Down to Earth

Force of Nature looks at the life and influence of eco-activist David Suzuki

Last Updated: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 | 12:41 PM ET

By Martin Morrow, CBC News

A scene from Force of Nature, a new documentary about broadcaster and eco activist David Suzuki. (TIFF)

Among Canada’s elders, Dr. David Suzuki is one of the most respected and beloved. Over the years, the geneticist, broadcaster and activist has evolved from the country’s best-known purveyor of popular science to its environmental conscience.

'I'd like to think that, yes, the film has environmental themes, but for me it's more of a humanistic story.'

— Sturla Gunnarsson, director of Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie

Force of Nature, the new documentary that premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, offers us the accrued wisdom of Suzuki’s 74 years. It’s both a record of his 2009 “legacy lecture” at the University of British Columbia and a journey through his past. It traces his growth from bug-collecting nature boy to radical-hippie scientist to his current role as the grey-haired guru of eco-awareness.

The film, by veteran director Sturla Gunnarsson, follows Suzuki as he revisits significant stages on that journey, including the site of the B.C. internment camp where his and other Japanese families were shipped during the Second World War, and the city of Hiroshima, his ancestral home. There are also vintage clips of Suzuki as a hip professor at UBC in the 1960s and ’70s, hanging out with students and already revealing his gifts as a communicator.

That’s when Gunnarsson first encountered him. “Those kids you see in that archival footage? I could have been one of them,” says the 58-year-old filmmaker, talking by cellphone from his Toronto home. “He was this rock-star professor and I was an undergrad.” Gunnarsson didn’t take any of Suzuki’s classes, though. “I was reading English Romantic poets and he was teaching genetics,” he says, “but nevertheless, it seemed like he was talking the same language. We all looked up to him.”

Decades later, when producer Laszlo Barna approached Gunnarsson to shoot a science doc featuring Suzuki, Gunnarsson countered by suggesting the film be about Suzuki himself. “I realized, despite the hundreds of hours of material featuring him, I don’t think anybody’s actually made a film abouthim.”

He caught Suzuki at a reflective time in his life. As the pair discussed the project, the idea emerged of a last lecture, a summing up of Suzuki’s teachings and philosophy. Suzuki wrote it while the rest of the movie was being shot, and delivered it in December 2009 to a packed house at UBC’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. Gunnarsson staged and filmed the lecture and uses it as the backbone to the documentary.

Suzuki was born in Vancouver in 1936 to second-generation Japanese-Canadian parents. When he was six, his family was interned at a camp in the Slocan Valley during the wave of racist paranoia that followed Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. Although Suzuki has written two volumes of autobiography and often spoken publicly about his past, in the film he’s unexpectedly emotional as he recalls the indignities of that experience. Later, he chokes up during a poignant trip to Hiroshima, where his maternal grandparents returned at the end of the war, only to die in the U.S. atomic bombing shortly afterward.

He is also candid about his own failings as a man, including the neglect that led to the collapse of his first marriage. “I was surprised at his vulnerability,” Gunnarsson says. “You don’t expect that from someone who is in his 70s and very successful and a national icon.”

He says the ever-questing Suzuki was actually learning new things about himself in the course of making the film. “We’d talk about some incident in his life and relate it to something in his present life,” Gunnarsson says, “and he would make connections and discoveries that were kind of exciting.”

A recurring theme that emerged was creation blossoming out of destruction. At one point, Suzuki goes back to the research laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tenn., where he was an associate in the early 1960s. Oak Ridge had been created in the 1940s to produce the enriched uranium for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and killed his grandparents. Yet, ironically enough, at that same lab Suzuki would launch a brilliant scientific career.

Sturla Gunnarsson, director of Force of Nature. (TIFF)

Back in Canada, Suzuki became both a popular academic and a national celebrity as host of CBC-TV’s venerable science series, The Nature of Things. A turning point came in the early 1980s, when Suzuki travelled to Haida Gwaii (a.k.a. the Queen Charlotte Islands) to shoot an episode of the show and became caught up in a Haida logging protest. It inspired a new appreciation of the aboriginal attitude toward nature and helped transform him into an environmental activist.

Force of Nature will draw inevitable comparisons with the Al Gore global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, particularly during the lecture scenes. But unlike Gore, Suzuki comes off not as a crusader so much as a visionary who sees beyond the immediate climate crisis to a new way of living.

“I’d like to think that, yes, the film has environmental themes, but for me it’s more of a humanistic story,” Gunnarsson says. “His message is really one of self-examination. To take a look at your life and the way you lead it, and ask yourself what are the things in your life that really matter to you. A lot of the things that are causing us so much distress environmentally are unnecessary things.”

Gunnarsson, who divides his energies between feature films and documentaries, has typically been drawn to difficult subjects in his non-fiction work. They’ve ranged from fractious union leaders (1984’s Final Offer) to a South African apartheid death-squad commander (1997’s Emmy-winning Gerrie & Louise). His next project is a film about Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr. With Suzuki, however, he was dealing with the opposite – a revered figure and one very easy to like. The Iceland-born Gunnarsson says they quickly bonded over a shared passion for fishing.

Suzuki detractors may accuse Gunnarsson of creating a hagiography, given that the film is told almost entirely from its subject’s viewpoint. Even Suzuki’s wife of 38 years, Dr. Tara Cullis, appears only briefly to talk about him. “I thought at one time about incorporating other characters into the film,” Gunnarsson says, “but I wasn’t really interested in doing an exposé of David Suzuki, it wasn’t part of the agenda. I was more interested in making the connections between his character, his life experiences and his ideas.”

After its TIFF debut, Force of Nature will play the Atlantic, Sudbury, Vancouver and Calgary film festivals, then open commercially on Oct. 1. Later on, it will air on CBC as part of the 50th anniversary of The Nature of Things. The series has been running since 1960, originally hosted by physicist Donald Ivey. Suzuki, who had separate TV programs in Edmonton and Vancouver during the ’60s and ’70s, came on board as its host in 1979.

“Can you imagine a science show on prime time for 50 years?” Gunnarsson says with amazement. “I think that’s a big part of the reason why Canadians aren’t as ignorant as Americans about science issues, to be honest. We all grew up on a science show.”

Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie opens in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa on Oct. 1, and screens at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 6 and 7.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.