Andy Richardson and Sunita Patel report on Pete Postlethwaite’s new climate change movie, The Age of Stupid – and reveal the role the Shropshire Star played in getting the Oscar-nominated actor involved with the project.

Pete Postlethwaite’s new movie hits British cinema screens this weekend, and he’s hoping for big things.

But this time, Shropshire’s internationally-acclaimed actor has no aspirations for Academy Awards or public acclaim. He’s gunning for a far bigger prize.

The Age Of Stupid is aiming to change the world. No, scrap that. It’s aiming to save the planet.

The film by Franny Armstrong, director of McLibel, and John Battsek, producer of One Day in September, is a drama-documentary-animation hybrid which stars Oscar-nominated Postlethwaite as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching archive footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change while we had the chance?

It was shot in seven countries over a period of three years and features six separate documentary stories. Postlethwaite says he is thrilled with the project.

“I’m doing something really worthwhile with a bunch of people I really respect. It’s lovely to be on a set where people want to be there and do what they are doing. I’m amazed at the set up. It’s good. I knew the dialogue was going to be good.”

The actor and his family have a long history of environmental involvement. They have fashioned their home in the south Shropshire hills, near Bishop’s Castle, to be environmentally responsible. Postlethwaite adds: “I was terrified because of the subject that we are dealing with. It’s something important. It’s something we really need to address.

“When you look at the subject and read what they’re trying to do, there was no option, really, I had to do it.”

The team behind The Age of Stupid is hoping an incredible 250 million people will watch their 89-minute film. Postlethwaite added: “The stakes are very, very high. The stakes are through the roof. But the commitment and desire to do something slightly strange with a documentary is very exciting.

“To pack that much information, detail and fact into a film that is exciting. It’s an extraordinary achievement. It’s Spielberg-eat-your heart-out for the first ten minutes. I think it will make people think, make them debate it, will freshen their memories if they don’t already know about what the hell is going on.

“That’s all you can do. It’s not preachey in any way, but I think it’s strong.”

The Age of Stupid is unlike any film that has ever been made. It was crowd-funded by 220 people who donated between £500 and £35,000 each, including a hockey team and a women’s health centre. They will receive a pro-rata share in any profits, alongside the 105 crew who worked for survival wages. It was shot for a measly £450,000.

The producers calculated the carbon footprint of the film to be 94 tonnes of CO2. The soundtrack, meanwhile, includes songs from Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Dragnerve and The Band of Holy Joy, as well as an original orchestral score written by Chris Brierley.

The Shropshire Star played a role in getting Postlethwaite on board with the project – director Franny Armstrong approached him after reading our article about his environmentally-friendly home.

“I think primarily they were looking for someone who they thought would be kind of on side, really. I suppose in a way I was the perfect candidate for that. When Franny read the details she thought, ‘ah, well, looks like he knows a lot about the project’.”

Armstrong says The Age of Stupid is set in 2055 when runaway climate change has devastated the entire planet, and Postlethwaite plays a survivor trying to work out why we didn’t save ourselves when we still had the chance.

She and her team spent three years making an early version, but then decided to ditch it. “It wasn’t really working for people who didn’t deeply understand the issues. We had a horrible few months and eventually we decided to introduce a drama element.”

Armstrong returned to the drawing board. For take two, she wanted to include teenagers who were looking back at the behaviour of today’s decision-makers.

“The problem with that was that basically all those kids could say was ‘You idiots, you destroyed the planet, you don’t care about us’. So you, the viewer, were just getting berated by some teenage kids in the future, which was awful.

“So after that bad experience we realised it shouldn’t be the next generation, it should be my generation. How are we going to feel in the future knowing that we stood by and did nothing? We understood the situation but thought no, we’re not going to do anything. So it would be about sorrow and regret and guilt. So at that point we needed an older actor for it. For me, personally, there was only one actor I even wanted to think about and that was Pete Postlethwaite.

“I wanted to tackle my lifetime obsession, climate change, and I feel extremely happy with the final product.”

She hopes it will influence politicians like President Obama at a world climate change summit in Copenhagen in December, when a treaty will be signed to succeed the climate change treaty signed in Kyoto.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that that meeting will decide whether our species survives or not. It’s the most important meeting in human history by such a long way.

“We’re setting up a campaign called Not Stupid. The idea is to get 250 million viewers to watch the film and inspire them all from being a viewer into an activist, who will address the problem and put pressure on governments.”

* The Age of Stupid went on nationwide release on March 20. The first scheduled screening in Shropshire is March 31, when Postlethwaite himself will introduce the showing at Ludlow Assembly Rooms, and answer questions.