Candida Brady

Well, I think the role of the film for me was to raise awareness on the topic and get it into the press so that people could start having a meaningful conversation about waste, which is not a particularly attractive subject, let’s say.

We ended up actually filming in eleven countries, but the stories that I’ve chosen are universal, and obviously I spoke to people incommunities, in more countries, than we actually filmed in.

But their stories are certainly not isolated: they were repeated around the world, sadly, wherever you kind of want to pick, actually.

I had worked with Jeremy some years ago on a different film, and I was generally aware that he doesn’t like waste, either.

He will, you know, wear his jumpers until they’re worn out; he’ll keep his cars until they’re falling apart, you know; he’ll repair everything – so he’s always seen, you know, the value in reusing things.

It’s just something natural to him as well, so he just felt like a natural first approach, and so I sent him the treatment and amazingly he loved it.

Well, Jeremy and Vangelis have been friends for years, so Jeremy sent him the rough cut of the film and Vangelis absolutely loved it.

He is also a committed environmentalist, so he’s always been aware.

He was aware because he worked with Cousteau – sort of various people, you know – he was aware of issues for the seas and so on but generally, again, he was very shocked by the film and really wanted to get involved, so...

I spent about a year talking to communities, talking to experts you know, obviously reading an awful lot and just ingesting it all, because obviously, again, it’s such an enormous topic to take on.

Yes and no strangely enough.

Obviously, I had a wonderful DOP – Director of Photography – so he can pretty much make anything look beautiful, I think.

But I wanted to choose – as I’ve said earlier you know, I did a lot of research, and so sadly, these things were repeatable and in every country around the world – so I wanted to choose beautiful places wherever possible that had been ruined, unfortunately, by man-made rubbish.

So the ancient port of Saida in Lebanon – the fact that, you know, you’ve got this huge mountain of waste which was formerly a flat sandy beach.

A huge challenge, yes. Um, I would have preferred to make a much more cheerful, um, documentary than, um, I think Trashed is. I think it has got hope, um, I think ’cos we were very much aware that we wanted to offer solutions at the end of it, but you are...um, the subject is not a cheerful subject. Um, I could have gone further, I think,with it, but I didn’t want to because actually, youknow, you could sort of end up feeling that you just want to go and shoot yourself, which is notwhat I wanted. I wanted to feel that, you know, people feel that they can make a difference to this topic.

If I had to pick one which I would be reluctant to do it would be water, without a doubt.

I think that what has happened to all of the oceans – and beaches, actually, as well – in the world in the last thirty years is astonishing in the scale and the speed.

You know, there are certain places in the world, that, you know... that you have to dig down on a beach over a foot before you’ll find sand that doesn’t have plastic in it.

Unfortunately, what’s happened with the way that soft plastic degrades in water is that the pieces become so fragmented that they’re the same size as the zooplankton, um, which obviously is in the food chain.

I tried very hard, actually, not to blame one person or things in the film – actually quite deliberately, because I think in a way it lets us off the hook and it also...

I think we all need to work on the problem together because it’s too complicated to blame one person or one thing or one act, or, you know, I think it’s multi-faceted, unfortunately.

Well, I actually in the film ended up using San Francisco as the example because I wanted to show that zero waste could be achieved on a big scale.

When you go and stay in San Francisco in your hotel room, you’ll have four different bins, and you’ll have signs on the wall of what goes into each bin, so it’s very, very easy to recycle, and I think that’s a huge part of what we should be doing.

I don’t think the film has particularly changed my own habits dramatically, um, because I’ve always been thrifty, um, by nature because I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with my grandparents when I was growing up, and the post-war, sort of, philosophy of never wasting anything, it just, you know, it was instilled in me.

I ride the same bicycle that I’ve had since I was fifteen years old, and over the years obviously had it repaired and repaired, but I take tremendous pride in the fact that I’ve always ridden the same bike, and, you know, I have lovely memories of it, so – and with it – so I think we need a slight change of mindset to make things cool the longer you have them, in a way, than actually this perpetual thing of buying new things for the sake of it.

I don’t think the film has particularly changed my own habits dramatically, um, because I’ve always been thrifty, um, by nature because I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with my grandparents when I was growing up, and the post-war, sort of, philosophy of never wasting anything, it just, you know, it was instilled in me.

I ride the same bicycle that I’ve had since I was fifteen years old, and over the years obviously had it repaired and repaired, but I take tremendous pride in the fact that I’ve always ridden the same bike, and, you know, I have lovely memories of it, so – and with it – so I think we need a slight change of mindset to make things cool the longer you have them, in a way, than actually this perpetual thing of buying new things for the sake of it.