Ray McCormack and Basil Gelpke's A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash is a startling eco-documentary looking at the phenomenon of Peak Oil - the point when the non-renewable fossil fuel's production starts to decrease. And if no replacement energy source emerges in its place, well, it's back to the horse and cart for future generations.

We met up with Irish director McCormack to find out more about the end of the world as we know it...

Tell us where your passion to make A Crude Awakening came from...
I moved to Switzerland in 2000 and met Basil [Gelpke, Ray's co-director], and we were looking for something to do and couldn't find a project. I'm always looking for environmental issues anyway - I studied environmental policy here in London before I moved to Switzerland, and I had never come across this phenomenon of Peak Oil. As soon as Basil explained peak oil to me, it was totally clear that we should make the film. He had approached me to produce because he had wanted to direct it, but I talked him into letting me direct with him.

You've got a lot of talking heads in the movie and shoot at far-flung places like the disused oilfields of Azerbaijan and Venezuela. Tell us about the logistics of making the film...
Basil shot a lot of the film. I did a lot of the post-production, and that's how we split up the work. I didn't go to Baku [in Azerbaijan] but he told me what it was like and it's not so easy to work there. Getting access to some of the fields that are no longer in operation was difficult - it's devastation, it's like a post-apocalypse landscape. They're not just disused fields, it's quite shocking when you see it for the first time.

You've assembled a lot of experts from the petroleum industry. How easy was it to get them?
Surprisingly easy. There was a conscious decision to talk to people who had been in the industry or still were. It was easier to get people to talk who were working in an advisory capacity these days and not sitting on a board or government. So we have former ministers for oil, we have former CEOs of oil companies, and they want to set the record straight, in a way. Despite the fact that you could say they were from the conservative end of the political spectrum, they were or are industry insiders.

The oil industry is obviously a very powerful lobby. What kind of response did you get from the industry itself when you were making the documentary?
A muted response. Nobody actually said they didn't want to be interviewed for the film, but serving CEOs and prominent people within the oil majors never said yes and never said no. So we don't have the CEOs of Shell or Exxon in the film, for these reasons.

Tell us about finding the archive footage, because you've unearthed some great material...
The internet is a great help, obviously, but we also had a researcher based in Washington, where the national archives are; we also had an associate producer based in Texas who went to NASA. It was an adventure and a wonderful one, and it was surprising how much stuff was out there. It's not so much finding the material, it's deciding which pieces work for you. Because the oil industry was such a big and central part of American life, and still is - oil is almost entirely responsible for it being the number one economy in the world. There's a whole range of industrial films and cartoons sitting in archives, and it really was a joy to go through it.

The film feels like a labour of love. How much time did you dedicate to it...
Certainly at the beginning it was a full-time job for Basil shooting, and then I came in after he had shot some material and it's been a full-time job for me for two years now - making the film, completing the post-production... I've enjoyed it immensely. It's the first film for both of us, even though we've been in the industry a long time, and it's kind of like your first record or your first book, I suppose - you've an awful lot of ideas and experience concentrated in that film.

Your film delivers a Doomsday message to the audience at the end. How disappointed will you be if people don't react to the problem you highlight?

We're not prepared for what's around the corner, and that's the message of the film

We made a conscious decision when we were editing the film to structure it so that it didn't have a happy ending or let people off the hook in any way. I think a lot of people think that the men in white coats will come along with some wonderful technologies and save the day, and we made a point of exploring that towards the end of the film and finding out where we really stand in that regard. And the news is not that good, and we didn't want to shy away from that. We didn't want to let people walk out of the cinema feeling 'There is a potential disaster coming, but it will be averted.' Because at this point in time no one can really say that. We're not prepared for what's around the corner, and that's the message of the film. We're not trying to scare people, we're trying to wake them up.

You're screening on the back of An Inconvenient Truth winning the Best Documentary at this year's Academy Awards...
It was wonderful that an environmental doc won an Oscar, that was great news.

But were you ever tempted to go down the route of getting a 'name' on board to narrate or present the film?
That's what everybody said we should do. When you're researching and structuring a film, and afterwards when you're cutting it, the content dictates the form of the film. The Al Gore film was very much about following him on his lecture tour, and him explaining global warming. The person who came up with the peak oil explanation, Dr MK Hubbert, is sadly no longer alive, but I think if we'd just had someone like him standing in front of a blackboard explaining it, it might not have been such an interesting film.

Al Gore, now that he's not in the hands of spin doctors, is a very engaging personality and he does a really good job in that film. But unlike in An Inconvenient Truth, we felt the need to back up the evidence with experts, so it just didn't lend itself to having a personality.

You've made the film as a wake up call but how are you going to get people to see the film?
When we set out to make the documentary, our aims were to finish the film, maybe have it shown in some festivals, and if we got lucky have it shown on a couple of TV stations. But our expectations have been hugely exceeded. The film is showing in cinemas in Canada, in Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand, and it'll be on primetime television in North America later in the year. People are responding to the film in film festivals, and distributors and broadcasters are responding to that, which is great.

A Crude Awakening; The Oil Crash is released in UK cinemas on Friday 9th November 2007.

Adrian Hennigan | Published 08 November 07

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