FEATURES

Riot cops, optimism and superglue: Mike White talks to film-maker working behind the scenes with the brave outlaws of the environmental direct action movement.

By necessity, the direct action movement is quite a secretive world. They’re heavily under surveillance by the police and constantly at risk of being infiltrated, so it’s very hard for the average person to really know what they’re like or to get a glimpse into what they’re really trying to do. The idea behind ‘Just Do It’ was to give the public the opportunity to see them as people – as the brave, passionate individuals they are.

The film follows an ensemble cast of about six different activists from groups like Climate Camp and Plane Stupid, during a year in their life in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit. We see them do things like blockade RBS bank with stepladders and superglue, attempt to shut down power stations and travel to Copenhagen to protest against the summit there. Feeding occupying workers in a closed-down wind-turbine factory, learning how to use a bicycle to defend against a baton charge, and making cups of tea for riot police – there’s quite a range of things that fall under the banner of direct action.

I’d never done any direct action myself. I’m a film-maker, I went to the National Film and Television school and spent about 10 years working in TV making documentaries, commissions for Channel 4… but I’m also quite passionate about climate change, having worked on films like ‘The Age of Stupid’ and ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’, which is about the American car industry and its attempts to deny climate change.

I was essentially recruited by Plane Stupid to film them shutting down Stansted airport in 2008. It was just the action as it happened, the kind of footage you’d see on the news – but of course they can’t ring up the BBC and say “Can you be outside Stansted airport back fence at 4 o’clock tomorrow morning?” without some people getting a bit suspicious. So they tend to ask somebody who they trust. I did that for them and got the tape off to the news, and that served as my introduction. They felt they could trust me after that.

This label of ‘activist’ is sometimes not helpful, because it makes people believe it’s an all-or-nothing thing, that people either are activists, or they’re not, or that it’s just a lifestyle choice that people are making. I’d like to see a world in which everyone was actively interested in the way our planet is run, rather than it all falling on the shoulders of a very small percentage of people.

Public apathy is a huge problem. We can blame a lot of that on a consumer culture that’s steeped in advertising, constantly telling us that to be happy we should focus entirely on our own selves and our belongings – things that ultimately don’t bring us much happiness. The real issues that face society are overlooked, because we’re encouraged to ignore them. I think that’s quite sad and it’s certainly not doing us any favours.

Obviously riot police don’t always respect a press card but in the more physically intimidating situations, knowing I had that card in my back pocket made it easier for me to be bold. Copenhagen was the scariest, because they had passed this set of laws a few months before the conference which basically gave the police carte blanche. They were just making it up as they went along; it was like all bets were off – none of the normal rules applied. There was one occasion where they kettled all of the press and then pushed the protesters around a corner so that the press couldn’t see what they were doing to them. Normally you go into a situation and you think you know what your rights are, so going into a situation and realising you don’t actually have any rights was very scary.

I hope that the people who see the film will get a deeper understanding of what those involved in direct action are like and why they do what they do. As we’ve been doing the cinema release, we’ve gone around to meet the people who are coming to see the film, and the feedback has been really encouraging. Even people who were quite sceptical of the activist world were won over simply by being given the chance to see them as people. Hopefully that means that the next time some direct action news story comes up at the pub, rather than buying into the easy, quick dismissals that people often use, they’ll maybe stand up for them and say “Actually, I support these guys”. But mostly it’s just to reposition them into what I think is their rightful place in history – as heroes.

CATCH JUST DO IT AT FREE PUBLIC SCREENINGS AT ALL MAJOR UNI AND COLLEGE CAMPUSES – INCLUDING BRISTOL – ON TUE 18 OCT. CHECK HTTP://JUSTDOITFILM.COM FOR DETAILS.

Copyright Mike White 2011