by Gill Pringle

A prophetic filmmaker, Scott Z Burns has always been ahead of the curve, be it his scarily prescient 2011 film Contagion which, directed by Steven Soderbergh, spelt out the horrors of a global pandemic. Or his groundbreaking 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, where he collaborated with Al Gore to sound the alarm on global warming.

The climate crisis has been on his mind ever since, today tackling it within the framework of star-studded drama series, Extrapolations.

Over the course of eight episodes, featuring Meryl Streep, Sienna Miller and Kit Harington among others, Burns spotlights a futuristic polluted planet plagued by extinction, food and water scarcity, drought and flooding, as the polar ice cap melts and temperatures rise.

A gripping drama that begins in 2037 and ends in 2070, Extrapolations introduces an alarming near future in which the chaotic effects of climate change have become embedded into our everyday lives.

Consulting with scientists across the globe to create this series, executive producer Dorothy Fortenberry hopes that there’s still time to reverse Extrapolations’s bleak forecast. “It’s definitely one version of a future, but I don’t think it’s definitive. It’s not guaranteed that this will be our future. And I think there are more pessimistic TV shows out there, with bleaker visions where we’re all just hiding from mushrooms zombies,” she says.

Neither Burns or Fortenberry expect to change the world with the series, but they hope it gives audiences a wake-up call.

“I think the first role of television is to be entertaining and exciting and to be something that you want to keep watching because, if you turn it off, then it has no role and it’s just a piece of furniture in your living room,” says Fortenberry [left].

“But I think after that, it has the possibility of reflecting something back at you. Every one of us is living in a world whose climate is different than the world that we experienced 10 or 20 years ago and yet our TV shows largely don’t portray that at all. So, when you sit down to watch a TV show, there’s this weird alienation where you’re going, ‘I know that the weather is different now. I know that I walked through a flood earlier today or a drought or a fire, and yet what I’m seeing on my screen doesn’t reflect that’.

“And so, we have the chance to do something different; a chance to say, ‘Hey, you’re not crazy. You’re not alone. The thing that you’re going through is the thing that we’re all going through’, and to provide a space to go ‘OK then…’ And the first step is acknowledgement. And after acknowledgement, you can get action and then you can have accountability,” she says.

Peppering the series with A-list actors, she hopes, is a way to draw in audiences who perhaps may not have previously been interested in the climate crisis.

“Our hope is that people are excited to watch because there are performers that they love, who are brilliant, and they’re excited to see what they do. I also hope that it makes the subject and the future feel close.

“One thing that we tried to do throughout the production was to have a near future. It’s not centuries away; everyone’s not in spaceships. It’s not a faraway future. It’s a very close future. And so, hopefully when an audience sees familiar faces who maybe they’ve grown up with and seen in lots of different roles, and then they see those faces going through climate change, it’s an emotional reminder that it’s going to happen to everyone. And it’s going to happen to people that you love. It’s currently happening to everyone; to all the people we love,” argues Fortenberry.

When FilmInk asks Burns [left] if he truly believes that our future is as bleak as his series, he is unapologetic. “Well, I guess I don’t think of this as being bleak. I like telling stories, where there are important moments for characters to make decisions that have impact, and I like it when the characters’ decisions come from a very personal place. So, what I like doing is taking a big issue and drilling down to the smallest human component,” he says.

It wasn’t difficult for him to entice actors like David Schwimmer, Keri Russell, Gemma Chan, Marion Cotillard, Eiza González, Tobey Maguire, Matthew Rhys and Heather Graham to come aboard.

“Our show spans across generations. And so, just like we have Meryl or Diane Lane, Edward Norton and Forest Whitaker, I loved the opportunity to work with another incredible generation of actors like Yara Shahidi, Hari Nef, Daveed Diggs or Michael Gandolfini,” says Burns.

“There are lots of new and exciting names who are a part of the show – just like we’re seeing in the world around us that there are so many young people who are stepping up to talk about this issue,” he says.

A true optimist, he believes in the power of film and TV to change the world and shift the dial, pointing to Sidney Lumet’s thriller Fail Safe and Stanley Kubrick’s comedy Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, both released in 1964.

“Those two movies are companion pieces that helped people in the ‘60s understand the nuclear threat. Similarly, in the US, there were lots of movies I saw growing up about the Vietnam War that really helped me understand what happened. ‘Where did my country go wrong?’

“We all hope that, in time, this group of stories will serve as part of a larger body of work that looks at what I believe is the largest existential threat of our time – which is climate change,” says Burns who has interwoven global stories about love, work, faith, and family, in order to explore the life-altering choices that must be made as our earth is changing faster than the population.

His cast are equally idealist, Indira Varma [above] arguing, “It’s not a fictitious world. I mean, it is – but all the science that it’s inspired by, actually exists. All the technology that it’s talking about is already in existence. Scott has extrapolated; to infer what we might imagine to be from the science we already know about with the acceleration of climate change to what might happen soon. I think it’s very real. And it should be a wake-up call,” she says.

Her co-star Tahar Rahim [above] agrees. “We have to act right now if we don’t want this to happen. And to use a story that can entertain people and show them what can happen in the near future is an emergency in a way. This is the best way to talk to the audience and let them identify to the human beings that we play, and tell them what’s going to happen in a couple of decades,” says the Mauritanian actor.

Varma – known for her roles in Luther and Game of Thrones – worries that people don’t look at the news as much as previous generations, therefore TV dramas perhaps now play a larger role in spreading the word.

“There are so many news outlets, and many people don’t engage at all. Often, the news that we have about climate change is data. But how does a graph make you feel?” she asks. “It doesn’t, and also, we can be overwhelmed by seeing images of disaster happening around the world, in places where we might not know anybody, or it’s not directly affecting us. So, it feels like something that’s happening to other people over there.

“I think the privilege that we have as actors is that someone like Scott Burns, has decided to make this series of stories which are entertaining, which means that it’s more likely to reach a wider audience. And the fact that it’s all based on real science and technology means that this is not science fiction. It’s not something where you’re going to have zombies saving the world at the end; it’s posing a question, saying, ‘Can we as human beings, who are essentially the perpetrators of this disaster, also be the heroes and save our future?’ We have to do that globally and work together,” she says.

Extrapolations is streamong now on Apple TV+

Shares: