'Crude' tactics in Ecuador

For director Joe Berlinger, the painstaking road to making the powerful documentary "Crude," all started with what he dubs his "toxi-tour" of a contaminated swath of Ecuador's Amazonian rain forest. After massive oil exploration that began in the mid-1960s by Texaco (in a consortium formed with Gulf), the area -- approximately the size of Rhode Island -- is now home to some of the world's most heinous environmental destruction.

Four years ago, Berlinger traveled to Ecuador to view the destruction at the urging of acquaintance Steven Donziger, a Manhattan-based attorney and consultant to the legal team representing 30,000 native Ecuadorians embroiled, since 1993, in a protracted class-action lawsuit against Texaco and, later, Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001. The plaintiffs charge that Texaco spent three decades systematically poisoning their water, air and land, which led to widespread disease and an irrevocable breakdown of these indigenous peoples' traditional ways of life. (Though state oil company Petroecuador took over complete ownership of the consortium oil fields from Texaco in 1992, it is not involved in this now-$27-billion lawsuit, a verdict on which is reportedly expected in early 2010.)

Berlinger's initially "reluctant" trip to the Amazon was, to say the least, an eye-opener for the director of such acclaimed documentaries as "Brother's Keeper" and "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster." Recalled the New York-based filmmaker in a recent phone interview, "I was absolutely dumbfounded; the pollution there was just unbelievable. There was literally no fresh drinking water." He added, "While Texaco was operating, they just dumped waste into the rivers and streams that's home to five indigenous tribes. The lack of moral responsibility just blew me away."

Though, at first, Berlinger was unsure his usual aesthetic criteria for undertaking a documentary ("unfolding action, a present-tense story, juicy characters") would be met here, something he witnessed on his second day in the region changed his mind. "I came upon a group of Cofan villagers preparing a meal near the river, and I noticed they were using this big, industrial-sized can of tuna fish. I found out it was because their local fish are either very diseased or dead. That image, more than anything else, made me realize I had to answer the call and point a camera at this and figure out how to make a film to help these people."