Lunch with the FT: Franny Armstrong
The last star to claim he was bigger than Jesus wound up shot outside his home on Central Park West. Franny Armstrong has no such fears. She has the vital stats to prove it.
More people have watched her breakthrough blockbuster than any other movie in history. Forget Star Wars, Titanic, or Gone with the Wind. Even Casablanca and It’s a Wonderful Life. The most popular film of all time starts with an insult, makes most people wince and feels like being kicked in the balls with a hug.
The Age of Stupid isn’t easy viewing, yet it’s awfully compelling. The Ministry of Vice and Virtue says it’s now been seen by half the world’s population. That’s a billion more than supposedly sat through The Jesus Film. So what’s it like to topple Our Lord and Saviour?
“Don’t be silly,” says Ms Armstrong, who doesn’t seem to be, or to think we are, despite her choice of title. “Everyone starred in The Age of Stupid really. And if we hadn’t felt inspired to act to save ourselves, the film would have stiffed, along with most of us living on the planet.”
For such a global player, she doesn’t have much of a mansion. She doesn’t even do lunch, at least not formally. I’ve come to Thinker’s Bubble, the commune she founded in Cornwall, where a couple of dozen friends grow all their own food. A plate of it has just arrived in front of me, and I’m surprised to see it looks rather appetising. Nary a whiff of Quorn to be seen, and all whipped up lovingly by autonomous, non-hierarchical kitchen hands.
Not at all what we pictured back in 2000, when fuel protesters left us “nine meals from anarchy”, and people like Ms Armstrong warned: “our food system doesn’t just depend on oil for transport, there’s all the chemicals we need for intensive farming.”
So, a prophet as well as a Messiah, and a very naughty girl too, just like Monty Python’s Brian.
“Why are you obsessed with pinning this story on me?” she protests. “The film had 228 investors, 104 crew and 1,000 people working on the premiere, and they all did it because they shared a common vision.”
These daring dreams of Utopia started early. Ms Armstrong’s first break came with a no-budget hacktivist classic, McLibel, which took 10 years to get a BBC screening, and taught her how to find herself an audience. Begun in 1995, it followed a postman and a gardener’s efforts to resist humiliation by McDonald’s. Amazingly, they won, after the longest case in English legal history, and the biggest corporate PR disaster ever. Even before Ms Armstrong found fame, around 30 million people watched it.
“Helen and Dave proved that ordinary people and common sense can win against impossible odds,” she says. “And we proved independent filmmakers can fight through all the waffle on TV to get a radical story right into the mainstream.”
For The Age of Stupid, her company, Spanner Films, teamed up with an Oscar-winner called Passion Pictures. Together they raised almost half a million from some ordinary people, who bought £500 stakes. Then, in a typically rebellious gesture, they published all their “crowd-funding” contracts online, so others could copy them. Along with the crew, who worked for a pittance, all the investors got a cut of the film’s profits. Like most, Ms Armstrong’s blown her share on further campaigning.
“What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?” The Age of Stupid asked, via an archivist played by Pete Postlethwaite, who looked back on the end of everything from a tower in the Arctic. When it launched in 2009, trickling into cinemas week by week, this genre-bending futuredoc seemed revolutionary. Yet to modern eyes, it sounds like the 4-D scrawlboxes our kids paste over their MyWorldWebCams.
Perhaps it was that down-home accessibility that made it such a hit. Considering the original aim, to mobilise hundreds of millions to demand carbon rationing, it was surprisingly unpreachy. The overall effect was touching, like group therapy, mediated by an octogenarian Alpine guide, whose smile embodied Ms. Armstrong’s bleak optimism. “We knew how to profit, but not to protect,” the old man lamented. You couldn’t help but want to prove him wrong.
The movie surfed across the Niger Delta, through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to the launch of an Indian EasyJet, the travails of an English wind-farmer and the mountaineer’s evaporating glaciers. Our companions were humble nobodies, flawed like us, whose lives revealed modernity’s subtle twistedness.
In one of the darker scenes of happiness, a young Iraqi refugee pretended to be a journalist. Standing on a slagheap above Jordan, where she and her brother hawked salvaged shoes, this pre-teen princess of Babylon beamed at the camera. “This is Al Jazeera,” she said. “Call our studio on 007945. Look, this is Al Jazeera. You can win four Hummers and four SUVs.”
Towards the end of the show, a less flamboyant reporter gave it us straight. “The very fact that the crisis is taking place within our generation, that it’s happening right now, means that we are tremendously powerful,” he reminded people. “So this position of despair and I can’t do anything and there’s no point is completely illogical, it’s exactly the opposite.”
How liberating. Like Ms Armstrong says, we were the stars, which was why we all kept lapping up the limelight. So wasn’t she bitter about not winning an Oscar herself?
“Do I sound like someone who craves Establishment plaudits,” she asks, a touch of prickliness fizzing beneath her grin. “I wouldn’t have turned it down, of course, though I obviously wouldn’t have flown there to accept. But I’m happy to say the film could speak for itself.”
So why did she give it such a horrible title? Actually, she didn’t. The words came from an American who worked for Shell in the Gulf of Mexico. “In my opinion,” declared Alvin Duvernay III, “our use or misuse of resources the last 100 years or so, I’d probably rename this age something like The Age of Ignorance, The Age of Stupid.” What would Ms Armstrong call it now, having shown us another world was possible? “You’re really fishing for sound bites, aren’t you?” she says, before scurrying off to consult the rest of her collective. “Look,” she concludes on her return, “the best we managed to come up with was The Age of Sense. But you can call it whatever you want if you keep it alive.”
I feel enlightened and empowered all at once. Perhaps it’s time I went and saw her film.
Septuma Nosebag is the FT’s arts and advertainment editor
Thinker’s Bubble
Nr. Goonhavern, Cornwall
2 x veggie stew free
2 x fresh apple juice free
1 x rocks £20
1 x satellite truck £1,699
Total (with fuel) £2,019
