Al Gore Doesn’t Back Away From ‘An Inconvenient Truth’
by Ky N. Nguyen
At the end of 2000, former Vice President Al Gore narrowly missed fulfilling his long-held ambition to become president of the United States. What was next for a man, still relatively young, who’d devoted most of his life to public service? Out of office for the first time in years, he faced a big transition.
Having an epiphany, Gore realized his next calling. He would leverage his still high visibility to educate the public about the frightening dangers of global warming. He dusted off the slide show he’d presented to Congress, taking the Kodak carousel on the road to personally reach out to audiences.
Even after hundreds of lecture halls, Gore could only talk to so many people. One of those was producer Laurie David, who suggested that a movie would be capable of spreading the gospel to an exponentially larger population. That idea became “An Inconvenient Truth,” a theatrically released documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim, a veteran of docs, feature films and television.
In Gore’s office near the White House, The Washington Diplomat interviewed Gore and Guggenheim. Initially, the filmmaker had difficulty figuring out how to adapt Gore’s slide show to the silver screen. “I would have to translate that into a movie. We’d have to describe his story,” Guggenheim said.
“You don’t think people connect to scientific data,” Gore quipped as he relaxed comfortably, leaning back in his rocking chair.
“The most interesting thing is that Al has this passionate connection with the data, and you feel it,” observed Guggenheim.
When I mentioned having a scientific and engineering background, Gore replied, “Good. We’re kindred spirits then.”
Gore described his working relationship with Guggenheim: “After we talked for a while, I understood how he shared my goals. I gained a lot of respect for his way of thinking and his approach to the movie. Once you have that level of trust, then it becomes a mutual effort to try to get the message onto film.
“Of course, I know nothing about getting things on film, but I’ve tried to learn a lot about global warming. So we strengthened one another in the things that we respectively knew and didn’t know. Now, he knows all about global warming, and I still know nothing about making films.”
Gore pointed out that Guggenheim selected the film’s anecdotes sharing pivotal moments in the former vice president’s life. “I would not have wanted to have those personal stories in it and would have been against that whole idea, except that he convinced me that the viewers of the movie would have to connect to a personal narrative. And then he convinced me that he would be able to do them in a very sensitive way, which I think he did. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out,” Gore said.
Obviously, the 2000 election was a major turning point. “Almost immediately after the election, I took the old slides back out and started giving the slide show again. It used to be literally a slide show in Kodak carousels. I pulled them out of the boxes and held them up to the light.
“I redid the show. I gave it for the first time, and all the slides were backward. It takes so much time to change them all. I couldn’t do that in the middle…. I just had to verbally flip them in the audience’s mind. I’m not sure I succeeded, but it was an interesting exercise,” Gore recalled.
“I went back home to Nashville. My wife Tipper said, ‘I knew I should have put those in there for you. By the way, Mr. Information Superhighway, we have computers now.’
“That’s when I switched them to computer graphics. That was the key step because it enabled me to evolve the presentation much more rapidly. New images were much easier to add on the computer.”
A board member of Apple Computer, Gore remarked, “The new 17-inch Macbook Pro with the Intel chip became available yesterday. I’ve been using 15 inches, but I prefer the larger screen.”
Gore explained how his slide show has evolved: “Since I picked it back up five years ago, there are a lot of new images. Five years ago, there were probably only about 50 or 60 images. Now, there are at least 400. I probably have at least 1,500. But of those, I only use 400 at a time because you can’t do more than that without wearing out your welcome.
“The message is still the same as it was. Hurricanes play a more prominent role now. The pictures of glaciers melting are much more numerous now because I’ve collected them from all over the world…. Some of the scientific evidence is much more compelling now. I used to have a 160,000-year ice record. Now it’s 650,000 years. For a long time, it was 400,000 years.
“I’ve also changed the internal ordering of the different elements of the slide show. I learn from it every time I give it. I change it after every presentation—maybe sometimes only a little, but other times significantly because I see things. It’s sort of like collecting shells on the beach. After every tide, there’s a new bunch. So that’s what it’s like giving the slide show over and over.”
He added: “Since Sundance, a lot of things have happened that I wouldn’t attribute to the movie’s arrival. But the movie is well timed and coincides with a lot of developments, like the evangelical conservative Christian leaders announcing that they were changing their position and asking people to fight global warming; such as General Electric and other large corporations that have decided to jump into the fray, on the right side; such as 218 American cities independently ratifying the Kyoto treaty and taking steps on their own to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“All of these developments are encouraging because they make me believe we’re close to a tipping point beyond which the country will act. I think that the American political system, like the climate, is nonlinear. And we are close to a tipping point.”
Ky N. Nguyen is the film reviewer for The Washington Diplomat.
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