Movie features Oregon sustainability leadership, China-U.S. race
By Christina Williams, Sustainable Business Oregon
Sustainable Business Oregon
After three years and almost $2 million of his own money, Portland entrepreneur Matt Briggs debuts his first documentary, “Deep Green,” this month at the Bagdad Theater.
The film — he calls it “a love story of the earth with a really great soundtrack” — started out as a documentary of Portland’s green building and sustainable urban planning expertise in 2007. While it still features a number of Oregon businesspeople and politicians, the focus broadened during filming to cover larger issues of global warming, renewable energy and energy transmission, smart grid and the worldwide effort to de-carbonize.
In 2007, Briggs traveled to China with Dennis Wilde, principal at Gerding Edlen, and Clark Brockman, associate principal at Sera Architects. He worked for several months with a China film crew, shooting footage of a number of renewable energy initiatives happening there.
“Everyone thinks China isn’t doing anything,” Briggs said. “But they want to take over the business.”
One of the movie’s story threads compares the response of the U.S. and China to global warming. Filming also took Briggs to Europe, where he shot energy and transportation innovations in Amsterdam, Paris and Germany.
Filming wrapped in February 2009 after Briggs landed his big fish, food expert Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and Amory Lovins, head of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado.
He ended up with 40 hours of footage that was ultimately trimmed to a one hour and 46 minute movie.
The movie features a long list of Oregonians, including Wilde; Kyle Andersen, GBD Architects; Kathy Bash, DMS Architects; Shane Endicott, The Rebuilding Center; Andy Frichtl, Interface Engineering; Elliot Mainzer, Bonneville Power Administration; R. Peter Wilcox, Renewable Associates; Dr. Susan Wolff, Columbia Gorge Community College; Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman; Congressman Greg Walden; and former Gov. John Kitzhaber.
To punch up the entertainment value, Briggs worked with Portland animation studio Bent Image Lab on 11 animation shorts — one character is voiced by Sponge Bob Square Pants’ Tom Kenny — to illustrate the perils of global warming and deforestation.
Briggs describes the film’s main message like this: “The consequences of not acting are worse than people think, and the problem is easier to fix than people think.”
Briggs started a wild mushroom business, Cascade Trading, in the 1980s and tapped into high-end restaurants' demand for rare mushrooms. That business ultimately funded “Deep Green,” but it also equipped him with a business-minded approach to global warming.
“Being a business guy, I wanted to find a solution,” Briggs said. “This is practical stuff and the economics of it work too.”
Briggs figures that reducing the world’s use of fossil fuels at a rate of 4 percent per year will be enough to solve the problem.
As for the film, Briggs doesn’t anticipate getting rich from it, but he does hope to steal a trick from the independent film “What the Bleep do we know?” That independent documentary did well during a long run at the Bagdad Theater in 2004 and went on to gross $12 million in ticket sales with a cross-country run.
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