People & Media...

Whenever an actor or actress starts talking about their commitment to the environment, it’s all I can do to stop myself from shutting down, as if cornered by the party bore. Not another one! As a reporter, I can steer the conversation in another direction—we can talk about The Role, The Career, The Weather.

However, in the case of a recent interview with Ellen Page, star of the independent film Juno and legitimate contender for a Best Actress Oscar, it was easy to play along because she had such an attitude. Instead of mouthing the usual pieties about how we’re choking on our own garbage, she talked about the garbage.

“I arrive at the airport,” she says of a visit to New York, “and I'm just walking through with my bag and there are twenty large television screens on one side of the hallway and twenty large television screens on the other side of the hallway all playing a friggin’ Xbox goddamn advertisement. And I mean just that energy, forty goddamn television screens so that Xbox can advertise their friggin’ product.”

Page, who freely acknowledges how wasteful film productions are, does her carbon off-sets on-screen, playing young women who are more than just arm candy (in fact, her previous claim to fame was a film called Hard Candy). Her current film, Juno, is about a pregnant teen who decides to have the child and adopt it out to a childless yuppie couple played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. The film is very hot – though Page does not give global warming any credit for that – or blame either.

Asked if she thinks her youthful eco enthusiasm might eventually wane (she’s twenty), she says, “I don't think so, because I think significant change isn't really happening, or it's made to seem like there's significant change because Wal-Mart will sell the nice light bulbs—like, whoop-de-friggin’-do—so I'll drive my car to Wal-Mart and go into a place that sells nothing that's locally made to go and buy a light bulb. Awesome.”