Austin, Texas — An hour before the world premiere of Go Further, which opened the annual SXSW film festival and conference last Friday night, Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann orders a shot of wheat grass at a juice bar across from the Paramount. Fortified, he crosses Congress Avenue and surveys the hundreds of people waiting outside the vintage theatre.
Mann has been attending SXSW (South by Southwest) for five years running. His Genie-winning documentary, Grass, was the cause célèbre here in 2000. He is a familiar face on panels and juries, an expected guest at parties. And in moments, he will introduce his latest documentary, accompanied on-stage by an even more familiar face: the actor, Grass narrator and committed eco-activist, Woody Harrelson, whose Simple Organic Living (SOL) speaking tour, from Washington State down the West Coast in the spring of 2001, provided the storytelling spine of Go Further.
The movie opens with Harrelson wrapping up his stint on the sitcom Will & Grace and inviting production assistant Steve Clark, a junk-food-loving jokester and the film's Everyman, to join the tour.
Part of the fun is Clark's "awakening" to Harrelson's message of "how to live with a light footprint on the planet," as a small tribe -- that includes a pro-hemp activist, a raw-food chef, a yoga instructor and two activist lawyers -- proceed on bicycles, followed by a hemp-fuelled bus.
Harrelson stops to talk to students, while Clark battles food cravings, feeds seaweed snacks to aerosol-fume-inhaling teenagers and entices a fetching female college student to join the tour.
By the end, Clark is grabbing a bullhorn to holler the catchy slogan: "Say no to corn dogs." Along the way, the posse receives the blessing of 1960s counterculture legend Ken Kesey (who died soon after) and visits a solar-living centre, a man called Earthquake (who makes organic fertilizer from his worm ranch) and a training camp for Ruckus, an organization that promotes the use of humour in non-violent protests.
The film's action is broken up by whimsical animation and performances by such activist musicians as Bob Weir, Natalie Merchant and Michael Franti, with a touching solo performance by Dave Matthews as the credits roll.
After the first SXSW screening, Harrelson, Mann and several cast members -- including SOL tour travellers, and folks they met along the road -- gathered on-stage as the audience rose to cheer.
The collective good mood came to a collective awkward pause during the Q & A, when a woman seized the floor to make a tearful plea for her cause, unrelated to those in the film. Harrelson, who began his career on the New York stage, took control of the house by listening. Then he hopped down to give her a hug.
The tension-breaking sincerity of that moment, and the reason behind the SOL tour, are further explained when I catch up with Harrelson a couple of days later.
"The problem with a lot of people in my situation is this invisible wall that separates them and the public, which also happens with most politicians," says Harrelson, sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons in his stocking feet, munching on nuts from a tiny tray that has suddenly appeared. "I want to defy this in my life, because I hate the thought of it. So I liked the idea of taking a tour, taking the time to find out what people are really thinking and talk to them about what they're eating."
"Granted, it was a hippie line of pursuit down the coast, but we tried to talk to loggers, too," laughs the Texas-born Harrelson, who first rose to prominence as the bartender on the long-running sitcom Cheers, then made a successful transition into film (White Men Can't Jump, Welcome to Sarajevo and The People vs Larry Flynt, which earned him an Oscar nomination). Along the way, his activist activities grabbed as many headlines as his career strides.
"If you like to think of yourself as an artist, and you like to think of yourself as having a conscience, then to me, [Go Further] is the best synthesis of entertainment and getting the message across," he continues. "This is one of the most entertaining, heartfelt movies I've ever been a part of. There's so much funny stuff and just genuine, amazing situations, which is probably what those reality-TV shows are trying to capture."
At the core of the film are the changes Harrelson has made in his day-to-day diet in recent years, and how those changes pushed him to reflect on bigger issues facing the planet.
"I used to eat a burger, then feel sleepy, so I stopped eating red meat in my mid-20s," explains Harrelson, now 41. "Around that time I was on a bus somewhere, and I had these flu symptoms I'd had all my life. This girl tells me if I quit milk, it will all go away in three days and she was right. Now my diet has evolved much further than just vegan, and I eat only raw food. But, you know, if I can't every once in a while have white-bean soup . . . well, as the swami said when [my wife] Laura and I were in India, 'evolution, not revolution.' "
For Harrelson, it is only a small step from rethinking what we eat to rethinking bigger questions about how we live. "Like this war that feels pretty inevitable right now," he drawls. "If there is human sacrifice, which there will be on both sides if they start bombing, are people going to die in vain -- or are we going to evolve off the petrochemical? To me, that's what this war is about. It's not like one film is going to change all that, but my hope is that people will recognize how destructive we are, and find out how they can get together and do something."
For filmmaker Mann, the challenge was to follow Harrelson's odyssey while keeping the narrative entertaining and even funny. "Greenpeace and David Suzuki are heroes of mine, but I wanted to break from the traditional 'environmental movie' and build a comedy," Mann explains. "What I think comes through is a hopeful, upbeat message directed toward a young audience. "
Go Further is a hybrid of vérité filmmaking, different from what I've done before, but that still connects with my earlier films, which are about documenting alternative culture," continues Mann, 44, who has combined archival material, interviews with his heroes (including Allen Ginsberg and cartoonist Robert Crumb), as well as music, narration and graphic design in such films as Twist, Poetry In Motion, Comic Book Confidential and Grass, all of which are still in circulation on campuses and TV.
"In the 1980s, there was a rewriting of the 1960s, where many accomplishments were dismissed or reduced to failure," Mann explains. "My effort was to put those efforts on film for future generations. Go Further is about activism today, but its message connects to the natural-food movement of the 1960s."
Just then, a young woman timidly approaches to tell Mann that she saw Go Further and has decided to change her diet. "Wow. I'll tell Woody, he'll appreciated that," says the director, whose own lifestyle changes are also part of the film's back story.
"After Grass,I was blimp size from all the film-festival hopping," he laughs. "I decided to do what my wife Paty, who is a nutritionist, had been telling me for years: I stopped eating meat, started doing yoga and lost 50 pounds. When I read Woody was going to talk to kids about yoga and veganism, I knew I had to document it."
Along the way, he says, he came to truly admire the subject of his latest documentary. "Woody is the kind of person that walks his talk," says Mann. "I mean, he lives in a treehouse. I know that sounds strange, but he's off the grid, and that says something." Adds the filmmaker, "At their most cynical, people could say, 'Sure, we'd all love to run around in a bio-fuelled bus' or 'We can't afford organic.' But he's doing it, and if more people did, well, let's face it, it has to start somewhere."
