All change: Jewish filmmaker gets stuck into climate activism
'Waste man' Josh Appignanesi makes an autobiographical documentary about his new passion
For climate activists, 2019 will be remembered as a standout year. While wildfires were ravaging Australia, David Attenborough was making a shock appearance at Glastonbury to talk about plastic pollution. Meanwhile climate prodigy Greta Thunberg, just 16, went to a UN climate conference in New York and brazenly scolded world leaders for inaction, telling them: “You are failing us.” And across the UK, a fledgling group known as Extinction Rebellion was beginning to galvanise.
It was also in these heady pre-Covid days that filmmaker Josh Appignanesi found himself in a career lull. With far too much time on his hands – he began thinking not only about his own existence, but also that of life itself. What kind of world were his two young sons growing up in and why had he neglected doing more to address that?
Out of this anxiety sprang the idea for a wry, autobiographical documentary that follows Josh on his path from hapless Jewish father-of-two and self-described “waste man” from London fumbling his way through life to an involved political activist making speeches alongside the likes of Zadie Smith, Simon Schama, Juliet Stevenson and other leading voices on climate action.
The resulting work – My Extinction – is being released in cinemas nationwide tomorrow (Friday).
Josh, 48, is no stranger to having his life play out on the big screen, with his latest film being the third in an autobiographical trilogy featuring his wife, writer and academic Devorah Baum. His 2016 documentary The New Man follows the couple as they embark on parenthood for the first time, while Husband, released last year, is a searingly honest look at modern marriage as Josh accompanies his wife on her book tour.
The writer and director – best known for Song of Songs and The Infidel – describes his latest film as “the same shtick, where I play a slightly amplified comic version of myself, the butt of the joke, the self-involved entitled guy who goes on a journey. But this time round it’s much more political.”
Josh’s “journey” that he refers to is one that sees him at the start making adverts for car companies, perhaps even – though it makes him flinch to think of it now – taking the odd gig from an oil company. His biggest crises are centred around himself and the minutia of his own life. We even see him getting angry at ‘those’ people, the protestors who cause traffic to come to a grinding halt. But then everything changes.
Speaking to Jewish News this week, Josh explains: “I had some career things that I thought were going to work out, but they didn’t. And then you’re left sort of wringing your hands, thinking I’m 40-something, I should have made it by now, I should have had these successes and I’ve got all these ego demands. Then you begin to think about the world in general and realise really bad things are happening and you have children. In that moment of failure, I asked myself, why am I avoiding the elephant in the room?”
He slowly realises the state of the planet is a much bigger deal to him than he realised. But like many others in his “privileged” position, Josh makes varying excuses as to why he’s not doing more to bring about change, including the not-quite-so-accurate disclaimer he’s “got a lot on at the moment.”
Josh is keen to discover what’s holding him back. A chat with his slightly crazy, anti-natalist conspiracy theorist pal Danny Shine, who believes the world would be better off if people didn’t procreate, doesn’t quite hit the mark – perhaps because Danny himself is a father-of-three.
But then Josh receives a glimmer of insight during a tennis rally with another friend, author and journalist Peter Pomerantsev. “In a way, the nutters are us,” explains Peter in a deadpan manner. “We know the science, we admit that it’s real – and we do bugger all.”
Josh looks despondent, but his “awakening” has just been given a kickstart. We see him beginning to go to protests, at first as a bemused observer, before signing himself up to attend Writers Rebel and Extinction Rebellion meetings where participants are planning their next action.
At this point, Josh’s dedication to the cause still appears slightly on the fence, but then the group discuss their greatest fears. One woman speaks emotionally about the threat of mass starvation from climate change and her words evoke an emotional reaction from the filmmaker, whose maternal family perished in the Holocaust.
“When she started talking, almost in tears, about the possibility of seeing friends, of people we know or our children, our children’s children, really suffering and going through starvation, it was very moving. We don’t like to think about these things because they’re bloody ugly, horrible and hard to think about. It’s just much easier to have functional denial.
“I don’t particularly want to think about such things as starvation and deprivation, but it’s not like this is such a distant fantasy in the future. It’s literally in my past. My mum’s side came from Poland, and apart from her mother and father who managed to escape, everyone else in our family was wiped out.”
This history, combined with a strong sense of Jewishness has, says Josh, inspired him to delve deeper into making an impact.
“My favourite line in the film is where I’m at a protest and telling my friend [and comedian] Dave Schneider that I’m just really hopeless and depressed about the whole thing – and he says: ‘Of course you’re depressed, you’re Jewish!’ Cue me looking really depressed on a very lonely riverbank,” he relates wryly.
“But I do think Jewishness, that history and that tradition, is partly one of having feelings. You have to be able to say, this is really, really hard before you can then say, well, now what? [As Hillel says] if not me then who?”
For all his agonising and despondency, Josh really begins to step up into the role of climate activist, helping to organise protests and rallying the troops – though, in something of a running gag throughout the film, he nervously laughs and firmly shakes his head every time someone asks, “are you up for being arrested?”
While happily shirking the chance to spend time behind bars by locking himself to a lamppost or similar as an act of non-violent protest, Josh plays more of a central role during the September 2020 protest outside 55 Tufton Street, the headquarters of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has been accused of promoting climate change denial.
By the film’s end, there’s a feeling Josh is not in the same place where he began. He’s now a man of action, not just words, and making commercials for oil companies is now very far off his much greener radar. Surely now he doesn’t still feel like a “waste man”?
“Of course I’m still a waste man!” he laughs. “I don’t think in this dysfunctional world of ours with these incredibly high expectations that many feel they haven’t failed in some way.
“But what I have learnt is that when it comes to climate it’s not all or nothing. Being an activist doesn’t mean having to quit my job, abandon my family and run off to the Amazon. You can spend a few hours a week or even a month helping in whatever way you can. The point is that everyone should just do something.”
My Extinction is released in cinemas from Friday. Josh Appignanesi will appear alongside Devorah Baum and David Baddiel for a post-screening Q&A at JW3 on Sunday, 2 July, 3.30pm. Tickets: jw3.org.uk
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