Stuart Townsend: Ain't No Power Like the Power of People

Hometown: Dublin, Ireland.
Film: Battle in Seattle
For Fans Of: Medium Cool, United 93, Crash

In 1999, during the winter of our discontent, a tornado hit America’s own Emerald City—Seattle—in the form of tens of thousands of protesters who stormed the streets in a successful effort to shut down a meeting of the controversial World Trade Organization (WTO). Meanwhile, Stuart Townsend watched the “Battle in Seattle” unfold in another city revered for its verdancy—his hometown of Dublin—with nary a thought that it would one day illuminate the events in his directorial debut. “I wasn’t very political, and I wasn’t very aware of the world of protest,” Townsend says. But after reading an essay by Paul Hawken that recapped those five fateful days, he was “taken in by it, all the creativity on the streets, and how people express themselves and their right to dissent, or speak truth to power. I thought it’d be great to bring that to a big-screen audience and let them enter this colorful, creative, chaotic world.”

Seed sown, Townsend spent 18 months researching the groundbreaking grassroots protest before penning the script for Battle in Seattle, a film he also produced. After more than a decade in front of the camera, Townsend—a self-proclaimed “genuine film nerd”—found his ambitions shifting to a behind-the-scenes role. “I didn’t know if I could do it or not,” Townsend admits, “but I didn’t really ever ask myself that question, ‘Can I do it?’ I just knew that I wanted to tell the story.”

Townsend’s ensemble film incorporates archival footage from the riots—a la Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool—to create a multidimensional, vividly realized account of “the first Internet protest in history,” as one of the main characters dubs the decentralized uprising. As for the goal of exposing viewers to what “gets so marginalized by the mainstream media,” the rousing Battle in Seattle has struck a nerve with festival audiences, earning standing ovations across the globe.

“All those protesters out there were ahead of the curve,” Townsend says. “Seattle was the first moment where globalization really popped. Those activists were really inspired because they showed that you could tactically take down...one of the biggest organizations in the world, you could shine a spotlight and you could have a victory.”

Read Paste's review of Battle in Seattle here.