content taken from
http://www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Movies-TV-Music-Books/Explosive-Contents-Lucy-Walker-s-New-Documentary-Turns-Up-the-Heat
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jun/16/lucy-walker-countdown-to-zero
If Lucy Walker weren’t a filmmaker, she could have been a cop. She can make anyone talk, whether it’s the camera-shy Amish elders in her 2002 documentary, Devil’s Playground; idealistic mountaineers in 2006’s Blindsight squabbling over how to help blind Tibetan adolescents climb Mount Everest; the impoverished Brazilians who glean what can be salvaged from the country’s biggest dump in Waste Land (2009); or the amazingly chatty Russian truck driver caught smuggling weapons-grade uranium to terrorists in Walker’s most gripping documentary yet, this month’s Countdown to Zero. Walker jokingly calls herself “the queen of access,” but she’s dead serious about her new film, a vivid, heart-pounding wakeup call to an intensifying nuclear-arms race that makes the Cold War’s saber-rattling standoff seem almost cozy. (Sometimes it was: Her most shocking revelation details how in 1995 the hard-drinking Soviet premier Boris Yeltsin literally saved all of our lives.) Unlike the superpowers, terrorist groups want to get their hands on nuclear weapons for one reason only: to use them on the rest of us. Imagine 9/11 with nukes. “It’s the scariest stuff ever,” Walker says, “the most urgent threat we’re facing.”
Walker, a Londoner who took top honors at Oxford in English literature and language, started honing her craft when she won a Fulbright to study film at New York University. “A lot of my friends were snobby about documentaries,” she says wryly. “They thought they were Martin Scorsese.” But Walker learned how to make all kinds of films at NYU. “I felt I should master as many aspects of film as possible. That was my strategy for trying to get a leg up in this high-tech, massively maledominated profession.” It worked. She was nominated two years in a row for a Daytime Emmy for her directing work in her first job out of college (Nickelodeon’s animated series Blue’s Clues). Her first three documentaries have won major awards, and Countdown to Zero, already generating big buzz, is all but certain to get an Oscar nom. “I do want to make fiction films, too,” Walker says. She undoubtedly will, just as soon as she’s finished doing her bit to save the world.
