NEW YORK — (AP) — When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, "Bring Your Own Brigade," at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge.
“It was really hard,” the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. “I didn’t blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror."
And so the film, though acclaimed — it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times – didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a " particularly dangerous situation."
“This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable,” she said in an interview.
She added: "It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What’s tricky is that they’re really hard to accomplish.”
In “Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the northern California city of Paradise and the Woolsey fire in Malibu, two towns on opposite ends of the political and economic spectrum.
She embeds herself with firefighters, and explores the lives of locals affected by the fire. She shares harrowing cellphone footage of people driving through exploding columns of fire as they try to escape, crying out “I don’t want to die!” She plays 911 calls in which people plead vainly for rescue as fire laps at their backyards or invades their homes.
And she conveys a layered message: Devastating fires in California are increasingly inevitable. Climate change is a clear accelerating factor, yes, but it’s not the only one, and therein lies an element of hope: There are things people can do, if they start to make different (and difficult) choices — in both where and how they choose to live.
But first, complacency must be vanquished.
“Complacency sets in when there hasn’t been a fire for a few years and you start to think, it might not happen again,” Walker says.
It even affected Walker herself a few months ago. A British transplant to Los Angeles, she had chosen to live on the Venice-Santa Monica border — too scared, she says, to live in the city's lovely hilly areas with small winding roads, surrounded by nature and vegetation, near the canyons that wildfires love.
But a few months ago, she started wondering if over-anxiety about wildfires had incorrectly influenced her choice. And then, of course, came the Palisades catastrophe —“this God awful reminder that it only takes one event,” she says.
Walker became interested in making a film about wildfires after she arrived in the city and wondered if she was safe. “Why is the hillside on fire?” she says she wondered. “Why do people just keep on driving?” She had considered such fires “a medieval problem."
One thing she learned while filming: Firefighters were even more impressive and courageous than she'd thought. “If you want to watch a firefighter have their heart broken, it’s when they want to do more,” she says. "I was just absolutely wowed by how incredibly selfless and brilliant they were.”
Not that the public wasn’t angry at them — her film depicts angry residents of Malibu, for example, chastising firefighters for not doing enough.
One of the most stunning parts of “Bring Your Own Brigade” — the title is a reference to the economic inequity of wealthy homeowners or celebrities like Kim Kardashian hiring private firefighters — is watching the reaction of firefighters at a town meeting in Paradise, where 85 people had been killed in the fire. They've convened to discuss adopting safety measures as they rebuild. One by one, measures are rejected — even the simplest, requiring a five-foot buffer around every house where nothing is flammable. Safety takes a back burner to individual choice.
“It was very shocking to be at that meeting in particular, given that people had died in the most horrible way in that community. And you have firefighters with tears in their eyes saying, 'This is what we need to have happen to keep us safe, and then (they) get voted down."
Walker is not the only filmmaker to have made a film about Paradise. In 2020, Ron Howard directed “Rebuilding Paradise,” focused on the effort to rebuild, and the resilience of residents. Walker says she looked at the same set of facts and arrived at different takeaways.
Townspeople were indeed amazing and resilient, Walker says. “But are we right to be building back without a real rethink? Because the tragedy is that these fires are predictably going to be repeating and against the backdrop of climate change, they're getting worse, not better.”
That rethink involves making hard calls about where people should live. “The population is overwhelmingly moving into these wildland urban interface areas,” Walker says, referring to areas where housing meets undeveloped wildland vegetation — exactly the areas most likely to burn.
In California, some of these places are very expensive — like Palisades and Malibu — but others are in more affordable areas. With the great pressure on housing, more people are moving into such areas, she says. But the “braking mechanism” could be that insurance companies “are doing the math, and it’s not sustainable.”
It's not only a question of where people live.
“What does a fire-hardened home look like?” Walker asks. “Design-wise, that that does dictate certain things.” For example: “This lovely wood is going to require tremendous firefighting.”
It’s too early to know, but Walker thinks she may be hearing something different now from those who've lost homes, of whom she knows many.
“What I’m hearing from people is not just ‘I can’t wait to rebuild. Let me rebuild,'” she says. “It’s: 'How could we go through that again?'”
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