INTERVIEW SERIES: The Ecology of the Screen: Cinema, Digital Infrastructure, and Climate INTERVIEWERS: Gokhan Colak & Duru Demirkıran INTERVIEWEE: Pietari Kääpä

The climate crisis is no longer simply an issue that cinema and audiovisual media represent; it is increasingly becoming a structural challenge that requires the production processes themselves to change. Film productions have significant environmental footprints through travel, energy consumption, set construction, equipment use, logistics, and waste generation. In this context, how do you define the concept of “sustainable media production,” and which fundamental assumptions underlying conventional models of film production do you believe need to be reconsidered? Do you see sustainability as a set of technical practices that can be incorporated into the existing production system, or as a broader paradigm shift requiring the economic, cultural, and institutional structures of filmmaking to be fundamentally reimagined?

It may be best to start with a distinction between ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’. Green production is an explicitly promotional/branding focused term designed to mask the fact that film production is not – and never will be – environmental (due to all the reasons you listed). The working definition I use is deliberately relational: sustainable media production is production whose organisational, financial, practical and creative decisions are made with a clear understanding of the material consequences of such activities, and where responsibility for those consequences has an identifiable stakeholder. Film and television production is often based on a project-focused temporary organization and comes into being for a few months, whereby it mobilizes people, vehicles, generators, hotel rooms and hard drives, and then dissolves. While the production is often temporary, their environmental impact is tangible and durable.

Thus, it is less productive to focus on incidental production measurements and metrics (that invariably act as the core of the industry’s ‘green’ rhetoric) and more on the industry’s sustainability model itself. To me, the challenge is that sustainability is considered something exceptional that gets added to a production through a coordinator or a checklist, rather than something that should be part of ordinary professional judgement.

Because sustainability is considered and presented as extra-ordinary, it becomes more performative and rhetoric-based. However, if it was ordinary, sustainable approaches would be taken-for-granted craft knowledge of, say, a line producer or a location manager. While all the innovative practices and technical improvements incorporated into the existing system are necessary, and I would not be dismissive of them as they are what most people on a set can actually act on, they are in some ways insufficient. The economic structure of the industry is determined by growth, but sustainable growth is something of a misnomer when we are talking about an industry expanding at such vast scale. To be sustainable, then, is more about a paradigm shift that arrives through the mundane rather than the dramatic.

Discussions of sustainability in the film industry are often reduced to measurable technical objectives such as reducing carbon emissions, lowering energy consumption, or managing waste. Yet the way a film is produced is also deeply connected to labor practices, production cultures, economic pressures, international filming, platform economies, and the industry’s growth-oriented structure. Why do you think it is necessary to move beyond a purely “lower carbon” approach to achieve genuinely sustainable media production? How do you understand the relationship between sustainability and power relations, working conditions, and the political economy of media production?

The lower-carbon framing is seductive because it is measurable and visible (and thus marketable). Yet, the carbon focus is only a part of a much more complex narrative about cultural transformation: crew relations, travel arrangements, value systems, working conditions and the local economies the productions pass through. If you optimize your production to meet certification metrics, you can easily end up with a production that is nominally greener and materially worse for the people making it, for instance by shortening schedules until crews are working unsafe hours, or by moving work to wherever the emissions are projected to have the lowest costs regardless of what that means for the workforce there.

The key to understanding a sustainability-focused work culture is to look at the relationship between sustainability and power. Who gets to define what counts on set? There is now documented evidence of unequal work conditions for sustainability coordinators who are marginalized into, effectively, cleaning or waste management roles. As this is a business, they are sometimes perceived as an add-on to the ‘real’ creative work of making a film. And this is on individual sets that have already recognized the necessity of sustainability, even if it is through semi-legal enforcement, and not ones that still need educating about the merits of sustainability.

In addition, sustainable production is not an international standard that treats each location equally. Escalated to a more international scale, at the moment, sustainability coordination is managed by a fairly small group of streamers, broadcasters, funders and platforms in the Global North, working through certification schemes that they administer and whose methodologies they control. The people whose work is being measured, and the regions whose resources are being drawn on (especially when we think of problematic ‘solutions’ like AI tools), have very little say in what the metric captures.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform many stages of filmmaking, from script development and visual generation to post-production, editing, and virtual production. On the one hand, AI could potentially contribute to lower-carbon production models by reducing the need for physical shoots, travel, and certain forms of resource consumption. On the other hand, the energy and water consumption of large AI models, the environmental costs of data centers, and the rapidly expanding computational infrastructure are creating a new set of ecological concerns. How do you assess this contradiction? Can AI genuinely become a sustainable production tool for cinema, or does it risk simply relocating environmental costs from physical production environments to digital infrastructures?

The case for AI as a low-carbon production tool rests on the rhetoric of displacement reliant on an ‘avoided emissions’ argument. Sometimes referred to as Scope 4 emissions, the argument here is similar to virtual production: replicating shooting conditions, logistics, travel arrangements, set construction etc. digitally. The baseline against which the savings are measured is hypothetical and is in many ways chosen by the party making the claim. A production that generates an establishing shot with a diffusion model can assert that it avoided a location unit but it is not possible to audit the shoot that did not take place. Meanwhile the actual, measurable emissions of the compute required for AI services are typically reported by a different entity, on a different balance sheet, using market-based accounting that can make the energy, water and other material and social requirements and impacts of data centres disappear behind renewable energy certificates. Thus, for an AI-pilled shoot, the physical cost has not gone away but has instead moved to a place where accounting conventions can obfuscate it or even make it invisible.

I would add a second point that is more about what a lot of materialist STS work calls the rebound effect (or Jevons Paradox). AI does not simply substitute a shoot but changes the extent of what is possible in terms of both volume and aesthetic form. If generative tools lower the marginal cost of producing footage, the volume of footage rises. This is a historical pattern in media production as tools that make a thing cheaper make more of it.

Can AI be a sustainable production tool? Under specific conditions, yes, but this requires that the compute is disclosed with the same granularity and transparency now expected of a location shoot – a problem that is especially challenging considering the proprietary black box of big tech tools and material processes.

There is an important paradox between the representation of the climate crisis in cinema and cinema’s own environmental impact: a film can raise awareness about climate change while simultaneously being the product of a resource-intensive industry. How do you understand the distinction between producing “ecological content” and producing content “ecologically”? How meaningful is it for a film to address the climate crisis if its own production process is environmentally unsustainable? Furthermore, do you think cinema can move beyond simply producing stories about climate change and develop new narrative forms capable of transforming audiences’ perceptions of nature, consumption, technology, and anthropocentrism?

There is a level of well-known hypocrisy in producing films like the Avatar series while claiming that they generate climate awareness impacts. Yet, this is a tricky balance to strike. The awareness shows like Planet Earth generate is real and should be commended. The problem is when content is allowed to stand in for practice, and when the environmental credentials of the story are used, explicitly or implicitly, to deflect scrutiny from the environmental record of the production. This is another instance of green performativity: the environment is foregrounded in ways that produces legitimacy rather than constituting tangible change in production’s material expenses or working conditions.

Changing the production model of major media content is expensive and unglamorous (and often resisted on many levels of the production), so the focus on content positives is unsurprising.

As for more positive emerging trends in climate content: focusing on the everyday provides a potentially more impactful alternative to the explicit foregrounding of environmentalist messaging. BAFTA albert has been projecting this idea for some time now with their Planet Placement incentive where the idea is to place environmental, climate-aware content in the background into the subtleties of the image (for example, recycling bins in the background of Coronation Street etc). This has alternatively been called the climate unconscious or banal materialism, both concepts which imply that an awareness of the impacts humanity has on the environment needs to be weaved into the ordinary, everyday we see on screens. Here, the climate crisis is not the explicit subject of such films or shows, but these examples can arguably be even more environmentalist because of the depth of their representation. So yes, I think new narrative forms are possible, but I would look for them in the connection between how a film is made and how it represents the human-environment connection.

In recent years, the proliferation of green production guides, carbon calculators (such as Albert or PEAR), and eco-certification badges has become standard practice within major film funds and studios. However, scholars often critique these frameworks for reducing ecological responsibility to bureaucratic compliance and performative metrics. How do you view the effectiveness of these institutional auditing tools? Do they foster genuine ecological accountability among media producers, or do they risk creating a form of institutional “eco-washing” that shields hyper-capitalist production models from deeper structural critique?

First of all, calculators can be authentically useful: they give sustainability managers coordinating a temporary operation (ie. a film shoot) a vocabulary to communicate about the (sometimes) elusive impacts of production and visualize them in effective and comparable ways. But there are major caveats in all these certification mechanisms, that they themselves often recognise. A certification scheme run by the organisations whose productions it certifies, based on self-reported data, with a green label as the output, will not incentivize actual reductions in emissions. Instead, it increases the likelihood that offsetting is used as a mechanism to cut back on actual production emissions. Thus, many major media companies like Netflix are able to claim progress towards Net Zero without substantial cuts to production volume or transformations in practice.

At the same time, while it is worth recognizing that companies like Netflix, Sony and others are doing good work in being transparent and responsible in their operations, the deeper problem with the sectoral emphasis on reporting and metrification is scope. These frameworks are built around the physical production, and they are relatively good at measuring generators and flights (especially as they are auditable by the companies themselves). They are much less accurate with the parts of the value chain that now dominate: platform delivery, data storage, workflow distribution, and increasingly, AI compute, which sit in Scope 3 categories that are either excluded or estimated with methodologies that few outside the data and platform service provision reporting company can inspect. As this is increasingly the direction of travel, the work Hunter Vaughan and I have produced on sustainable digitalization, for example, needs to be considered alongside the emphasis on tangible production practice – the industry needs to divest from the rhetoric of green ephemerality of digital solutionism and see this as increasingly a key part of the problem in what are effectively hyper-capitalist production models.

The globalized geography of film production frequently relies on international co- productions, tax incentives, and location shooting in the Global South or peripheral economies—often displacing environmental degradation and resource extraction onto less regulated regions. How does an eco-critical political economy account for these global spatial inequalities? In what ways does the pursuit of high-budget visual spectacle reinforce environmental injustice, and how can sustainable production frameworks avoid falling into eurocentric or Global North-centric paradigms of “green standardizing”?

An ecocritical approach to the political economy of a sustainable film industry has to begin from the observation that tax credits, co-production treaties, labour practices, and location competition move production to wherever the combination of subsidy, infrastructure, labour cost and regulatory tolerance is most favourable. The environmental consequences of such location displacement is, for multiple reasons, not built fully into current carbon calculators. Here, the economics of scale of the blockbuster model reward mobility, because the incentive portfolio from multiple territories can offset a meaningful share of the budget.

There are several implications from this. First is the proliferation of calculation metrics and sustainability standards that is especially challenging with high-end blockbuster production. Thus, you get a production culture whose footprint is distributed across several countries and whose accountability is distributed to these locations, leading to a situation where an Amazon Prime production, for example, imposes its own green production standards on local crew and production resources. The green standardisation frameworks exported through such activities originate in the US, UK and Western Europe and carry assumptions about grid mix, infrastructure, production culture, and institutional capacity that do not travel well. Through the Global Green Media Production Network and colleagues working in Asia, Africa and Latin America, one hears the same concern repeatedly: that a Global North certification standard, applied as a condition of co- production finance, becomes another imposition or even a form of obstacle that requires local partners to change their practices, and often pay for it themselves. The approach to mitigating such challenges is to treat local production ecologies as sources of knowledge rather than sites of compliance. We do see an increased emphasis on glocalization, often highlighting instances such as the Austrian Film Institute’s 5% sustainability incentive, but my concern is that with increased reliance on black box algorithms and digital tools, such advances are marginalized.

With the rapid transition toward cloud-based workflows, remote post-production, and digital distribution (SVOD platforms), media consumption and creation are often perceived by the public as dematerialized. Yet, the physical infrastructure of digital cinema—ranging from rare-earth mineral extraction for hardware to the planned obsolescence of cameras and server farms—tells a very different story of environmental destruction. How shouldsustainable media research dismantle the myth of digital ephemerality? What role does the physical life cycle of media hardware and e-waste play in defining a holistic eco-criticism of screen industries?

The ephemeral rhetoric of the cloud is one of the most successful pieces of misdirection in the history of industrial marketing that obfuscates a warehouse full of servers, cooling towers, diesel backup generators and undersea cable networks. Sustainable media research actively refuses that vocabulary and its accompanying ‘green’ rhetoric: the extraction of minerals for sensors and drives, the manufacture and rapid obsolescence of cameras and workstations, the energy and water drawn by data centres, the undersea cables and the end-of-life e-waste that flows, disproportionately, to the regions least equipped to process it. And again, much of this still sits outside of the carbon calculator framework.

Methodologically there are several consequences. First, lifecycle thinking needs to be factored into production certification. Equipment footprint extends well beyond the shoot into manufacture and disposal, and a production-level calculator only provides a partial picture. Second, location-based (insetting) rather than market-based (offsetting) accounting is required to address digital impacts, because the practice of matching consumption against purchased green certificates is what allows the data intensive activity of digital production flows to be reported as near Net Zero. By questioning digital emissions and e-waste, a holistic eco-criticism of screen industries connects the industry’s growth logic directly to its material residue. Any analytical approach that does not include the digital and hardware lifecycle is, in effect, accepting the industry’s own definition of its responsibility boundaries.

Most contemporary policy initiatives targeting sustainable production attempt to align green practices with industrial competitiveness and economic growth. However, true ecological sustainability may ultimately be incompatible with the endless growth logic of mainstream commercial cinema. Is a “degrowth” model for the film industry politically or economically feasible, or must policy focus instead on state-mandated regulations, strict caps on physical resource usage, and alternative funding models that prioritize public- interest ecological values over box-office scalability?

The mainstream high-end commercial model is built on ever-expanding scale (a sustainable development perspective if ever there was one). It highlights an increasing drive for more content, more territories, more users, and more screens. Sustainability initiatives that are designed to be compatible with that model are, by construction, initiatives that do not question volume, and ultimately deliver certification without tangible reduction. So in principle, yes, I think a serious ecological accounting is incompatible with an endless-growth logic, and the industry’s policy language, in which green is often framed as a nice symbolic competitive advantage, is a way of not confronting that.

Is degrowth feasible as a policy for the film industry? As a slogan, no; governments are not going to legislate for fewer films. But this is in many ways about selecting your words carefully when framing the need for more sustainable approaches. Public service broadcasters and national film institutes, especially in the Nordic countries, have long funded on criteria other than box-office scalability. Public funding conditions can and do encourage mindful production practice, cap physical resource use, mandate disclosure and require sector- or corporate-level rather than production-level accounting. Location incentives can be made contingent on environmental as well as economic outcomes, as we now see in Austria, New Zealand, and Chicago, of all places, and could be redesigned to reward productions that stay put rather than productions that move.

Where I would push harder is on the framing. I have explained my reservations about the use of green rhetoric, but similarly, ‘sustainable’ has limitations as it means keeping something going (as in ‘sustainable development’). The alternative I have been working with is regenerative production that leaves the places, people and institutions it touches in better condition than it found them. That reorients the question from how much we can produce, and it brings environment, labour, locality and public value into the same frame as carbon. It is also, I think, the framing that has the best chance of being normalized as a way towards a more environmentally sensible and ethical approach, rather than operating as a performative tool. Sustaining current best sustainability practice (that increasingly outdates fast) is only ticking boxes, but doing something that significantly improves local conditions is something that can be built into the ordinary professional judgement of the people who actually produce film instead of being only a reporting obligation. Similar moves in open weight localized AI tools may provide a partial solution to the industry’s digital problem, or at least, diversify the (big data) service providers holding the reigns of the industry.