When we encounter Xochitl (Ariela Barer) in the first scene of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, she is a vision in pink: a bubblegum-coloured hoodie under a rose-wash denim jacket with fuchsia-red patches. In another movie, she might be the picture of practically dressed innocence — if only she weren’t in the middle of knifing someone’s 4×4 tires. She leaves an explanatory missive on the windshield that reads, after a multi-paragraph discussion of survival in the “sixth mass extinction of life on earth”: “If the law will not punish you, then we will.”
“I’ve just always loved colour, metaphors and movies,” says Ariela, who co-wrote the film with collaborators Jordan Sjol and Cam director Daniel Goldhaber. In her capacity as a producer, the 24-year-old picked out cars and other set dressing, and made it her personal mission to ensure each of the film’s protagonists wore a shade associated with their character at all times. Yellow — “the perfect representation of both joy and illness” — was assigned to Xochitl’s fiery best friend Theo (American Honey’s Sasha Lane), who has developed terminal leukaemia after a childhood spent in dangerous proximity to an oil refinery. A deep, bright purple was given to Theo’s girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson), who Ariela wanted audiences to think of as regal: the kind of person who would graciously go dumpster-diving to rescue still-edible produce for her hungry friends. “It’s also a pretty gay colour,” she notes.
The Jewish-Mexican actor — whose broad credits include a Marvel show, an all-female Lord of the Flies iteration alongside Maya Hawke, even a quick stint on New Girl — grew up with an artistic family in Los Angeles and was involved in local theatre from a young age. “I was asking my parents for an agent when I was four,” Ariela says. “They were very confused as to how I’d learned what that was, but they were always really supportive.” Having developed a precocious love of Shakespeare at her performing arts-oriented high school, Ariela’s dream role was and is still Lady Macbeth. Alternatively: “I, as not a man, would love to do a role like Hamlet,” she says. “I think that would make it harder for people to immediately understand his angst, maybe they would question his mommy issues.”
When she first read How to Blow Up a Pipeline — the controversial Andreas Malm manifesto that the film reimagines as a fictional story — it was already with a mind to adapt it. “Daniel and I were hellbent on making something that we could have creative control over, and feel like we were doing something that meant a lot to us. When Jordan was reading the book, Danny picked it up and had the idea to turn it into a heist movie.” Across three chapters, ‘Learning from Past Struggles’, ‘Breaking the Spell’ and ‘Fighting Despair’, Andreas’ 2021 book makes a historically-rooted argument against the efficacy of peaceful protest, and in support of tactical property destruction. Inspired by 70s political thrillers (“especially Zabriskie Point”), the film adaptation tests the logic of this argument to prove its strength, rendering a complex host of characters struggling with environmental circumstances that viewers will recognise as increasingly perilous — and disappointingly commonplace.
Pipeline’s young ensemble cast makes for a charmingly believable group of would-be eco-terrorists: there’s Michael (Forrest Goodluck) the aspiring pyrotechnician, tracking his progress in videos for #boomtok and arguing with his mother about the requisite tactics to protect the Native American reservation they live on from oil industry construction; Shawn (Marcus Scribner), the film student, disenchanted with collegiate activism and its obsession with divestment; Dwayne (Jake Weary), a Texan husband and father whose land has been seized by the federal government through a legal loophole; and who could forget Logan and Rowan (Lukas Gage and Kristine Froseth), the perpetually-horned-up anarchist couple? Though Ariela wrote Xochitl with some of her own experiences in mind, she hadn’t initially expected to play her. “That wasn’t really the angle that I came to the character with,” she says. “It was more that the foundation of this project was us asking ourselves: what if us and our friends got together and did this? What would that look like? Who would those people be?”
Radicalised by the climate-related death of her mother, Xochitl is in many ways the ringleader of the group — the meticulous, responsible know-it-all who seems to bond them all together. Ariela explains her as a person who “completely bought into academic institutions and general systems of power”, with a belief that she could “change things from the inside”. Then, “she suffers this major loss and realises that she needs to do something dramatic, from the outside, and that this system was never going to support her or care about her, it would only at best placate her.”
The film is careful to connect the dots between North America’s dependence on the fossil fuel industry, pervasive racial inequality and fatally exploitative healthcare system. Calling it everything from “part heist thriller, part climate change documentary” to an “apocalyptic Western”, critics have largely welcomed the film’s leftist perspective in a cinematic landscape that more frequently tends to glorify the military and police. “What are the chances that, years from now, How to Blow Up a Pipeline might be seen as a catalyst for historical change?” writes Peter C. Baker for The New York Times Magazine. “What are the chances that its legacy might be widespread condemnation and draconian crackdowns on ‘terrorist’ climate protests? What are the chances that it receives little notice at all and looks like just another example of our era talking about climate change, but not halting it?”
These are all, incidentally, questions Ariela has been asking herself. “The criticism I was most concerned about was in terms of people thinking that we didn’t fully understand the weight of the consequences of an action like this in the immediate future,” she says. “While we obviously empathise with the characters who are doing the act, it’s still thorny. That was a lot of what Alisha’s character and the conflict is directly addressing.”
The film’s title, in a similarly provocative vein to Jeanette McCurdy’s hit memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, has elicited a fair amount of pearl-clutching — and, according to Ariela, proved to be a point of contention for at least one interested distributor, before Neon snapped it up at last year’s TIFF. “Someone did try to buy the movie and change the title,” she says, but this was a non-negotiable point. “I mean, I also don’t want this movie to alienate people that might read the title and feel alienated. I hope that people from other sides of this argument can watch this and leave with some degree of understanding of why these characters would do what they do.”
What about the climate doomers? What do you tell fatalists who have lost all faith in the future of their planet? “I’m firmly anti-doomer,” Ariela says. “It’s not too late. And even if you believe it’s too late, there’s still something to fight for.” When writing the script, she admits, catastrophic thinking became an unfortunate habit. “It’s difficult to not totally succumb to the doomer rhetoric because you’re reading about all of the atrocities in the world as a direct result of this thing that no one is stopping, that we could stop. But the people who have the power to do that completely refuse, so we have to make them stop it.”
Solo road-tripping to their primary filming location in New Mexico, Ariela came across Andreas’ idea that feels most significant for her. In conversation with Vox, the Swedish thinker draws a parallel between the climate fight and “the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto”, which, he says, “was undertaken in the realisation that it’s too late. We cannot win this battle against the Nazis. We know that our people are doomed, we know that the people in the ghetto cannot be saved, but we fight because we have to register our resistance against this fate.”
“It was so beautiful and so powerful, I just started sobbing in the car,” Ariela says. “That one sticks with me. Even if it’s too late, there’s still merit in fighting back and going out with dignity.”
‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ is out in US cinemas now, arriving in the UK on April 21. Watch film’s trailer here.
Credits
Photography Sabrina Santiago