Whistle-blower sees 'Collapse' on horizon

Chris Smith walked into his interview with L.A. police detective-turned-whistle-blower Michael Ruppert early this year planning to make a film about the CIA’s alleged drug-smuggling operations in the 1980s. Smith emerged from the meeting with an entirely new movie in mind. “Michael had no inclination to talk about the past,” Smith recalls. “This was in February when the economy was at its worst, so Mike delivered this three-hour monologue about what he saw happening around us. The amount of information he had synthesized was astounding.”

In the resulting documentary, “Collapse,” Ruppert draws on a large array of facts and figures to forecast the end of American civilization mainly because of a dwindling oil supply. A self-taught analyst, Ruppert foresaw the Wall Street crash in 1998, when he began publishing his From the Wilderness newsletter.

“Michael feels like he’s been criticized ostracized and persecuted for trying to get this message out,” says Smith, who filmed Ruppert sitting alone in the basement of an abandoned meatpacking plant as he espoused his views. “We wanted it to feel like a place where an interrogation could take place, as if this were a meeting where you could get secret information. That plays off Michael’s background, given his allegations about the CIA.”

Tagged a conspiracy theorist, Ruppert counters during the film with the notion that he’s a purveyor of “conspiracy fact.” Smith, who won the 1999 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for “American Movie,” says “I’d put myself in the category of being borderline converted. Michael has an encyclopedic mind, but what really amazes me is the way he puts together all this information about peak oil, the economy, population and energy to develop a cohesive thesis.”

SF Chronicle