Director Joe Berlinger on "Crude" and the Amazonian Chernobyl

TreeHugger: Tell me about how you connected with Pablo Fajardo and what it was like following him around.

Joe Berlinger: He's a guy who just radiates heroism. One of the reasons we open the film with him winning the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2008 and then flash back and tell his story, is that when he won that Goldman Environmental Prize (which is kind of the environmentalist's equivalent of the Oscar) to me was the end of this incredible journey that we took with this guy.

More importantly, Chevron took this extreme position. They didn't say, "oh well, he may have won this prize, but we don't agree with him." They have taken the position that Pablo Fajardo is an environmental con man looking to line his pockets.

To me that is so, so extreme and so not grounded in reality that I just felt like I had to make a statement by opening the film with that dialectic: Is he a con man, or isn't he? Chevron says he is, and this guy says he isn't. Let's learn about his life, and then we flash back and tell the story.

To be honest with you, when I first was approached about making this film, I wasn't sure there was a film to be made--in my style, anyway. Steven Danziger, the American consulting attorney who you see in the film, came to my office in New York and told me about the case. I was a little dubious. A couple of red flags went off in my head.

First of all, I felt like he was looking for somebody to hew to his methods, to adhere and stick to his message points. I'm an independent filmmaker, and, in fact, my previous films are known for their objectivity and ambiguity in showing all sides of a case, which I told him. Strangely enough, he was a fan of the Metallica film.

But I said, "If you open that door to me, you're not going to be able to control the message, and I'm going to cover all sides. In fact, I'm going to want Chevron to be in this film. I think it's important that it's a balanced portrayal of the situation."

The other red flag that went off was when he started telling me about these 13 years of history; because I joined the party in the 13th year. I'm a vérité filmmaker, which means I like to film things as they unfold in the present. It sounded like I'd missed much of the story. I wasn't sure there could be a film.

The other thing a film like this required was a strong central character. I thought Steven was an interesting guy, but I didn't think I could build a film exclusively around him. All of these things were question marks.

Frankly, the fourth thing was: how am I going to pay for this film? Who's going to be interested in a primarily Spanish-language, subtitled documentary taking place in Ecuador? Most people don't even know where Ecuador is, let alone know much about it.

But I went down to Ecuador with him. I was very up-front, and I said these are my hesitations. But he was convinced that if I only saw the pollution with my own eyes, I'd want to make a film. So I said, "You know what? This sounds interesting enough that I'll go check it out with you as long as we're very clear that I have a lot of hesitation, a lot of doubt, that I can actually make the kind of film that I would want to make."

We get down there, and on day one, the pollution was worse than he had described. I was shocked. I said to myself, if an American company did this (and I didn't know if they did or not) but if an American company did this, then I'm embarrassed to be an American.

The film fails to really show you on a gut level just how bad the pollution is. By the end of the day your eyes are watering from the noxious fumes. I just was blown away at the level of degradation that this environment had endured.

On the second day of our trip we went to a Cofan village downriver. I got out of the canoe and was walking to the bank of the community, and there were some villagers sitting by the river's edge preparing a meal using processed tuna from this giant industrial can, the kind you might get at Costco or the bargain basement at Stop & Shop.

I was blown away that, deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, people were using canned tuna fish from another part of the world, people who have lived off the water and lived in harmony with nature for a long, long time. The reason was their fish were either dead or diseased.

That image of indigenous people eating canned tuna just really broke my heart. I started thinking to myself, "you know what, for some reason I've been put in this place. I seem to be the only person who is going to tell this story. One way or the other, I'm not sure if this is going to be a film or not, but maybe I need to loosen up on my criteria."

Maybe I won't have a great central character. Maybe I won't have present-tense action like I need to make a film. Maybe I'm just going to shoot a little documentation and hand it off to these people and hope that it helps them.

You know, I make a decent living doing television commercials and TV shows, and if I don't make money on this film, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to worry about who's going to pay for it. I'll just start doing it myself.

All that stuff just chipped away at me. I went back home and I just felt like here in my nice, affluent suburb of New York City with my nice house, and my nice children, and my nice cars, how could I look at myself in the mirror and turn my back on these people by not at least documenting what I saw?

I started to give in to that feeling, which was new to me because I normally need to know that I'm going to have a budget in place, I need to know who's going to show my film before I make it. That's been my traditional history. I need to know it's got all these aesthetic criteria so that I can make a good film.

But as soon as I let go of all those criteria, strangely enough, all the things started clicking into place, the first of which was meeting Pablo Fajardo. We met on the second trip. He walked into the room; he had this incredible charisma and honesty, and just this goodness that radiated about him. I just felt, wow, this is somebody special. So following him and following the arc, no one could have guessed that the arc of his life over the course of this film would be so dramatic.

He goes from being an impoverished oil field worker outraged at the injustice and the humiliation that the campesinos endure at the hands of the oil industry and the degradation of the environment, and gets himself educated, gets a law degree. His first lawsuit, his first legal case, is against the fifth-largest company in the world, Chevron.

It's an amazing journey. And then, over the course of that, "Vanity Fair" catches wind of it, does a profile. That profile brings Trudie Styler, the wife of Sting, gets her attention. She comes to visit the region, wants to help Pablo, brings Pablo to Live Earth, and introduces Pablo to the world stage. That gets a CNN Hero prize, and that leads to the Goldman Environmental Prize.

Obviously, I couldn't project the kind of arc that ultimately happens in the film. But I knew when I met him that, okay great, I have a central character, a hero, a protagonist that will work for this film.

The other thing that clicked is it wasn't clear at all that there would be these judicial inspections. They had been delayed for years and years, but once I gave in and started filming, these things happened right around the time I decided to make the film.

All of a sudden I did have a present-tense narrative that I could follow. I did have a present-tense trial. Things just kind of clicked, and then after a year of filming, I put together a fund-raising trailer and was able to raise the money; so that also fell into place.

That doesn't mean this was an easy film to make. It was a film shot under incredibly brutal conditions, 120 degree equatorial heat, in a malaria zone, so you're covered head-to-toe in heavy jungle clothing and slathered in industrial strength DEET to keep the mosquitoes away. We were a couple of miles from the Colombian border where the FARC was very active. It's kind of a Wild West atmosphere out there. So not the easiest film to make. I didn't feel the safest, but very much a life-changing experience.