'Inconvenient Sequel' directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk bring hope to the climate crisis
Al Gore kicked off his shoes and jumped onto his couch so he could reach the blinds. With the living room appropriately dark, he launched his ever-evolving slide show about climate change, which he began presenting more than a decade ago. Almost nine hours would pass before he concluded.
Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk listened attentively the entire time. The husband-and-wife filmmaking team had arrived at the former vice president’s Tennessee home to learn what Gore had been up to since the release of 2006’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary largely responsible for first informing the public on a major scale about the danger of global warming.
Before entering Gore’s 10,000-square-foot house — which is powered entirely by renewable energy — the filmmakers felt they knew a lot about how greenhouse gases are harming the environment. Just a few years prior, they’d made “The Island President,” a nonfiction film about how the leader of the Maldives was attempting to save his nation from rising sea levels.
But the stuff Gore was telling them? It was bad. Really bad. Bleak, even.
“I’m so familiar with the material that I probably should have warned them that hope was coming after lunch,” recalled Gore, who said he showed the pair about 500 of his 40,000 slides that day in 2015. “Before that, I think they were a little depressed.”
Shenk puts it more bluntly. “We were about ready to walk off a cliff,” he said with a laugh. “We were, like, ‘What do we tell our kids?’”
Fortunately, Gore did move onto a more uplifting portion of the presentation following lunch, when he began discussing some of the solutions now available to combat climate change. By the end of the day, the three had decided to move forward in making “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” which hits theaters on Friday.
Still, the Bay Area-based filmmakers were anxious about the difficulties of creating a sequel to a documentary with such a strong effect. “An Inconvenient Truth” won the Oscar for best documentary in 2007, the same year the Nobel Committee awarded Gore its Peace Prize, stating he was “probably the single individual who has done the most to create greater worldwide understanding of the [climate] measures that need to be adopted.” At the box office, the movie collected $50 million worldwide, a substantial amount for a documentary; the film is still the 11th top-grossing in the genre today, behind “Fahrenheit 9/11” and concert-heavy docs about Justin Bieber, One Direction and Katy Perry.
Davis Guggenheim, who directed the 2006 release, also was hesitant about the idea of filming a follow-up.
“I think Davis felt he’d given the first film everything he could, and obviously he gave his blessing to making a second one, but he just felt it wasn’t something he could take on at that point,” explained Diane Weyermann, who is in charge of the documentary film slate at Participant Media, which produced both “Inconvenient Truth” films. The executive also felt it was important to film the sequel during the 10th anniversary year of the original, and Guggenheim — who served as an executive producer on the sequel — could not meet those scheduling demands because he was working on “He Named Me Malala.”
“So then I had the very difficult task of trying to come up with a director who I thought would be able to step in, and honestly, Bonni and Jon were the first people who came to mind,” said Weyermann, who had collaborated with the duo before and knew they had a basic understanding of climate change. “But it was very important that Al was comfortable with them. Trust is key, obviously, if you’re the former vice president of the United States — or, frankly, any character being followed in a film — but particularly with someone of his stature who understands the media really well.”