April 20 marks the fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest marine oil spill in history.
The catastrophic event left 11 workers dead and ultimately spilled over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Margaret Brown’s latest documentary The Great Invisible chronicles both the spill and its aftermath, following both oil executives and the affected residents of the Gulf Coast.
The film won the grand jury prize at last year’s SXSW festival and makes its television debut Monday, April 20 on PBS. Brown recently spoke with us about the film.
Alex AuBuchon: Ms. Brown, tell us how you initially became interested in the Deepwater Horizon event.
Margaret Brown: Sure. I came to the film – I was actually working on another film in Ecuador and my father who has a house on Mobile Bay in Alabama sent me some photographs in the weeks after the spill of some absorbent boom that the volunteer fire department had put out in Mobile Bay to prevent the oil that was coming toward the shore from reaching into Weeks Bay and up into Mobile Bay.
In these photographs, there were all these workers that who had been hired to do the cleanup and it just didn't look like where I grew up, or my home. It was really upsetting, these images. So I started thinking “Well, what can I do?” And as a filmmaker, I thought maybe I could raise money for a film.
AA: And how did you go about doing that?
MB: For my last film, which was called The Order of Myths, which was also set in Alabama, I received a Peabody Award for that. So I had gone to New York to get the award, and I went to the Peabody Awards with a proposal in hand to raise money for this film, for The Great Invisible, because I thought, you know, an awards ceremony where you're winning an award from PBS would probably be a great place to hit up PBS for funding for... For a story that's happening right now that I'm kind of uniquely equipped to tell, because I'm from the area that's impacted.
And it worked. PBS and a bunch of other funders had me down on the ground about a week later in Alabama. The day the oil hit the shore, we were there filming it. It was very surreal, and you see it in the film, there's people in HAZMAT suits cleaning up these sheets of oil, and there's girls in bikinis filming them on their iPhones. It was extremely visually surreal. And also to be from there, the anger you had seeing all this oil wash up, and sadness. And hopefully people will see that captured in the film.
AA: What sort of challenges did you have in putting together The Great Invisible?
MB: It was really hard to get people in the oil industry to talk to us, particularly people who were on the rig that night when it exploded. They were difficult to talk to a lot of times because BP had given them their settlements from the explosion, and they were probably told not to talk. But we were able to get some people who had incredible stories.
Doug Brown, who was the chief engineer on the rig, I think his story of what happened that night will stay with me always, and how his life was changed since then. And the guilt and emotion he feels for being part of something – I mean, it's funny who feels guilt in these situations. It's ironic to me that Doug feels guilty when the decisions were made above him and I just wonder who should feel responsible. The people who should feel responsible, I wonder if they have trouble sleeping at night like he does. So it was really hard to see him go through all that pain. That's stuff that stays with me and all the crew that witnessed his story when he told it.
AA: Monday, April 20 is the five year anniversary of the spill – do you think there are any consequences that have yet to be seen?
MB: Oh Lord yes, I mean, I think the most impactful thing is yet to be seen. Since BP used Corexit to sink the oil... When I first started making the film, I thought a lot of it would be the environmental impacts of the spill, but as I returned here after a year and talked to scientists, they would pretty uniformly say that we don't know the impacts yet. The impacts will take 20 or 30 years to surface.
I think our knowledge of what the real impact of this is, and how the oil that was sunk to the bottom will now filter through the ecosystem, those reports are starting to come out now.
I was up for making a long film that took four years and followed a story for four years, but I was not up for making a 20 to 30 year film. But I do think that we'll continue to see independent scientists – because BP just published a report that said the Gulf is healthy again, but that's not what independent scientists are saying. So you have to be careful who you look to for the facts on this.
The Great Invisible will make its television debut on PBS Monday night and throughout the week. The movie is also available on Netflix and iTunes.
