Filmmaker Richard Curtis worries politicians are too stuck in the past to be able to effectively counter climate change. Believing that, like people tending to favour films they watched when younger, those in Westminster remain too concerned with the environmental issues prevalent previously, rather than those which matter today.
“Politicians are haunted by the issues they engaged when they were 20 or 30. If you ask most people: ‘What are the best films you’ve ever seen?’ Most name five they saw in their twenties. They don’t think about what’s happening now. I often think politicians are solving the problems of the last generation,” said the 66-year-old, as he joined former Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, on stage at the Southbank Centre.
The talk on climate action and finance formed part of Planet Summer, a series of events about climate activism. And while the man behind Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Noting Hill, as well as many other British classics, isn’t necessarily a fan of the often-disruptive tactics employed by Just Stop Oil campaigners, he can see a parallel of sorts with the Suffragette movement of the early 20th century. Which, although unpopular at the time, did eventually succeed in giving women the vote.
“My instinct is that a public movement will always attract more extreme, than more sensible, more quiet and more compromising things. I think if you look back…I’m glad that the women who threw themselves in front of horses did ensure votes for women,” he adds, before saying of current eco-protesters. “I don’t know if they’re doing the right thing, I’m really worried about the negative effect it has, but everybody’s got to do their part” he said.
