JOSH FOX LOOKS BENEATH THE SURFACE
SUBJECT
Josh Fox
OCCUPATION
Filmmaker
INTERVIEWER
Sarah Pant
PHOTOGRAPHER
Kali Bunn
LOCATION
New York City, US
DATE
February, 2021
Josh Fox is best known for his Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated film, Gasland. His films are deeply personal, following questions that capture him and pull him into quests for truth. From investigating the impacts of fracking to facing the devastating truths of the climate crisis and, in his latest film, exploring how “The Truth Has Changed,” Josh dives into the fray. He is unflinching in his willingness to meet the truth head-on, share it with the world, and support the movement that rises from it. It takes a rare combination of bravery, tenacity and willpower to tackle such topics and to stare down powerful lobby groups, industries and politicians who want him to be silent. However for Josh, art and politics have always been intrinsically linked.
Josh is an interesting contradiction – he talks with the speed and confidence of New York City, but ask him about nature and he is instantly transported. There’s a sudden spaciousness of days by the river amongst the Pennsylvanian pines of his childhood home and that profound quietness that comes over someone who truly knows the connection with the ecosystem of which he is a part.
Josh is an artist and an activist, and yet also describes himself as a historian. His personal history is alive within him. He carries the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in his veins, the legacy of his Yiddish poet grandfather who faced genocide and survived because he had the foresight to know when to move. Perhaps it is because of this that he shines a light on difficult and uncomfortable things, because somewhere deep within him he knows what happens when we turn a blind eye to brutality. Living out the legacy of his grandfather, Josh has the courage and foresight to face ecocide, and recognises that we have to move now.
If I were to draw a picture of Josh it would be of him standing in the centre of things, the centre of our recent history and world events. Josh has this sense of himself within history as it unfolds. He understands his place in the world and the monumental significance of this moment in time for us as a species.
SARAH PANT: I’d love to start by hearing some of the things that bring you alive, where that drive in your documentary work comes from. How you came to do the work that you do.
JOSH FOX: So I have been in the theatre since I was 10 years old. I came seeking refuge from a very violent and difficult home situation and found it a place to, like a lot of people, just express. From an early age I also had a deep love of the woods. You see a lot of my movies like and start in rural Pennsylvania. And then I’m also very much a person who grew up in New York City in the ’80s in an atmosphere where art was what you did. I played in all sorts of bands. Ska bands, punk bands, metal bands. I was part of a generation of punk kids who had no stability at home. You cut school and you went to 48th Street and you played guitars all day long, or walked around and looked at graffiti. I was also on stage in plays at my high school, and in some independent short films. There was a political consciousness at the time; this was the era of “Do The Right Thing.”.
