In the documentary Gaslit, Jane Fonda (Barbarella) travels across the oil fields of West Texas’ Permian Basin and through the Gulf Coast of Louisiana visiting the communities impacted by oil and gas production.

In an exclusive conversation with Nexus Point News, Director Katie Camosy sets out to detail the local groups most impacted by this capitalist greed, what celebrity support means for the project, and how this compares to the threat of AI.

James Crooks: Why is this story in GASLIT important to you, why is it the topic that you want to cover?

Katie Camosy: So I’ve been working with the environmental organization Greenpeace for about a decade as a video producer kind of traveling the US, telling stories about climate change, environmental pollution, oil spills on the ships, doing all of that, and gas. It really feels like the culmination of all that work.

The urgent issue right now is we have this pretty new threat to our environment: It’s called ‘LNG’ – it’s liquefied natural gas. It’s kind of a wonky term, but basically we’re now doing something the US has never done before, where we’re fracking gas here and then exporting it to other countries.

What that means is that people in the US are getting all the, not just climate change issues, but all the health issues, jobs issues, communities getting just decimated to make room for these things. Then it’s sold for a profit overseas, including places like Europe, that have banned fracking on their own lands. So that’s also raising our energy costs! 

This is like a brand new kind of thing in the last, I don’t know, five years or so, that’s come out of the fracking boom and it’s just really keeping us away from the transition to renewable [energy] …

What really got me wanting to make Gaslit were the people that live in this region. So almost all of these new terminals and a lot of this fracking is down in Texas and Louisiana, which is a place that for the last hundred years has been like a dumping ground for our industrial pollution.

So we have Jane Fonda (9 to 5) kind of take us on a road trip from Texas through Louisiana, meeting the communities who are impacted and kind of seeing how they’re fighting back. So it’s ultimately like a bit educational, but also, hopefully really inspiring for audiences.

James Crooks: How do you feel having a celebrity of Jane Fonda’s status attached and the eyes that this brings to the project that perhaps Gaslit might not otherwise have?

Katei Camosy: I think it’s so necessary for docs like this. Audiences have lots of options, a lot of things to watch. When you have kind of social justice issue documentaries or things like this, it can really help to bring in a celebrity presence. I think we can all think of examples like that, but you also want to be careful because we are bringing a wealthy celebrity down to communities that are really poor. I think there’s a really important balance there that as a documentarian, you have to keep an eye on.

So Jane, this was front of mind for her, she’s like: “I want to help people, shine a light on these stories, amplify these stories, but I don’t want to take attention away”.

So I love how right in the beginning of the film she says, ‘my celebrity affords me a spotlight, I’m using to shine it on this’. I think it’s really great.

She plays another role in the film that is so helpful! She’s kind of like an audience avatar where we’re watching her meet these people and we see how she reacts to them. And, Jane is so down to earth and has so much empathy that, I really think it adds another dimension that we wouldn’t have if we if we didn’t have her in the film as well.

James Crooks: Were there any moments during the filming of this documentary that caught you off guard and you suddenly had to improvise?

Katie Camosy: Yeah, we had a lot! On a practical level with the production, these are areas that have just really wild weather changes.

So in the Permian basin, which is in West Texas, this big drilling field, we had sandstorms, we had [issues where] it would get too hot to turn the cameras on. Even with Jane [Fonda], we had her for three weeks, a different location each day And there would be so many issues with storms, with this and that, but it would, you know like it often does, it would give you new ideas.

Like one, when we go to Corpus Christi, Texas, we meet these organizers and we were going to kind of meet them one at a time. And then we had so many production issues that we were like, okay, we can only have one person and we thought, ‘why don’t we try like a roundtable and do that?’ – so we kind of improvise on the fly there.

Our production motto was, in fact, pivot. Because we were felt like we were always pivoting but Jane was a trooper and went along with it. Then in the larger world, the issues with energy and specifically LNG, that keeps changing as we go through.

When we were filming it, the Biden administration was still the one we were dealing with and they actually put a pause on building any of these new terminals while we’re filming.

And we thought, ‘Well, maybe that’s the ending. We might have just gotten the end!’

We have this, like, really good news. But of course, during the edit process – and we had 500 hours to get through, so that took a while – Trump comes in and on day one undoes that, and is like, ‘let’s ramp up these terminals!’

So we had to kind of figure out [how] we don’t have budget to necessarily go back and re-shoot things. But, the way from the beginning we thought about it is; it might be about LNG, it might be about single use plastic, but really it’s about destructive industries and kind of the industry versus the community or the pollution versus the individual – and so I think it works regardless. I’m sad to say that with the Trump administration in office, Gaslit is more relevant than ever.

James Crooks: We’re seeing this boom now of AI, whilst I appreciate this deviates from Gaslit’s subject focus, this also has a massive environmental impact. Are you concerned about the environmental impact of AI, or are you cautiously optimistic that things are perhaps going in the right direction?

Katie Camosy: There’s more awareness on the topic, it’s so fascinating. The data centers [etc], it’s absolutely connected to Gaslit and in fact, I think in a way it’s an easier route in for people to sort of think about the industry near them because it’s a new thing. Greenpeace has campaigns against data centers that are using fossil fuels, it’s definitely an issue. We’re also seeing these data centers…I mean, they’re everywhere!

I think we all know they’re coming near us, but in the area we’re adding Gaslit, there’s so much there as well.

So I’ve been taking Gaslit around , we’ve done the festival circuit, we had a limited theatrical run, and we do these Q&A’s after, and people talk about it!

They’re like, ‘all of a sudden there’s going to be a data center in my community’ – it happened very fast.

Public comment period is very short and it’s really, it’s the same kind of resistance you see in Gaslit that can be used against that. And I think it’s something we should all be worried about.

One thing that’s different, that’s very interesting, is it doesn’t seem to yet be as politicized, you know, with oil and gas. There’s definitely a left and right viewpoints on it, both data centers, it seems to be that left and right are both against it. So I’m hoping that this can be a way ‘in’ for people to see how powerful communities are and that if you can organize your community, and get on the same page, you actually do have more power than these billion dollar industries.

James Crooks: What could audiences do or say after watching Gaslit that makes you feel that you’ve done your job correctly?

Katie Camosy: So there’s so many ways you can plug into this movement. If you want to support the people in the film, you can go to GASLIT Doct, that’s our website.

You’re also going to find petitions and all that there. But the piece that I kind of gets me the most excited is if they start looking at their own community and talking to their neighbors and getting more information. I think that’s really where this is going to come down to.

Also, of course, we would love for you to support the film, share the film, get people to watch it if you’ve seen it.

Gaslit is Out Now on Prime Video