Heat seeker

How screenwriter Scott Z Burns turned the lessons from his previous An Inconvenient Truth and Contagion into the star-studded climate-crisis drama Extrapolations.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Scott Z Burns doesn't much look like a prophet of doom. Via Zoom from Los Angeles, he's a friendly, bespectacled, bearded, bald guy from the American Midwest who went from directing commercials to making movies with a message. Doom has been a bit of a speciality.

That's whether it was as producer on the landmark 2006 Al Gorefronted climate-change doco An Inconvenient Truth or as the writer of Contagion, the prescient 2011 pandemic movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, which, having done okay at the time, became a streaming hit during the Covid lockdown era.

He's tackled issues after the fact, too - as the writer of The Laundromat, a Soderbergh Netflix movie about the Panama Papers, and as the writer and director of The Report, about US Senate investigator Daniel Jones' efforts to probe the CIA's use of torture after 9/11.

But with Extrapolations, the new climate-crisis drama series he's created for Apple TV+, Burns has gone back to the future. The show combines the crystal ball gazing of An Inconvenient Truth with Contagion's trick of joining the global dots with seemingly disparate local dramas and a starry ensemble. The series starts in 2037 and its eight episodes of interlaced stories are heading to 2070.

That near-future starting date is significant, says Burns. "When I was writing the show, Inconvenient Truth was about 15 years in the rear-view mirror and our pilot episode was about 15 years in front. I think most people remember An Inconvenient Truth and so it means that this isn't that far away - 15 years is not a length of time that any of us can afford to go, 'Oh, well, that's not my life, that's not my world.""

Contagion, and how much it got right, he says, helped give him the confidence to do something as farreaching and big as Extrapolations and take some hypothetical leaps.