparation and filming by that stage. The film obviously has
some ghastly optics there. You you lay audio tracks of
people calling, or there's some kind of recorded voice you
(13:47):
have of someone screaming this blood curdling scream as they're
being engulfed in. The visual might not be you know,
their visual, but you lay that track against a car
proceeding down the tunnel of flames. Everyone's trying to leave.
I want to make sure our listeners understand that up
in Paradise the campfire, everyone tries to leave at the
(14:09):
same time. Yeah, I mean something that we get into
because we start with the fires, and you're so right.
It's the most horrifying and hellish scenes and people were
killed in Paradise and the most hellish, terrifying way imaginable,
And we were able to gather so much material, including
the nine and one calls and the radio traffic, so
(14:31):
that you really get a sense of what that's like.
We meet a girl who couldn't persuade her mom to
evacuate because she hadn't had an evacuation warning and she
has to leave because she's so scared, and unfortunately her
mom did succumb to the fire. And all these terrifying
stories of a woman who just had had a C
section and she is in the car but she can't
(14:52):
somebody's giving her right out to escape, but she can't
feel her legs. She's just had an eperdural, and she
has this newborn baby who's just been born by hours
earlier by c section, and she has to say to
the driver of the car, who she's never met, if
it comes to it, just take my baby and run,
because I can't move and I'm going to die, but
I want my baby to have a chance to take
(15:13):
the baby and run. I mean, these scenes, you can't
imagine how traumatic they are. And then we sort of
don't stop there. Though it wasn't enough to me to
just show the horror. I wanted to understand what happens next?
How do we stop this happening again? Because I learned
that these communities burned over and over again, actually this
(15:34):
summer already with the Dixie Fire. That fire began right
where the campfire began, as well and burned right up
into the same community of having, causing our characters to
all be evacuated again. There was another far last year
that killed another twenty two people that was right next door.
And so what I wanted to understand is, well, how
are we stopping it or why are we having this problem?
(15:55):
And why are people living in these areas and building
these houses that burn over and over and over again.
Could we do better? And you start to understand it's
not sensible. When you figure out what should be happening
and you figure out what's actually happening, it's not the
same thing. So you would think that when people look
at developing an area for housing, they would think about
(16:19):
is fire safety and the cost to the homeowner and
also to the state a nation of these risks that
people are having. But in fact, there's an incentive locally
to approve all the building because a town wants more
residents because then they're going to have more tax revenue.
But nobody's actually thinking about what are they going to
be able to ensure these homes and who's going to
(16:41):
pay if these homes burned down. There's all these kind
of mismatched incentives and what's actually happening now to poor
homeowners is in the in the in these areas unexpectedly
now the insurance companies are cutting them off, and California
actually putting moratorium on insurance companies dropping their customers because
it was so sudden and so dire. But in future,
(17:02):
the truth with climate change and with this problem which
is not just caused by climate change but is escalating,
is if these homes are uninsurable, what's going to happen
to the residents if they burned down and a lot
of them are not going to be able to ensure
afford that, and there's going to be a huger burden,
and and we're seeing these problems sort of pile up.
(17:23):
It's the inability to get together and solve these complicated problems.
It really is just like it is with climate change,
that we have a complex problem on our hands, and
so we all need to really get together and have
sensible discussions about what we can all do to solve this.
It's not easy, but you really capture in the film
(17:46):
exactly where the problems are happening, exactly which conversations are
not happening, exactly where officials can't get voted out by
doing anything unpopular, and the town don't want to be
told what to do. So you see this town where
people were killed and eighteen thousand buildings were burned down.
(18:07):
Less than a year later, eighteen eighteen thousand structures lost,
not all of them homes. Some of them were buildings
that weren't homes, businesses, or or other structures, but eighteen
thousand structures lost. It was the most expensive disaster of
that year in the world. Less than a year later,
the town doesn't just vote against these measures, they eviscerate
(18:33):
their seven town council members for daring to suggest these measures,
many of which have no cost. A few of them,
like sprinklers, do have a cost associated but some like
actually changing the way that that you can have gutters,
so changing the rules around gutters that's free, and people
like their gutters. People don't want to be told what
to do about gutters. Even though the fire chief and
(18:57):
all the people that know how fire works begging them
to reconsider this, still this feeling that like, we don't
want to be told what to do. This is a
town where we do our own thing, and not being
able to have that complicated discussion with people about well,
that's great, but the unfortunate reality is that when your
(19:19):
home catches fire because you have this gutter with the
leaves stuck up there, you're also gonna catch fire to
your neighbor's homes, and then all the roads are going
to clog up, and it's a domino escalating problem. It's
similar to get the vaccination, not just for yourself but
for everybody else, exactly right, And you actually learn that
it's actually a really good analogy because that idea of
(19:41):
social distancing is exactly like there's a concept in fire
safety where you have this five ft defensible space they
call it, so you don't have anything flammable within five
ft of your house, and that's sort of like social distancing.
Then the aerosol dispersion is like the embers when you
have the virus that little particles that will come out
(20:01):
and infect people. That's actually the same as the embers.
That actually how far start is these ember storms get
carried by the wind and actually will catch So it's
a really eerily perfect analogy with the pandemic. So that
really got me thinking. Of course, another interesting thing about
the film is that in looking at these two fires
that were kicked off by the same wind event in Paradise.
(20:24):
They called it a red hill in a blue state.
So even though California is mostly Democratic state, this area
of Paradise in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada is
a much more moderate or even conservative area, lots of guns,
lots of Republicans, and much more rural sort of mindset.
(20:45):
And Malibu it's a much more democratic place and much
more well to do as well. So the socioeconomic disparity
was astonishing than Malibu. The average home price was over
ten times more than the average home price in Paradise
that burned. So it's really interesting, So describe what happened
in Malibu. The fire was aware, the fire was everywhere.
(21:07):
It was a huge fire. And you're right, Malibu is
such a gorgeous, gorgeous place just outside of Los Angeles
and just spectacular, spectacular countryside, spectacular scenery over the ocean.
But with those hills and canyons that give you these
spectacular views, you have a lot of vegetation and you
(21:28):
have a lot of wind, and when those winds just
line up just right, you get these terrible fires. And
on that day it was a monster and it was
in so many canyons and it was all going off
at once in this gigantic incident. It did. It burned
right into Point Doom, and everyone said, oh, the Point
never burns, and it did. And I'm sure you you too.
(21:52):
You know, I have friends that lost their homes there
and was able to film with them as they went
through that, and we were able to film with the
fire depart as they're driving around trying to fight this fire.
But it's huge, and the public didn't quite get it.
The public didn't quite understand that it wasn't sort of
the firefighter's fault for doing a bad job, whereas, in fact,
(22:12):
as fire was so humongous, and every firefighter was out
working without sleep for days on end, and yet you
just can't fight afar that big. And what was extraordinary
given the scale was that not more people died. At
least three people did die, and I forget how many
(22:33):
thousands of structures, but thousands and thousands and thousands of
incredible homes were lost, and it was devastating, and most
of those were not not in the Point, but up
in the hills on the other on the land side
of the highway. Yeah, exactly, like that exactly exactly, loads
of those canyons up there. You can just drive up there,
(22:55):
and it looked like, you know, instead of the normal vegetation,
it looked like a kind of like a kind of
singed pig hide or something. I can't describe this landscape,
but just looked everything was just burned and black, and
the houses, the footprints of the houses looked like ashtrays.
You can see that imprint of where the house would be, yes,
(23:16):
a different different colored material exactly. And then once in
a while just a strange building that you know, strangely
wouldn't have burned, or actually not so strangely, because some
of those buildings were actually designed not to burn, and
we did have the proper defensible space and there are
ways I learned that you could protect them. But it
was very surreal because you'd see some of the structures
(23:36):
did survive, but some areas that were whole canyons or
whole streets where all the structures were burned, and it
was absolutely devastating. And also, you have, it gave rise
to a lot of conspiracy theories, as with the pandemic.
You know, people would say to me and perfectly sensible
looking people that would start out, you know, seeming very smart.
(23:57):
We'd be having this conversation and certainly they'd start talking
about how it must be laser pointers because it was
so hard to account for the fact that some structures
had survived. But I learned about this, and I learned
that actually there are ways you can build homes that
mean that they do survive when the fire burns through,
as they burn through really often. Because I learned with Malibu,
(24:18):
these fires happened all the time, has happened over and
over again. I found all these films, and we show
in the movie, this extraordinary film about the bell Air
fire in the sixties, and there's this wonderful presenter, you know,
in three saying, I wonder if this was a one
in a million chance, or could this ever happen again?
And it's happened dozens of times since he asked that question.
(24:40):
These fires come through all the time. There was another
fire in Sonoma, in the beautiful wine country in northern California,
the Tubs fire, and that killed it over twenty people.
And remember driving on the four oh five through the
suppul oft to pass or actually my friend was and
he filmed like out of an epic film, you know,
(25:00):
like a Cecil B. Demill film the flames just because,
as you know, all those grasses when they draw out
ore a golden color to like a golden wheat color,
and you'd see, like you said, like a singed pigs high.
That was a funny reference. And then in the middle
of that of the burned yellow fields is the debris
(25:22):
from the house that burned down. And you'd see in
your film those box shaped the building envelope where the
house burned down. And he sent me the film of
the flames just roaring over the Supulvitan Pass near the
Getty Center, you know, and the flame just roaring as
people just drove through like it was another day in
(25:43):
l A. I want to ask you though, regarding the
campfire people in Paradise, and you said that after the
campfire they had other fires that were similar and came
right up to their door or whatever. Did they raise
their taxes to some kind of greater fire protection system
(26:04):
in place? No, because half the tax base was gone.
When I was filming, I was filming one incredible guy
who had an incredible blind mom, and they he was
the one person that managed to stay and defend his
home and successfully and live and I got to know him,
but he was one of seven people who were still
collecting their mail. And so you can understand that the
(26:25):
fire department, who I made friends with and fall in
love with, all these incredible firefighters in Paradise, half of
them were laid off after the fire because there was
no more tax dollars to pay for them and not
many people living in the town. And so you had
these poor, depressed firefighters with not much work to do
and having had half their colleagues lose their jobs. The
(26:48):
month after the campfire was absolutely brutal, but no, I mean,
FEMA stepped in with great resources for people. And it
was ironic to me because a lot of the people
in Paradise will tell me that they hate big government.
They don't know where their taxes go. But they're the
people who were able to buy, you know, trailers, or
(27:08):
get money from the female, which is the government, which
is what go our tax dollars go on right precisely
because there was female to pick up the pieces and
support people and buy a lot of people trailers and
or get people into new homes. And then you have
the economics, which is strange, but the home prices go
way up because you have a lot of people looking
(27:30):
for homes. And that's the sort of bizarre cycle that
we're in. A in a high fire zone like Paradise
or Malibu, that home cost goes up and up and up,
and same thing Montecito. And these home prices go up
and up, not because you have so many people desperate
for homes. They want to keep the kids in the school,
they want to stay in these beautiful communities, but there's
less housing and and so you see the cycle. And
(27:54):
in an immediate aftermath of a fire, there's actually less
risk of fire because you've kind of burned off all
that fuel. And so I think you get lulled into
a full sense of security because immediately there's no risk
of fire. You just want the continuity. You want to
move back. You want to have your life, you know,
back as quickly as possible. Naturally and understandably, people just
want to get back home. They want to rebuild or
(28:14):
have a new home or there's you know, get back
on track as quickly as possible. And then as the
years tit by and the fuel piles up, when the
risk of fire comes back, people kind of get a
little complacable that hasn't been a fire for a while,
so it'll probably be okay, But actually the risk is
building and as soon as the wind and the weather
(28:34):
lines up again, that fuel and the wind is just
going to be a recipe for disaster again. And so
you can kind of see how this problem keeps compounding
until we do something differently. What did you find that
in the way that the film shows that stubborn, entitled,
privileged Americans, independence Americans who just don't want to be
(28:57):
told what to do. Let me come of that decision
in my own way and in my own timing. I
have a complicated relationship with this question. It's a great question.
I'm from the UK, originally in Europe, and there is
more of a sense of the society coming together, and
we have a national health service. That's a really wonderful
(29:19):
gift that you always have free healthcare, and it's a
feeling that the state has your back and will protect you.
And yet I immigrated to the US, I have an
American passport. I personally you made that voyage myself because
it is exciting to stride out on your own and
try your luck and go west. Young woman right, And
(29:42):
I personally really relate to this desire for independence and individuality.
And and that's me. I'm a filmmaker and a creative
asked this person and a woman who wants to, you know,
use the voice and make the world a better place.
Personal I left my family behind, and I think about
(30:04):
these wonderful American immigrants whose footsteps I'm in, and the
people in these areas are often descended from gold miners,
and is the gold Rush and California was these rushes
of even today we have the Silicon Valley kind of rush,
but we've had aerospace, we've got wine, we've had a
punk rock, we've got the movies. I mean, the people
(30:24):
that recent people come to California are often to you know,
stride out on their own right. And and we have
that kind of community almost in our genes. And it's
exciting and it's entrepreneurial and it's driving the world's exciting economy. Right.
And at the same time, we have this challenge, which
is if we don't come together, we can't solve these
(30:47):
big problems. And we're literally burning alive, like literally when
the Christian imagination will be come up with the idea
of hell. It's burning fire pits, and this is actually
what we're creating for ourselves. Those scenes you see in
Paradise in Malibu with people try and escape through the
flames or even succumbing as eighty five people didn't paradise,
(31:07):
this is actually sort of our worst thing that we
can imagine. It's literally hell, and that's what we're doing.
And so how can we come together with the pandemic
with climate change? Because there are things that we can do,
but it does require us having difficult conversations with people
that might be in crisis, that may have just had
(31:28):
their homes burned down. But rather than just saying, sure,
build the same flammable home right there without having to
be told that you can't have your rose bush within
five ft of the front door, maybe we really need
to have these difficult conversations. Maybe we really need to
have difficult conversations about vaccination and the responsibility we have
(31:48):
to our other people as well as to ourselves, and
how we need to lean into the system of knowledge
called science, whether it's fire science or virology, to understand
the world, because it is the best system of knowledge
that we have, and if we ignore it, we ignore
it our at our peril and that we are dying
and suffering more. And as the world becomes terrifyingly more
(32:11):
challenging with climate change, are we going to put our
best minds on trying to mitigate these effects? Several firefighters,
I believe it was in either Paradise or or maybe
it was in Santa Barbara, they committed suicide. Cric they
had a suicide epidemic there. Yeah, you know, firefighters everywhere,
first responders everywhere, suffering from post traumatic stress. And really
(32:34):
the suicides, the suffering, the divorces, the depression, I mean,
lives are being really affected and the first responses are
at the sharp end of this. We're asking them to
do so so much, and the toll it takes is
actually too much for the human psyche to bear. And
I think we're just starting to learn about the toll
(32:56):
that it's taking. And I think the firefighters are really
trying to get better at supporting firefighters mental health. But
we are really learning. And it was so moving to
see fire she's breaking down in tears about the colleagues
that they've lost and couldn't save and to hear our
(33:18):
wonderful firefighters. We're following want to see to talk about
the toll on it's taken on her family and her life.
It was just it's just heartbreaking, you know, and it's
it's not okay. I wanted people to understand that what's
going on is not okay. People are suffering. We can't
just keep doing this without really hurting people. We can
(33:39):
do a better job taking better care of our residents
and our responders. Filmmaker Lucy Walker. If you're enjoying this conversation,
tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the
Thing on the I Heart app, Spotify or wherever you
get your podcasts. When we come back, Lucy talks about
(34:00):
her transition from loving theater to making documentary films. I'm
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Lucy
Walker went to Oxford and graduated with top honors in literature.
(34:23):
She got involved with theater at school, but soon became
curious about making movies. I was very lucky in the
UK again, this wonderful. I grew up in the UK.
It had a fantastic free systems, had a fantastic education,
and then I was very lucky because I want a
fulbright scholarship to go to n y U for graduate
film school, which was a real golden ticket for me
(34:45):
to come to New York City and study with incredible
teachers all around the world, including some Russian teachers that
at all in the collapse of communism. Come and we're
in New York teaching you were just geniuses and monin
school Sasi in Spightly in all these incredible alumni and
female filmmakers there were just you know, women directors, which
(35:05):
I was. When I was growing up in the UK,
there hadn't been any role models for me as a
female director. So it's really really exciting to come to
New York and and being affected with that kind of
independent filmmaking spirit. And at the time actually documentaries weren't
very big, but then in the nineties there were these
new exciting digital cameras came out and suddenly you could
(35:26):
afford to get your hands on a camera and even
without a script, to start shooting stuff. And then of
course Avid's and these nonlinear editing systems came out, and
that for documentary was huge transformation because before, as you know,
you need a script and you need actors to tell
a story because real life is kind of difficult to
make interesting. But when you had your cheaper, fantastic cameras
(35:50):
that you could still blow up the video to see
on a big screen, and it still started to look good.
By two thousand, we were having sort of digital video
that look decent, and we're also having these editing systems
that meant that you could actually really edit, fine tune
with a whole bunch of stuff. You could take a
big haystack and make a really finely crafted story out
of it without losing your mind. Because before you had,
(36:11):
like when you were cutting on film that was so
laborious to edit before, and suddenly it was just computer
editing and you could click a button and compare different
versions or make music videos and all this just amazingly fun, beautiful,
dynamic stuff. And so that was this moment suddenly where
documentaries became really exciting, and I thought you could actually
make real life into a really exciting, watchable story documentary
(36:37):
because actually I was loved working with actors and wanted
to do scripted stuff. What's what's stopping you? Oh, it's
been tough. No, I'm always trying to make fiction films,
and honestly, it's tough for any director, and maybe even
tougher as a female. I'm not sure, but now I
grew up in England actually directing theater. That was my
big love, and at Oxford I was every term I
(36:57):
directed different play and there was so much young talent
at Oxford University and I realized at a young age
that I was not a very good actor. But if
you did this thing called directing, you've got to be
around the actors and around the plays and to put
on a fantastic show and for the actress to have
all that they needed to do their incredible performances. But
I didn't have to get on the stage myself. So
(37:20):
that's how I became a director. And then I realized, oh,
but wait, but film is even cooler because then you
can do the cool shots and you can do close ups.
And I loved actually watching movies more than I loved
watching theater. And I thought, okay, well, I could I
even be a director of movies. And that's when I
applied to n YU and was lucky enough to get
(37:40):
in and learn how to direct movies. But it was
only later on that I thought, oh, these documentaries are
pretty cool because now I can make movies out of
real people's lives. And so that's been really really incredible
privilege of a career. And I've loved exploring the world
and meeting so many people and telling, you know, the
(38:02):
stories of the courage and heroism of everyday people. And
I've loved this, but I have to confess it is tough.
Give me actors and a script, and that is the
fun way to tell a story. You've been recognized multiple
times for these films. You were shortlisted for five Oscars,
(38:24):
of which you were nominated for two. Waste Land was
that about the favelas? And that's exactly right. Yeah, it's
setting the favela in the largest garbage dump in the world,
an incredible artist as an incredible project with the people
that live in the favela in Rio, That's right. And
then the tsunami and the cherry blossom, And are we
talking about the tsunami that was the Fukushima event exactly,
(38:47):
the one in Japan. Exactly, that's right. And were you
able to get anywhere near Fukushima? I would imagine no,
I was close as you'd want to be, that's right,
with a Geiga counter making sure I wasn't too close
for too long and getting too radioactive. But yeah, no,
it was that was fascinating. That was I was actually
originally supposed to be making a little film about cherry blossom,
(39:08):
which I love, and this beautiful In Japan, they're obsessed
with the cherry blossom and this is beautiful season. When
the cherry bossom comes out, they celebrate spring and they
sit under the trees and and sort of party with
the cherry blossom and write poetry. And this was always
a sort of dream I I had, And so I
was all set to go and make a little film
when the terrible tsunami earthquake disaster happened, and I thought
(39:35):
about running away and not making the film, and I thought, gosh, well,
if the cherry blossom season is going to mean anything,
it's going to mean the most this year when people
are really suffering. And so I sort of was the
only person flying into Japan that day along with my cinematographer,
and we made this film with the Japanese survivors of
(39:56):
the earthquake, tsunami, radiation disaster, and we kind of begin
the film with the tsunami and end with the cherry
blossom coming and the relationship with the cherry bosoms of
comforts everyone and lifts them into spring and new life
and new growth. That it was really an exquisite film,
and it was amazing that it was nominative for the
Oscars as well as Emmys and stuff. So yeah, I've
(40:18):
been really lucky that my films have been recognized, these
two films, the tsunami film and also the fire film.
I think that's actually why I thought, Okay, I can
make this film about the fires, because I had made
that film about the tsunami, and I thought, I have
made films about the courage and grace and resiliency of
the amazing people that you can see in these disaster situations.
(40:43):
When you see human beings rise to the challenges that
the most horrifying, it's very captivating and you learn a lot.
And I think I had the confidence to begin Bring
your Own Brigade, which is a really difficult film to
make actually, because far is a really overwhelming problem and
it's much easy to pretend it's not happening and just
(41:04):
drive on past that fire and hope for the best, right,
but to really dig in and understand it like I
wanted to that I think I had the confidence because
I had done that previous film about disaster. Now, documentary
film has exploded in the last twenty years. Everybody's buying
documentary films and wanting to program documentary films During your career,
(41:25):
have you noticed that as well? Yeah, absolutely, Well I
feel like we do have thanks to this amazing technological
revolution of fantastic cameras where you can afford to shoot
a bunch of stuff, and fantastic editing computers where you
can really arrange that stuff to perfection without losing your mind,
that you can really craft real life, and that we've
(41:48):
really got these windows into these worlds now that we
can make incredible films that really kind of magical instruments,
you know, as the microscope helps us peer into tiny cells,
or the telescope help peer far away into stars. I
feel like the documentary films can actually be a machine
to glimpse how life happens. You know, when you see
(42:08):
a wonderful documentary, you kind of get this perspective of
how life actually unfolds, or how something works in the
world or story that for me, it's just fascinating glimpses
into the kind of mechanics and machinery of how things
actually are, and that's just an incredible new thing that
(42:29):
the technology has afforded us that does give wonderful actors
and scripts and run for their money. So I think
now that documentaries are fascinating to people, and I think
that there's room for both now, which is really really exciting.
So everyone loves watching, you know, fantastic movies where the
story is written to perfection and performed to perfection by
(42:50):
the best actors in the best locations and the best
costumes and all that glorious production value that we love.
Yet there's something about the reality and that these are
real people, this is a real situation, this is a
real story that's also really fascinating powerful, that's right. So
I love the fact that right now in the world
that we have both. And I think also with the
(43:10):
streamers and these new platforms, people that the streamers know
that see the numbers and they see that audiences are
really loving unscripted and nonfiction, and that's given them the
confidence and the ability to commission more of it. And
so I feel like there's room for everything. And we're
finding these different audiences and serving these different audiences and
(43:31):
different curiosities, and I think that's really terrific. What are
you working on now? Oh, good question. I can say
I'm very fascinated with psychedelic science and the incredible science
that's coming in that shows that psychedelic molecules are actually
incredibly full of promise to treat the hardest to treat
(43:51):
conditions that we have, depression, anxiety, o c D, PTSD,
eating disorders, the kind of anguish you have if you're
confronting a terminal diagnosis. These are things that are current
medicines have nothing for addictions, alcoholism, and these are really
really hard to treat conditions causing huge, huge suffering around
(44:11):
the world. And it turns out that these psychedelic molecules
are actually showing incredible promise. I'm really excited about that,
and I have a couple of projects that will hopefully
be coming out soon. As my friend once said, he
said he would take acid when he was young because
he wanted to tear down walls, the walls of perception
that blocked him from seeing things in the best way
(44:33):
possible or the most open minded way possible. And that
was when he was young, and then he got older
and he said, it took me so long to build
those walls back up again. I can't bear the idea
of tearing them down again. Told me he was not
going to be dropping acid in his fifties and sixties,
and well, he might be a lucky and happy person
in his fifties. I think there's a lot of older
people though, that kind of get stuck in the wrong rut, right,
(44:56):
And as we get older, it gets it can get harder,
and people and get stuck in maladaptive defense mechanisms for example,
that might have outlived their usefulness that actually might be
getting in your own way. And for some people, actually,
for some people, tearing down those wolves can be a
real gift as an intervention life. Well, listen, I want
(45:17):
to say I'm a great fan of yours. I'm a
great admirer of your films. Thank you very much. Stay
safe out there, and we'll talk to you down the road,
I hope. Okay, what a treat. Thank you, Lucy Walker.
Her documentary about the California wildfires, Bring Your Own Brigade,
is streaming on Paramount Plus. This episode was produced by
(45:41):
Carrie Donohue, Zach McNeice, and Kathleen Russo. Our engineer is
Frank Imperial, here's the thing. Is brought to you by
iHeart Radio, complete thing to be the way into
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. British documentary filmmaker Lucy Walker
has been compared to legendary director and Here's the Thing
guest Errol Morris. She's made five feature films and been
nominated for an Academy Award twice, first for Waste Land,
(00:25):
about an artist who works with materials found in landfills
in Brazil, and the second time for a short doc
called The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, about the two
thousand eleven Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster. Her critically acclaimed
two thousand thirteen film The Crash Wheel followed snowboarder Kevin
(00:46):
Pierce after he suffered a traumatic brain injury while training
for the Winter Olympics. Lucy Walker's latest film is Bring
your Own Brigade, a reference to wealthy residents who hire
their own but firefighters to protect property during forest fires.
The film focuses on two two thousand eighteen California wildfires,
(01:10):
the camp Fire, which nearly destroyed the town of Paradise
and killed people, and the Woolsey Fire, which erupted on
the same day, and destroyed large parts of Malibu. Bring
your Own Brigade attempts to answer an urgent question, why
are there more catastrophic wildfires, not just in California but
(01:31):
around the world, and what can we do to mitigate
their destruction. Walker's film says these fires can be blamed
on more than just climate change. When she started her reporting,
she followed several firefighters and learned a great deal about
their work, including how these fires get named. You know,
when a fire breaks out, the operating commands just pick
(01:54):
a name quite quickly, and it's not a great deal
of thought that goes into it. They just instantly need
names for incidents, especially because with California often with the
wind events driving multiple incidents all at once. You just
need to know that the Dixie fire isn't the Wolsey fire,
isn't the campfire. And they'll often name them for the
(02:14):
road that they break out on or a facility nearby.
For example, Camp the Campfire came from Camp Creek Road,
which was where the fire was first spotted. So it's
kind of a loose improvisation that they come up with
these names. And then, in the case of the campfire,
which became later on the most deadly in history. It
(02:35):
was obviously achieved a great sort of notoriety that name,
but that their their coin very quickly. You first became
aware of this story when were you living in southern California. Then, Yeah,
I'm originally from England. And the Great Fire of London,
which actually followed the plague and kind of put out
the plague, so to speak, because it killed all the rats,
was in sixteen sixty six, and you think of fire
(02:58):
as a medieval problem in London. And then I moved
to New York house in film school and grad school
in New York, and again you think of urban fires,
but you think of it as a problem that we've
come together to solve. And then I moved to California,
and I was confused because the hillside was on fire
and people were driving down the freeway as if this
(03:18):
was just business as usual, and I was scared. I
just knew there was a thread that if you tugged
on it, there was a cognitive dissonance. I didn't know
what was wrong, but I knew that I had a
feeling that fire shouldn't be burning and there must be
(03:38):
a problem because houses were burning and people were dying,
and this fire problem, actually since I moved here in
the two thousands, kept getting worse and worse and worse.
The fires seemed to be getting bigger and I wasn't
imagining it. And finally there was the biggest fire ever
in California at the time, that Thomas Fire, and I
(04:00):
had some friends that were caught up in it, both
on the resident side and the firefighter side. I have.
That was all around Santa Barbara, Oh, High Ventura, sort
of just north of Los Angeles. It began in December
twenty seventeen, so very late, at the time when the
rains would normally have come. And you start to learn
(04:20):
about the climate in southern California and that the real
danger zone in southern California is when the winds kick up,
the seasonal winds kick up, but the rains have not
yet arrived. And what's been happening increasingly with climate change
is that the winds are arriving, but the fuels are
still dry, and there's only a few rain events in
(04:42):
southern California. I think on average about five times you
get these big rains, but it will only rain about
a few times a year. And obviously there's normally a
variability in that because statistically it's there's always going to
be a variance. It's not always five a year, it's
never been that. It's has been on average that. But
with climate change mixing things up more and more and
(05:04):
the ongoing drought that we've had, there's less and less rain,
and the winds are actually more because the temperature gradients
actually tend to push up and make stronger wind events
that are really drive these really out of control. Big
fires always have a huge wind event at their back.
They don't just happen on an ordinary day. They'll happen
(05:25):
when the wind conditions are at their worst. And so
you start to learn that the full season in southern
California is the worst. It's a little different in other
states where you get far as earlier in the season.
You'll get winds earlier in Arizona and northern California, in
Oregon and Washington, the western United States, it's not necessarily
quite so late in southern California, where the rains come
(05:47):
really quite late. That's how the season moves. My brother
lives in Santa Barbara, and he has moved and kind
of hopped between Monte Cedar, when Santa Barbara itself and
the in that area. He's been there for many, many years.
The mud slides were the next act after that. That's
exactly right, the mudslides that came pouring through and crushed
(06:09):
many homes and killed a couple, killed twenty two rain
mud slide exactly, and I had friends in Montecito, and
that was exactly what made me get up and stopped
being a spectator and start to say, where is the
documentary film about this? Because for me, documentary films are
the best, single, best way I have as a viewer
(06:32):
to understand a complex issue. When I see a great
documentary made by one of my colleagues, I really feel
like I know the story inside out. If the reporting
is good, if the story and the characters really get
me in there, I feel like I get my arms
around the issue. I really understand in three sixty what's
really going on. And there are so many complicated issues
that I've really understood for the first time because of
(06:53):
a great documentary film, and there wasn't one about fires,
And finally I thought, my gosh, if there isn't one,
I'm going to have to do it. Because when that
mud slide. The debrief flow happened. It was the end
of that same fire I was talking about, and started
in December seventeen and then January. This like just greight train,
but you know, you can't even describe that, Like the
(07:15):
hillside came with boulders embedded inside. Exactly, there were boulders
inside the mass. That was horrifying, Yes, exactly. Sort of
this gigantic, epic, tragic sliding down of the beautiful mountain
side because after the fire, the all the roots had
been um the trees have been burned, and you get
(07:37):
all this slickness, and when the rain comes down, you're
a great risk of the mud slides because there's nothing
to stick the earth the side of the mountain, and
it all comes down and kind of cannonballs and snowballs
and and builds up such momentum that houses, you know,
were actually lost into the ocean and never found. I mean,
just such momentum. And over twenty people were killed in
(07:59):
the most horrifying way. I mean, I've been in many
traumatic disaster zones and I've never been quite so shocked
and stunned as what I saw in Montecito. And I'm
so sorry your brother was affected because that whole community
was just so kids at the school, yeah, devastating, and
I thought, my goodness, what is going on? And I
(08:21):
had friends who are both firefighters and residents, and I thought,
somebody has to tell this story. Somebody has to I
couldn't understand that even as close as Los Angeles and
with all the filmmakers in California, that no one was
really describing the awful, intense tragedy that these people were
going through. And I thought, Okay, well, I'll step up.
(08:43):
I want to understand what is happening with these fires
and then the debris flows that can sometimes be they're
kind of kicking the tail, and let's really get to
the bottom of this and understand what the residents and
the responders are going through because it's getting worse and
I don't like it, and are we safe here? And
(09:03):
let's find out is there anything that we can do
about it? And my initial assumption had been that it
was all climate change, because it really made sense, right,
we have the worst fires ever and we have the
hottest summers ever, and the climate change that I follow,
the science on these trends really point to that, and
(09:24):
initially I thought that was the only thing driving these fires,
and so I thought that the cause wasn't going to
be too hard to pin down. But actually, while climate
change is happening and climate change is exacerbating the problem,
for sure, there are other factors. And that's actually great
(09:44):
because there are some things that we could do now.
Whether or not we do do them is something that
you've touched on. And the film really blew my mind
as I was making it, understanding how things actually happen.
Even when you can fix things, it's not true that
they do get fixed. And so I sort of went
(10:07):
on a whole journey filmmaker Lucy Walker. If you enjoy
conversations about the challenges of making documentary films, check out
my episode with the directors of Making a Murderer. The
controversial series explored the case of Stephen Avery, Wisconsin, man
(10:27):
who was wrongly convicted of rape, released after two decades
in prison, and then convicted of murder. The series was
written and directed by Laura Richardi and Moira Dimas. It
just seemed like, you know, he was this incredible window
through which to look at our system. You know, if
we followed this man's story, we would go from one
(10:49):
extreme of the system to the other. So as I
was saying, you know, we had no money, but what
we what we could put into it with time, which
is actually an incredibly valuable asset. And after doing a
preliminary week of shooting in December, realized this was something
we wanted to pursue, and we sublet our apartment in
New York. We've got an apartment in Mantuak and we
(11:10):
lived there, you know, more on than off, for close
to two years. To hear more of my conversation with
the filmmakers behind Making a Murderer, go to Here's the
Thing dot org. After the break, Lucy Walker explains why
some California residents resist taking even basic steps to prevent
(11:32):
forest fires. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to
Here's the Thing. Lucy Walker is originally from the UK.
She moved to Los Angeles and two thousand eight and
quickly began exploring what was causing the huge fires around California.
(11:56):
I've been observing these fires and wondering and and been frightened.
But that fire, the largest ever far in California, the
Thomas Fire, with the terrible debris law in Montecito in
I thought, oh my goodness, I'm going to have to
make a film about this, and I began to make
the film. Then the film actually features fires that happened
(12:18):
later in Malibu and Paradise. But I've already been working
on the film for a year at that point when
those fires came along. Now, you were, I don't know
if this is the word, monitoring the fire situation in
southern California. So when Paradise happens, when Malibu happens, you're
you're already there monitoring those that kind of activity. Curry exactly.
(12:40):
And I've already been filming a great deal and already
made friends with these incredible firefighters, actually the incredible firefighters
in the Montecito Fire Department, and been embedded with them
on various fires and cools and knew just who to
cool up. And when the as far as broke out
(13:01):
in Malibu and Paradise, actually I saw it on Twitter
early that morning, and I instantly was able to cool
out the firefighter zone that I knew actually in Montecito
and hopping with them as they were being deployed down
to the fire in Malibu, and we knew the fire command,
and we were able to really film within those incidents
(13:23):
immediately and know what we're looking at and know how
to film it because we've been doing a lot of
preparation and filming by that stage. The film obviously has
some ghastly optics there. You you lay audio tracks of
people calling, or there's some kind of recorded voice you
(13:47):
have of someone screaming this blood curdling scream as they're
being engulfed in. The visual might not be you know,
their visual, but you lay that track against a car
proceeding down the tunnel of flames. Everyone's trying to leave.
I want to make sure our listeners understand that up
in Paradise the campfire, everyone tries to leave at the
(14:09):
same time. Yeah, I mean something that we get into
because we start with the fires, and you're so right.
It's the most horrifying and hellish scenes and people were
killed in Paradise and the most hellish, terrifying way imaginable,
And we were able to gather so much material, including
the nine and one calls and the radio traffic, so
(14:31):
that you really get a sense of what that's like.
We meet a girl who couldn't persuade her mom to
evacuate because she hadn't had an evacuation warning and she
has to leave because she's so scared, and unfortunately her
mom did succumb to the fire. And all these terrifying
stories of a woman who just had had a C
section and she is in the car but she can't
(14:52):
somebody's giving her right out to escape, but she can't
feel her legs. She's just had an eperdural, and she
has this newborn baby who's just been born by hours
earlier by c section, and she has to say to
the driver of the car, who she's never met, if
it comes to it, just take my baby and run,
because I can't move and I'm going to die, but
I want my baby to have a chance to take
(15:13):
the baby and run. I mean, these scenes, you can't
imagine how traumatic they are. And then we sort of
don't stop there. Though it wasn't enough to me to
just show the horror. I wanted to understand what happens next?
How do we stop this happening again? Because I learned
that these communities burned over and over again, actually this
(15:34):
summer already with the Dixie Fire. That fire began right
where the campfire began, as well and burned right up
into the same community of having, causing our characters to
all be evacuated again. There was another far last year
that killed another twenty two people that was right next door.
And so what I wanted to understand is, well, how
are we stopping it or why are we having this problem?
(15:55):
And why are people living in these areas and building
these houses that burn over and over and over again.
Could we do better? And you start to understand it's
not sensible. When you figure out what should be happening
and you figure out what's actually happening, it's not the
same thing. So you would think that when people look
at developing an area for housing, they would think about
(16:19):
is fire safety and the cost to the homeowner and
also to the state a nation of these risks that
people are having. But in fact, there's an incentive locally
to approve all the building because a town wants more
residents because then they're going to have more tax revenue.
But nobody's actually thinking about what are they going to
be able to ensure these homes and who's going to
(16:41):
pay if these homes burned down. There's all these kind
of mismatched incentives and what's actually happening now to poor
homeowners is in the in the in these areas unexpectedly
now the insurance companies are cutting them off, and California
actually putting moratorium on insurance companies dropping their customers because
it was so sudden and so dire. But in future,
(17:02):
the truth with climate change and with this problem which
is not just caused by climate change but is escalating,
is if these homes are uninsurable, what's going to happen
to the residents if they burned down and a lot
of them are not going to be able to ensure
afford that, and there's going to be a huger burden,
and and we're seeing these problems sort of pile up.
(17:23):
It's the inability to get together and solve these complicated problems.
It really is just like it is with climate change,
that we have a complex problem on our hands, and
so we all need to really get together and have
sensible discussions about what we can all do to solve this.
It's not easy, but you really capture in the film
(17:46):
exactly where the problems are happening, exactly which conversations are
not happening, exactly where officials can't get voted out by
doing anything unpopular, and the town don't want to be
told what to do. So you see this town where
people were killed and eighteen thousand buildings were burned down.
(18:07):
Less than a year later, eighteen eighteen thousand structures lost,
not all of them homes. Some of them were buildings
that weren't homes, businesses, or or other structures, but eighteen
thousand structures lost. It was the most expensive disaster of
that year in the world. Less than a year later,
the town doesn't just vote against these measures, they eviscerate
(18:33):
their seven town council members for daring to suggest these measures,
many of which have no cost. A few of them,
like sprinklers, do have a cost associated but some like
actually changing the way that that you can have gutters,
so changing the rules around gutters that's free, and people
like their gutters. People don't want to be told what
to do about gutters. Even though the fire chief and
(18:57):
all the people that know how fire works begging them
to reconsider this, still this feeling that like, we don't
want to be told what to do. This is a
town where we do our own thing, and not being
able to have that complicated discussion with people about well,
that's great, but the unfortunate reality is that when your
(19:19):
home catches fire because you have this gutter with the
leaves stuck up there, you're also gonna catch fire to
your neighbor's homes, and then all the roads are going
to clog up, and it's a domino escalating problem. It's
similar to get the vaccination, not just for yourself but
for everybody else, exactly right, And you actually learn that
it's actually a really good analogy because that idea of
(19:41):
social distancing is exactly like there's a concept in fire
safety where you have this five ft defensible space they
call it, so you don't have anything flammable within five
ft of your house, and that's sort of like social distancing.
Then the aerosol dispersion is like the embers when you
have the virus that little particles that will come out
(20:01):
and infect people. That's actually the same as the embers.
That actually how far start is these ember storms get
carried by the wind and actually will catch So it's
a really eerily perfect analogy with the pandemic. So that
really got me thinking. Of course, another interesting thing about
the film is that in looking at these two fires
that were kicked off by the same wind event in Paradise.
(20:24):
They called it a red hill in a blue state.
So even though California is mostly Democratic state, this area
of Paradise in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada is
a much more moderate or even conservative area, lots of guns,
lots of Republicans, and much more rural sort of mindset.
(20:45):
And Malibu it's a much more democratic place and much
more well to do as well. So the socioeconomic disparity
was astonishing than Malibu. The average home price was over
ten times more than the average home price in Paradise
that burned. So it's really interesting, So describe what happened
in Malibu. The fire was aware, the fire was everywhere.
(21:07):
It was a huge fire. And you're right, Malibu is
such a gorgeous, gorgeous place just outside of Los Angeles
and just spectacular, spectacular countryside, spectacular scenery over the ocean.
But with those hills and canyons that give you these
spectacular views, you have a lot of vegetation and you
(21:28):
have a lot of wind, and when those winds just
line up just right, you get these terrible fires. And
on that day it was a monster and it was
in so many canyons and it was all going off
at once in this gigantic incident. It did. It burned
right into Point Doom, and everyone said, oh, the Point
never burns, and it did. And I'm sure you you too.
(21:52):
You know, I have friends that lost their homes there
and was able to film with them as they went
through that, and we were able to film with the
fire depart as they're driving around trying to fight this fire.
But it's huge, and the public didn't quite get it.
The public didn't quite understand that it wasn't sort of
the firefighter's fault for doing a bad job, whereas, in fact,
(22:12):
as fire was so humongous, and every firefighter was out
working without sleep for days on end, and yet you
just can't fight afar that big. And what was extraordinary
given the scale was that not more people died. At
least three people did die, and I forget how many
(22:33):
thousands of structures, but thousands and thousands and thousands of
incredible homes were lost, and it was devastating, and most
of those were not not in the Point, but up
in the hills on the other on the land side
of the highway. Yeah, exactly, like that exactly exactly, loads
of those canyons up there. You can just drive up there,
(22:55):
and it looked like, you know, instead of the normal vegetation,
it looked like a kind of like a kind of
singed pig hide or something. I can't describe this landscape,
but just looked everything was just burned and black, and
the houses, the footprints of the houses looked like ashtrays.
You can see that imprint of where the house would be, yes,
(23:16):
a different different colored material exactly. And then once in
a while just a strange building that you know, strangely
wouldn't have burned, or actually not so strangely, because some
of those buildings were actually designed not to burn, and
we did have the proper defensible space and there are
ways I learned that you could protect them. But it
was very surreal because you'd see some of the structures
(23:36):
did survive, but some areas that were whole canyons or
whole streets where all the structures were burned, and it
was absolutely devastating. And also, you have, it gave rise
to a lot of conspiracy theories, as with the pandemic.
You know, people would say to me and perfectly sensible
looking people that would start out, you know, seeming very smart.
(23:57):
We'd be having this conversation and certainly they'd start talking
about how it must be laser pointers because it was
so hard to account for the fact that some structures
had survived. But I learned about this, and I learned
that actually there are ways you can build homes that
mean that they do survive when the fire burns through,
as they burn through really often. Because I learned with Malibu,
(24:18):
these fires happened all the time, has happened over and
over again. I found all these films, and we show
in the movie, this extraordinary film about the bell Air
fire in the sixties, and there's this wonderful presenter, you know,
in three saying, I wonder if this was a one
in a million chance, or could this ever happen again?
And it's happened dozens of times since he asked that question.
(24:40):
These fires come through all the time. There was another
fire in Sonoma, in the beautiful wine country in northern California,
the Tubs fire, and that killed it over twenty people.
And remember driving on the four oh five through the
suppul oft to pass or actually my friend was and
he filmed like out of an epic film, you know,
(25:00):
like a Cecil B. Demill film the flames just because,
as you know, all those grasses when they draw out
ore a golden color to like a golden wheat color,
and you'd see, like you said, like a singed pigs high.
That was a funny reference. And then in the middle
of that of the burned yellow fields is the debris
(25:22):
from the house that burned down. And you'd see in
your film those box shaped the building envelope where the
house burned down. And he sent me the film of
the flames just roaring over the Supulvitan Pass near the
Getty Center, you know, and the flame just roaring as
people just drove through like it was another day in
(25:43):
l A. I want to ask you though, regarding the
campfire people in Paradise, and you said that after the
campfire they had other fires that were similar and came
right up to their door or whatever. Did they raise
their taxes to some kind of greater fire protection system
(26:04):
in place? No, because half the tax base was gone.
When I was filming, I was filming one incredible guy
who had an incredible blind mom, and they he was
the one person that managed to stay and defend his
home and successfully and live and I got to know him,
but he was one of seven people who were still
collecting their mail. And so you can understand that the
(26:25):
fire department, who I made friends with and fall in
love with, all these incredible firefighters in Paradise, half of
them were laid off after the fire because there was
no more tax dollars to pay for them and not
many people living in the town. And so you had
these poor, depressed firefighters with not much work to do
and having had half their colleagues lose their jobs. The
(26:48):
month after the campfire was absolutely brutal, but no, I mean,
FEMA stepped in with great resources for people. And it
was ironic to me because a lot of the people
in Paradise will tell me that they hate big government.
They don't know where their taxes go. But they're the
people who were able to buy, you know, trailers, or
(27:08):
get money from the female, which is the government, which
is what go our tax dollars go on right precisely
because there was female to pick up the pieces and
support people and buy a lot of people trailers and
or get people into new homes. And then you have
the economics, which is strange, but the home prices go
way up because you have a lot of people looking
(27:30):
for homes. And that's the sort of bizarre cycle that
we're in. A in a high fire zone like Paradise
or Malibu, that home cost goes up and up and up,
and same thing Montecito. And these home prices go up
and up, not because you have so many people desperate
for homes. They want to keep the kids in the school,
they want to stay in these beautiful communities, but there's
less housing and and so you see the cycle. And
(27:54):
in an immediate aftermath of a fire, there's actually less
risk of fire because you've kind of burned off all
that fuel. And so I think you get lulled into
a full sense of security because immediately there's no risk
of fire. You just want the continuity. You want to
move back. You want to have your life, you know,
back as quickly as possible. Naturally and understandably, people just
want to get back home. They want to rebuild or
(28:14):
have a new home or there's you know, get back
on track as quickly as possible. And then as the
years tit by and the fuel piles up, when the
risk of fire comes back, people kind of get a
little complacable that hasn't been a fire for a while,
so it'll probably be okay, But actually the risk is
building and as soon as the wind and the weather
(28:34):
lines up again, that fuel and the wind is just
going to be a recipe for disaster again. And so
you can kind of see how this problem keeps compounding
until we do something differently. What did you find that
in the way that the film shows that stubborn, entitled,
privileged Americans, independence Americans who just don't want to be
(28:57):
told what to do. Let me come of that decision
in my own way and in my own timing. I
have a complicated relationship with this question. It's a great question.
I'm from the UK, originally in Europe, and there is
more of a sense of the society coming together, and
we have a national health service. That's a really wonderful
(29:19):
gift that you always have free healthcare, and it's a
feeling that the state has your back and will protect you.
And yet I immigrated to the US, I have an
American passport. I personally you made that voyage myself because
it is exciting to stride out on your own and
try your luck and go west. Young woman right, And
(29:42):
I personally really relate to this desire for independence and individuality.
And and that's me. I'm a filmmaker and a creative
asked this person and a woman who wants to, you know,
use the voice and make the world a better place.
Personal I left my family behind, and I think about
(30:04):
these wonderful American immigrants whose footsteps I'm in, and the
people in these areas are often descended from gold miners,
and is the gold Rush and California was these rushes
of even today we have the Silicon Valley kind of rush,
but we've had aerospace, we've got wine, we've had a
punk rock, we've got the movies. I mean, the people
(30:24):
that recent people come to California are often to you know,
stride out on their own right. And and we have
that kind of community almost in our genes. And it's
exciting and it's entrepreneurial and it's driving the world's exciting economy. Right.
And at the same time, we have this challenge, which
is if we don't come together, we can't solve these
(30:47):
big problems. And we're literally burning alive, like literally when
the Christian imagination will be come up with the idea
of hell. It's burning fire pits, and this is actually
what we're creating for ourselves. Those scenes you see in
Paradise in Malibu with people try and escape through the
flames or even succumbing as eighty five people didn't paradise,
(31:07):
this is actually sort of our worst thing that we
can imagine. It's literally hell, and that's what we're doing.
And so how can we come together with the pandemic
with climate change? Because there are things that we can do,
but it does require us having difficult conversations with people
that might be in crisis, that may have just had
(31:28):
their homes burned down. But rather than just saying, sure,
build the same flammable home right there without having to
be told that you can't have your rose bush within
five ft of the front door, maybe we really need
to have these difficult conversations. Maybe we really need to
have difficult conversations about vaccination and the responsibility we have
(31:48):
to our other people as well as to ourselves, and
how we need to lean into the system of knowledge
called science, whether it's fire science or virology, to understand
the world, because it is the best system of knowledge
that we have, and if we ignore it, we ignore
it our at our peril and that we are dying
and suffering more. And as the world becomes terrifyingly more
(32:11):
challenging with climate change, are we going to put our
best minds on trying to mitigate these effects? Several firefighters,
I believe it was in either Paradise or or maybe
it was in Santa Barbara, they committed suicide. Cric they
had a suicide epidemic there. Yeah, you know, firefighters everywhere,
first responders everywhere, suffering from post traumatic stress. And really
(32:34):
the suicides, the suffering, the divorces, the depression, I mean,
lives are being really affected and the first responses are
at the sharp end of this. We're asking them to
do so so much, and the toll it takes is
actually too much for the human psyche to bear. And
I think we're just starting to learn about the toll
(32:56):
that it's taking. And I think the firefighters are really
trying to get better at supporting firefighters mental health. But
we are really learning. And it was so moving to
see fire she's breaking down in tears about the colleagues
that they've lost and couldn't save and to hear our
(33:18):
wonderful firefighters. We're following want to see to talk about
the toll on it's taken on her family and her life.
It was just it's just heartbreaking, you know, and it's
it's not okay. I wanted people to understand that what's
going on is not okay. People are suffering. We can't
just keep doing this without really hurting people. We can
(33:39):
do a better job taking better care of our residents
and our responders. Filmmaker Lucy Walker. If you're enjoying this conversation,
tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the
Thing on the I Heart app, Spotify or wherever you
get your podcasts. When we come back, Lucy talks about
(34:00):
her transition from loving theater to making documentary films. I'm
Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Lucy
Walker went to Oxford and graduated with top honors in literature.
(34:23):
She got involved with theater at school, but soon became
curious about making movies. I was very lucky in the
UK again, this wonderful. I grew up in the UK.
It had a fantastic free systems, had a fantastic education,
and then I was very lucky because I want a
fulbright scholarship to go to n y U for graduate
film school, which was a real golden ticket for me
(34:45):
to come to New York City and study with incredible
teachers all around the world, including some Russian teachers that
at all in the collapse of communism. Come and we're
in New York teaching you were just geniuses and monin
school Sasi in Spightly in all these incredible alumni and
female filmmakers there were just you know, women directors, which
(35:05):
I was. When I was growing up in the UK,
there hadn't been any role models for me as a
female director. So it's really really exciting to come to
New York and and being affected with that kind of
independent filmmaking spirit. And at the time actually documentaries weren't
very big, but then in the nineties there were these
new exciting digital cameras came out and suddenly you could
(35:26):
afford to get your hands on a camera and even
without a script, to start shooting stuff. And then of
course Avid's and these nonlinear editing systems came out, and
that for documentary was huge transformation because before, as you know,
you need a script and you need actors to tell
a story because real life is kind of difficult to
make interesting. But when you had your cheaper, fantastic cameras
(35:50):
that you could still blow up the video to see
on a big screen, and it still started to look good.
By two thousand, we were having sort of digital video
that look decent, and we're also having these editing systems
that meant that you could actually really edit, fine tune
with a whole bunch of stuff. You could take a
big haystack and make a really finely crafted story out
of it without losing your mind. Because before you had,
(36:11):
like when you were cutting on film that was so
laborious to edit before, and suddenly it was just computer
editing and you could click a button and compare different
versions or make music videos and all this just amazingly fun, beautiful,
dynamic stuff. And so that was this moment suddenly where
documentaries became really exciting, and I thought you could actually
make real life into a really exciting, watchable story documentary
(36:37):
because actually I was loved working with actors and wanted
to do scripted stuff. What's what's stopping you? Oh, it's
been tough. No, I'm always trying to make fiction films,
and honestly, it's tough for any director, and maybe even
tougher as a female. I'm not sure, but now I
grew up in England actually directing theater. That was my
big love, and at Oxford I was every term I
(36:57):
directed different play and there was so much young talent
at Oxford University and I realized at a young age
that I was not a very good actor. But if
you did this thing called directing, you've got to be
around the actors and around the plays and to put
on a fantastic show and for the actress to have
all that they needed to do their incredible performances. But
I didn't have to get on the stage myself. So
(37:20):
that's how I became a director. And then I realized, oh,
but wait, but film is even cooler because then you
can do the cool shots and you can do close ups.
And I loved actually watching movies more than I loved
watching theater. And I thought, okay, well, I could I
even be a director of movies. And that's when I
applied to n YU and was lucky enough to get
(37:40):
in and learn how to direct movies. But it was
only later on that I thought, oh, these documentaries are
pretty cool because now I can make movies out of
real people's lives. And so that's been really really incredible
privilege of a career. And I've loved exploring the world
and meeting so many people and telling, you know, the
(38:02):
stories of the courage and heroism of everyday people. And
I've loved this, but I have to confess it is tough.
Give me actors and a script, and that is the
fun way to tell a story. You've been recognized multiple
times for these films. You were shortlisted for five Oscars,
(38:24):
of which you were nominated for two. Waste Land was
that about the favelas? And that's exactly right. Yeah, it's
setting the favela in the largest garbage dump in the world,
an incredible artist as an incredible project with the people
that live in the favela in Rio, That's right. And
then the tsunami and the cherry blossom, And are we
talking about the tsunami that was the Fukushima event exactly,
(38:47):
the one in Japan. Exactly, that's right. And were you
able to get anywhere near Fukushima? I would imagine no,
I was close as you'd want to be, that's right,
with a Geiga counter making sure I wasn't too close
for too long and getting too radioactive. But yeah, no,
it was that was fascinating. That was I was actually
originally supposed to be making a little film about cherry blossom,
(39:08):
which I love, and this beautiful In Japan, they're obsessed
with the cherry blossom and this is beautiful season. When
the cherry bossom comes out, they celebrate spring and they
sit under the trees and and sort of party with
the cherry blossom and write poetry. And this was always
a sort of dream I I had, And so I
was all set to go and make a little film
when the terrible tsunami earthquake disaster happened, and I thought
(39:35):
about running away and not making the film, and I thought, gosh, well,
if the cherry blossom season is going to mean anything,
it's going to mean the most this year when people
are really suffering. And so I sort of was the
only person flying into Japan that day along with my cinematographer,
and we made this film with the Japanese survivors of
(39:56):
the earthquake, tsunami, radiation disaster, and we kind of begin
the film with the tsunami and end with the cherry
blossom coming and the relationship with the cherry bosoms of
comforts everyone and lifts them into spring and new life
and new growth. That it was really an exquisite film,
and it was amazing that it was nominative for the
Oscars as well as Emmys and stuff. So yeah, I've
(40:18):
been really lucky that my films have been recognized, these
two films, the tsunami film and also the fire film.
I think that's actually why I thought, Okay, I can
make this film about the fires, because I had made
that film about the tsunami, and I thought, I have
made films about the courage and grace and resiliency of
the amazing people that you can see in these disaster situations.
(40:43):
When you see human beings rise to the challenges that
the most horrifying, it's very captivating and you learn a lot.
And I think I had the confidence to begin Bring
your Own Brigade, which is a really difficult film to
make actually, because far is a really overwhelming problem and
it's much easy to pretend it's not happening and just
(41:04):
drive on past that fire and hope for the best, right,
but to really dig in and understand it like I
wanted to that I think I had the confidence because
I had done that previous film about disaster. Now, documentary
film has exploded in the last twenty years. Everybody's buying
documentary films and wanting to program documentary films During your career,
(41:25):
have you noticed that as well? Yeah, absolutely, Well I
feel like we do have thanks to this amazing technological
revolution of fantastic cameras where you can afford to shoot
a bunch of stuff, and fantastic editing computers where you
can really arrange that stuff to perfection without losing your mind,
that you can really craft real life, and that we've
(41:48):
really got these windows into these worlds now that we
can make incredible films that really kind of magical instruments,
you know, as the microscope helps us peer into tiny cells,
or the telescope help peer far away into stars. I
feel like the documentary films can actually be a machine
to glimpse how life happens. You know, when you see
(42:08):
a wonderful documentary, you kind of get this perspective of
how life actually unfolds, or how something works in the
world or story that for me, it's just fascinating glimpses
into the kind of mechanics and machinery of how things
actually are, and that's just an incredible new thing that
(42:29):
the technology has afforded us that does give wonderful actors
and scripts and run for their money. So I think
now that documentaries are fascinating to people, and I think
that there's room for both now, which is really really exciting.
So everyone loves watching, you know, fantastic movies where the
story is written to perfection and performed to perfection by
(42:50):
the best actors in the best locations and the best
costumes and all that glorious production value that we love.
Yet there's something about the reality and that these are
real people, this is a real situation, this is a
real story that's also really fascinating powerful, that's right. So
I love the fact that right now in the world
that we have both. And I think also with the
(43:10):
streamers and these new platforms, people that the streamers know
that see the numbers and they see that audiences are
really loving unscripted and nonfiction, and that's given them the
confidence and the ability to commission more of it. And
so I feel like there's room for everything. And we're
finding these different audiences and serving these different audiences and
(43:31):
different curiosities, and I think that's really terrific. What are
you working on now? Oh, good question. I can say
I'm very fascinated with psychedelic science and the incredible science
that's coming in that shows that psychedelic molecules are actually
incredibly full of promise to treat the hardest to treat
(43:51):
conditions that we have, depression, anxiety, o c D, PTSD,
eating disorders, the kind of anguish you have if you're
confronting a terminal diagnosis. These are things that are current
medicines have nothing for addictions, alcoholism, and these are really
really hard to treat conditions causing huge, huge suffering around
(44:11):
the world. And it turns out that these psychedelic molecules
are actually showing incredible promise. I'm really excited about that,
and I have a couple of projects that will hopefully
be coming out soon. As my friend once said, he
said he would take acid when he was young because
he wanted to tear down walls, the walls of perception
that blocked him from seeing things in the best way
(44:33):
possible or the most open minded way possible. And that
was when he was young, and then he got older
and he said, it took me so long to build
those walls back up again. I can't bear the idea
of tearing them down again. Told me he was not
going to be dropping acid in his fifties and sixties,
and well, he might be a lucky and happy person
in his fifties. I think there's a lot of older
people though, that kind of get stuck in the wrong rut, right,
(44:56):
And as we get older, it gets it can get harder,
and people and get stuck in maladaptive defense mechanisms for example,
that might have outlived their usefulness that actually might be
getting in your own way. And for some people, actually,
for some people, tearing down those wolves can be a
real gift as an intervention life. Well, listen, I want
(45:17):
to say I'm a great fan of yours. I'm a
great admirer of your films. Thank you very much. Stay
safe out there, and we'll talk to you down the road,
I hope. Okay, what a treat. Thank you, Lucy Walker.
Her documentary about the California wildfires, Bring Your Own Brigade,
is streaming on Paramount Plus. This episode was produced by
(45:41):
Carrie Donohue, Zach McNeice, and Kathleen Russo. Our engineer is
Frank Imperial, here's the thing. Is brought to you by
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