Backbone > Life in the Balance

Way to Go Further
By Susan Piperato

This year's Woodstock Film Festival will feature the second premiere of Go Further, an on-the-road documentary featuring actor/activist Woody Harrelson’s quest for worldwide eco-consciousness, and directed by award-winning documentary filmmaker Ron Mann. Billed as “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on Tofu,” the film follows Harrelson and his contemporary “Merry Hempsters” on a tour along the West Coast, promoting sustainability. The film features appearances and music by Dave Matthews, Natalie Merchant, Ken Kesey, Bob Weir, Michael Franti, Anthony Keidis, Medeski, Martin & Wood, and String Cheese Incident.

Go Further follows Harrelson as he takes a small group of people on a hemp oil, biodiesel-fueled bus journey to visit people who have incorporated sustainability into their lives. An award-winning filmmaker specializing in alternative culture documentaries (Twist, Comic Book Confidential, Grass), Mann captures with humor and humanity the hostility the Hempsters encounter, and watches as their ideas and habits are challenged and reshaped from within and without.

The Woodstock Film Festival takes place September 17–21, with a premiere party for Go Further, featuring Ron Mann and Woody Harrelson as guests, set for Sunday, September 21. For more information, visit www.woodstockfilmfestival.com.

Susan Piperato caught up with Ron Mann via telephone to chat with him about the making and the message of Go Further.

Susan Piperato: How did Go Further come into being?

Ron Mann: Woody Harrelson was touring colleges and universities, talking to everyone about simple organic living, basically having a sustainable lifestyle, and making sustainable choices in what we buy and eat and do. For me, I’d changed my lifestyle through yoga and stopping eating meat and stopped doing other things in my life. I’d come to a point when I knew people can change their lives. My lifestyle was heading down the wrong path. I decided if I wanted to be around a little bit longer, I needed to lose weight. I stopped eating meat and started doing yoga. Coincidentally, I called up my good friend Woody—whose promotional tour I'd read about in High Times magazine—and said, “You know, somebody should be documenting this,” and he said, “Yeah, well, you know any documentary filmmakers?” We just kind of laughed, and then he paused and said, “Well, that was a no-brainer.”

So I went to San Francisco and talked to him about what he wanted to do with the bus tour and what the film would be. I asked him this: “What do you want people to feel at the end of the movie?” He said, “I want people to feel hope.” That was the direction he gave me, and I tried to make a hopeful film. All my films have been about historical subjects or documented alternative culture, to explain how we got here, but Go Further is about the present, what’s happening today, the zeitgeist. People are very concerned about what they eat. Even the makers of food, like Kraft, for example, are changing their ingredients because of their potential to lead to obesity. They’re lowering their fat content. And there are people who are concerned about pesticides and having genetically modified food in the marketplace. It’s not a fringe thing. It’s not just about people who shop in co-ops anymore. Organic Style, the magazine that's sponsoring the party for the premiere of Go Further in Woodstock, reaches 2.9 million subscribers. That’s not a marginal group! It really is a kind of coalition of lots of different people out there who really didn't have a voice before. The film reflects this culture, really looks at what’s going on across the country.

SP: What’s the film trying to say?

RM: Movies are popular entertainment and can reach great numbers of people. The environmental documentaries that I’ve seen have always been, well, not that humorous. They haven’t brought in musicians. No Nukes was the last one I can remember that brought us this close to making politics more easygoing for people. Basically, that’s what I’m trying to do, what's different about this movie. It’s really just a comedy. It’s entertaining. Comedy sparks people to think. Comedy is my thing. I use comedy to get across a point the way Mad magazine does.

I wanted to make an environmental film, but the traditional ones are too serious and scary. This film is lighthearted and fun, and uses a lot of comedy, like with this guy Steve that the film follows. He’s addicted to cheeseburgers and chocolate milkshakes, and he completely transforms his life. It's amazing, but very funny. It seems to work. After the screening at South By Southwest, where we premiered the film, I’d say that about 20 people came up to me afterward and told me, “I'm changing my diet.” One guy actually said, "I'll never eat Lucky Charms again.”

The film focuses on green examples, clear examples of what people can do and are doing to help the planet. That’s what Woody’s talking about. He's saying, “Look, we can find alternative products,” but he’s also trying to introduce people to what is out there [in terms of] sustainable products, the idea of leaving a light footprint on the earth, being conscious about how we can affect change through consumer action by purchasing an earth-friendly product, and promoting the goal of making the planet a better place. The film is also about wellness—for example, yoga as personal transformation. Woody believes personal transformation equals planetary transformation. If you change yourself, you start to change the world around you.

SP: Who are the New Merry Hempsters? Who’s on the biodiesel-fueled bus?

RM: We visited Ken Kesey in the movie and he kind of dubbed ‘em that. Being on the bus is about enlightened culture. Kesey, you know, was with the Merry Pranksters on their road trip. [In Go Further ] there’s a yoga teacher; a raw food chef; Joe Hickey, who’s a hemp activist; Sonia, Woody’s assistant, who was kind of managing the whole thing; Steve Clark, the fast food guy; Woody; Laura, who organized the tour’s Web site; and Tom, who is an environmental lawyer. He’s the one who flew the flag upside down on his bike and kind of provoked people. But they’re all activists. And we visit a lot of other activists. We show organizations like RUCKUS—which is very media savvy, training activists to safely get their message across. They helped Woody scale the Golden Gate Bridge and put up a banner. There are other ways of being an activist, like being conscious of what you buy, incorporating activism into everyday life. You start to feel good about it, like you’re not part of a problem; you’re the solution, to use an old phrase. You’re on the bus or off the bus.

Woody is almost not the main character. It’s Steve Clark who becomes the Everyperson. You can’t relate to the lifestyle of a movie star, but you can relate to Steve. He’s the junk food junkie. He came on the bus at the last minute as a helper. He met Woody on the set of Will and Grace, and basically got water for everybody on the show. Then Woody said, “We need somebody to take care of the bikes, so why don’t you come along?” So Steve said “OK, I’m not doing anything.” I mean, he’d followed the Grateful Dead for like 10 years, and he was used to just picking up and going, so he just hopped onboard. The next thing you know, he’s stopped eating meat, he’s eating raw food, he’s stopped smoking, and he’s counting down the hours since he stopped. And he’s started doing yoga. He’s totally changed his life.

SP: Go Further champions the use of hemp as a sustainable alternative. Your last film, Grass, documented the legislative and cultural history of marijuana. Is Go Further an outgrowth of Grass?

RM: We’ve moved off from looking at the recreational use of marijuana from a kind of legislative history point of view. By the way, that’s something I’m very vocal about. Both Woody and I are members of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). We feel it’s wrong to treat marijuana smokers as criminals. But Go Further is about marijuana’s sister plant, hemp, and its positive uses as food, fiber, and fuel. One person we visit in the movie is someone who works with Carolyn Moran’s Living Tree Paper Company, which uses hemp as an alternative to cutting down trees for paper. We’re a fairly sizeable group of people out there, and we can collectively make a difference. We do not so much need to boycott things, but if we buy, say, an organic avocado, or hemp paper, that can make a difference. It’s basic stuff. It's the kind of activism that everybody can participate in.

SP: Making the film confirmed your personal beliefs. Did it also change you as a filmmaker?

RM: Most of my films use historical archival material. Grass, the last film I did, used historical materials, and was a very long, research-intensive movie—a collage film. Go Further follows the tradition of road movies, or cinema verité, which is the more common term for this genre of documentary, or even direct cinema. The direct cinema movement started in the '60s, with hand-held 16mm films, these kind of fly-on-the-wall home movies. Go Further is all that, but I actually refer to it as my cult movie, you know, as in joining the cult of Woody, eating strange food—it was all raw, organic—and traveling around on a biodiesel bus run on hemp oil. But the thing is, it was life-changing, and as a result of making the film, I think there's a new culture out there that this film is speaking toward.

What I'm trying to do is promote sustainable living as a real, viable thing. What was inspiring to me were the organic farmers we met, and people promoting sustainable housing, making decisions—all the people who actually do it day by day. That's a community I want to be part of, and its values are about ultimately sustaining our life on the planet. I don't mean to sound New Age. I'm as far from that as possible—I mean, I smoked cigarettes for 20 years—but eventually you come to these four corners and you have to ask yourself, "Do we want to go down this path that we know is wrong, or do we want to back up a bit?"

SP: Who's coming to see Go Further?

RM: Well, it's definitely not preaching to the converted. There has only been one big event screening for this film, which was at South By Southwest [SxSW]. Woodstock is next. We held back the film for Toronto because we've got so many distributors wanting this movie. We thought, "OK, let's give everybody a chance to see it in one place, which will be Toronto." So we're expecting the film to be distributed in movie theaters. It's a great time for documentaries; people are really going to see them. Bowling for Columbine made over $100 million. For a documentary, that's extraordinary—not so much about the money, but because that figure represents a huge audience of people who don't necessarily want to see The Hulk.

There are some people who are interested in the film whose lifestyle already incorporates buying organic and environmentally friendly products, or who follow The Dave Matthews Band, say, or do yoga. Those are all very sizeable groups. But really, the film is for everyone, and the reaction is just mind-blowing. People really do come up to me and say, "I'm changing my life." That's the point of the film. You know you've done a good job when you've reached people. That's what Woody wanted, to show people we're not really that rudderless. To inspire people, you have to give them examples and show them there's a hopeful future. You have to reach outside the core audience. We've shown this film to college students and elderly people. People all over like it, and respond to it, because they really do want a better world. The state-culture wants to say a sustainable lifestyle is a stereotype, it's a fringe thing, and it really isn't. There's a groundswell out there—lots of people out there thinking the same thing. And it's viable. People think, "Oh, it's too expensive, I can't do it." Well, that's not true; a lot of these solutions are in the range of everyone.

SP: So the film's message is getting across?

RM: Yes, and it's a very odd thing. A journalist for the Austin Chronicle said he cleared out his entire freezer of meat and fed it to his dog after he saw the movie. Other people have quit coffee. I think people are thinking about making changes, and what the film does is make them say, "Yeah, I'm gonna do it." It just pushes them somehow, it hits some buttons. Who knows? People have called this film the next Bowling for Columbine. Some say it'll do for food what that film did for stopping violence. Last year, the book Fast Food Nation was a bestseller. So it's out there, the idea behind this film. As a documentary filmmaker, I see what's out there in the culture and document it, especially alternative culture because, boy, nothing gets written about that. It's just all straight media, all the time. It's all status quo. Nobody wants to say anything. For me, the genetically modified labeling issue in the US is a good example of that. If you put "GMO-Free" on labels in supermarkets, then of course consumers will go for those products. But right now that kind of labeling isn't allowed, so people can't make that decision. The media's not saying anything. But people deserve an answer. Do you want the food with the poison or the food without the poison? Why isn't the media talking about that?

For more information on the making of Go Further, visit the Web site of Ron Mann's Toronto-based film company, Sphinx Productions, at www.sphinxproductions.com. To find out more about Woody Harrelson's projects in political activism, go to www.voiceyourself.com.