In the baking heat of the west Texas desert, a young man is making a bomb. Hands trembling, sweat fogging his goggles, he slowly assembles the explosive. A knife-blade of powder is painstakingly poured into a tiny tube. Wires are shakily glued together. With infinite care, the delicate, deadly contraption takes shape. Outside the tin shack where this is all unfolding, another young man paces, remembering his friend’s instructions: “Don’t come in unless I tell you to. Unless you see fire.” He looks as if he’s about to be sick. The audience knows how he feels.
This is the tense setup at the heart of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a propulsive, nerve-jangling thriller about eight young people who want to send a message about the urgency of the climate crisis by sabotaging an oil pipeline. The film takes its cues from its heroes: aiming to excite audiences into action instead of hectoring them into submission. It is one hell of a ride. After its premiere at Toronto last year, the New York Times pronounced How to Blow Up a Pipeline “a cultural landmark” for its sympathetic take on eco-terrorism, while the Washington City Paper described its youthful cast as “a much more intense, combustible version of The Breakfast Club”.
What director, co-writer and producer Daniel Goldhaber – one of its four key film-makers – wanted to make, he says via video call, was a thriller: “Ocean’s Eleven about environmental activism.” It’s an ingenious pitch. Regardless of your feelings about their approach, you root for the gang to succeed as much as you do for hardened gangsters poring over blueprints to pull off a bank heist. “The idea of empathising with characters who take action like this, without ever condemning them for taking it too far, is something I don’t see in the media,” says Ariela Barer, who co-wrote, produced and also stars in the film.
The pair first had the idea for the project while isolating in an LA apartment in January 2021. Their other flatmate, co-writer Jordan Sjol, had got hold of a book provocatively entitled How to Blow Up a Pipeline. It was a manifesto by Swedish academic Andreas Malm that made a rousing case for property destruction as a tactic in the pursuit of climate justice. The volume was excitedly passed around. Goldhaber had the idea of dramatising its ideas, turning them into a movie. But how to adapt a work of theory into a mainstream blockbuster? None of them wanted to make a hand-wringing documentary, or an apocalyptic disaster flick in the mould of The Day After Tomorrow or Don’t Look Up. They wanted it to be credible, but also appealing – optimistic even.
For Goldhaber, films that now possess that last quality tend to have major vested interests – and budgets to match. “We have traded the ability for hopeful moviemaking for movies like Top Gun,” he says, “which is a good piece of film-making but undoubtedly a piece of American military propaganda.” Yet tapping into the same emotional beats – underdog narrative, heart-pounding action – and using them to talk about acts of sabotage and resistance is, he says, “a totally valid and important thing for the progressive movement to engage with”.
It’s true: watching the gang plant the explosive, or Michael, the young man in that pivotal scene, cook it up in the first place, the job at the centre of How to Blow Up a Pipeline shares more DNA with tense Hollywood heist movies like Thief or Inside Man. “What they’re doing is pretty dangerous,” says the film’s editor Daniel Garber, who rounds out the quartet, each of them billed equally in the credits as makers (like their characters, they are a collective). “That’s what provokes this stomach-churning feeling of, ‘Oh my God, are they going to blow themselves up?’”
Once you create a certain level of tension, he says, it buys you time to digress. “The heist,” he adds, “is a Trojan horse into which we can sneak all of these other concepts.” Those concepts are explored in flashbacks, each one detailing how the individual characters came to be involved with the cause.
The team spent two months interviewing climate activists and pipeline experts about their experiences. Some became characters. Clarissa Thibeaux, Barer’s friend and a credited consultant, partly inspired Theo, played by American Honey’s Sasha Lane, whose leukaemia diagnosis she ascribes to growing up near to a chemical plant. They also drew from the story of Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, who were imprisoned for terrorism after they vandalised the Dakota Access Pipeline with an acetylene torch, despite there being no oil running through it.
Barer had campaigned against its construction as a teenager. “The pipeline got built,” she says, “and nothing really happened, despite the activists doing everything right.” This failure, after immaculate campaigning, was one of the reasons she was so drawn to Malm’s book: “It felt like an unapologetic push for a radical flank.” The book also detailed acts of sabotage sometimes wrongly remembered as non-violent, such as women’s suffrage. “Reading theory like this reinvigorated me,” she says.
The film-makers also wanted to more accurately represent the communities affected by the climate crisis, bringing in Indigenous actor Forrest Goodluck (who played Leonardo DiCaprio’s son in The Revenant) to consult on the film as well as star as bomb-maker Michael. Their on-screen ensemble is predominantly made up of people of colour and includes working-class voices, Malm’s book having described movements such as Extinction Rebellion as “persistently aloof from factors of class and race”. Goldhaber says that, while the film does acknowledge the sort of activist often criticised for skewing white and privileged, it is designed as “a kaleidoscope of all the different kinds of folks involved in the movement”. The idea was to offer broad access points for the audience. This also explains the film’s subtly comic moments: while the characters are taken seriously, they do not do so themselves. Two even fool around while waiting for a timer to go off.
“It would be totally alienating if it was all melodrama,” says Barer. “If it were me and my friends, we would get drunk the night before. We would be idiots about it, because it’s so scary. Even with ‘the perfect plan’ they have, there’s so much risk and personal sacrifice.” The intention was provocation, adds Goldhaber, not propaganda, not just “riling people who already believe in what you’re saying”. Instead, they wanted to shift the conversation from the decision whether to take action to actual tactics and strategy once you do.
Earlier this year in the UK, more than 120 lawyers defied bar rules and arguably engaged in an act of civil disobedience by signing a declaration stating that they would not prosecute peaceful climate activists, nor defend companies pursuing fossil fuel projects. But what about the non-peaceful activists? If pipelines are morally indefensible, is there a moral obligation to destroy them? “If you see how this is self-defence for these eight characters,” says Goldhaber, “that opens up a whole world of questions and possibilities for the future of the climate movement.”
All four film-makers have their own stories to tell regarding their way into activism. Goldhaber’s seems the most conventional: parents who worked in the field, a childhood spent “with the doom of climate change hanging over me”. He worked on the 2012 documentary Chasing Ice, about crumbling glaciers, but was disillusioned by the fact that the film triggered precious little change.
Sjol, who grew up in rural Wyoming, tells me about hiking the jagged peaks of the Tetons as a child during the summer, climbing up to one of the range’s glacial lakes. “The glacier would be a little smaller every year,” he says, “until it was very, very nearly vanished.”
Barer is the youngest of the group and perhaps the most passionate. She was raised in Los Angeles by a mother who “came from the hippy movement in Mexico” and preached a gospel of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. When she was nine, the family visited Disneyland. In the queue for the rollercoaster, she overheard an adult saying that the planet was dying. Devastated, she asked how long it had left. They reckoned about 40 years. “I was like, ‘I only get to be 49? That’s it?’”
Barer, now 24, remains haunted by the exchange. “I’ve thought about that number ever since.”
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline is released in UK cinemas on 21 April
