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