Lucy Walker goes nuclear

'Countdown to Zero' is the incendiary latest from the London-born doc maker

Lucy Walker has become a powerful force in documentary-making. Earlier this year, she was Oscar nominated for ‘Wasteland’, her portrait of a Brazilian artist engaging with a social project among the rubbish-pickers of Rio de Janeiro. And her 2006 film ‘Blindsight’ – about blind Tibetan mountaineers – met with acclaim. Now, she’s been hired by the big guns of American campaigning documentaries – producers Lawrence Bender and Jeff Skoll, who made ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ with Al Gore – to craft ‘Countdown to Zero’, a film about the enduring threat of nuclear weapons. An Oxford graduate, Fulbright Scholar and former partner of Labour ex-minister James Purnell, Walker is no stranger to academia or politics, and in ‘Countdown to Zero’ she offers a line-up of interviewees – Tony Blair, Pervez Musharraf, Mikhail Gorbachev – to rival the buffet queue at a pope’s funeral. On the phone from Los Angeles, Walker explained how she rose to the nuclear challenge.

Was making ‘Countdown to Zero’ different from your other movies because it’s a campaigning film? You’ve described it as ‘an assignment’.
‘It’s different in the way you put your finger on, but it was the same in the sense that I felt like I had a subject that was important and a question to answer. That question, as I frame it in my head, is: “What’s going on in the world with nuclear weapons today?” I tackled it in the same way in terms of research and approach – which was doing everything I could to understand the topic and figure out what was interesting about it and important. I was thrown the car keys on this film. There I was, in my bedroom, hitting my head as I attempted to understand what task I’d been given. I’m not a nuclear weapons expert, I’m a hard-working person with research skills and a crazy determination to do something good when I get the chance.’

Do you feel like your film is about awakening a sleeping – or at least dozing – debate around nuclear weapons?
‘Yes, and no matter what you used to think about nuclear weapons – and there have always been a lot of fine people in the UK against them – we’re at a tipping point where it’s no longer possible to say that nuclear weapons can be in the hands of a few. If a few have them, we have to accept that a lot of other states, less stable ones and also non-state actors, are going to get hold of them. I was just filming in Japan for a new film, in the area where the tsunami hit, and I was wandering around these smashed towns. I was in Hiroshima and looking at these pictures of the city after the bomb was dropped. The tsunami was reminiscent of what happened there. It reminded me how possible these scenarios are that we’re only familiar with from horror films.’

Did you feel you had to back off from also dealing with nuclear energy as it’s a whole other area?
‘It wasn’t that I had to back off, but with these films I’m very conscious of what’s possible within the 80 to 100-minute window that documentaries function well in. The nuclear power debate is a whole other set of information. That one really divides people. God, I’d love to make an epic work like “Shoah” one day, don’t get me wrong, and I probably will when
I get the chance.’

You speak to a lot of politicians, but you also have to get across the threat of a nuclear catastrophe to each and every one of us.
‘Politicians are in there because they’re the experts’ experts. I hate it in documentaries when you think: Well, who the hell are they? I think: Okay, here’s a guy with a mortgage, but why is he the person talking about the mortgage crisis? Here’s somebody with a garden growing vegetables, but are they really the person to talk to us about whether organic is good? I wanted people to see all the horses and all their mouths on screen.’



Why do you think the producers asked you to take this on?
‘I guess because of my interest in the topic – and one thing I love to do is to be quite nerdy about research. I’ve got academic chops. I loved academia and in a parallel universe I would have carried on and been a very academic researcher.’

Now you’ve been Oscar-nominated and worked with such a line-up of interviewees, do you think you’ll find it easier to secure subjects in the future?
‘I hope so. But it comes down to the topics. For my first film, “Devil’s Playground” (2002), I persuaded a lot of Amish people to talk and I had no track record. You have to find something in it for them. Perhaps it will be easier, but if you’re in a sweet spot where you know your subject and you’re honest, people will want the truth to be understood.’

Are you based in LA now?
‘No, not at all. I’m in London all the time and still consider that home. I happen to be here for work. I feel with British documentaries that the television tradition used to be so strong, that we didn’t think of them so much as a big-screen thing. In the US, documentaries were forced down an indie-film route with people like Barbara Kopple because they were so stymied in television. I feel like I had to go to the States in a way to start thinking about doing docs on a big screen. But now in the UK they’re really taking off too. I was a juror at Sundance earlier this year, and, gosh, “Senna” made me cry.’

Read our review of 'Countdown to Zero'

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