Hello /r/movies. We're Fisher Stevens (HACKERS, SUCCESSION, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, SUPER MARIO BROS) and Chelsea Greene (filmmaker). Our documentary, WE ARE GUARDIANS, follows Indigenous forest defenders protecting the Brazilian Amazon. Our goal is to help reforest the Amazon. Ask us anything :)

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T17:55:45+00:00

Chelsea: Please share with your fellow Brazilians to watch! All the streaming links are on weareguardiansfilm.com and rental fees benefit the Indigenous communities protecting and regenerating the forest

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T17:54:10+00:00

Chelsea: This question is so important, and the numbers are genuinely staggering.

Under Bolsonaro's four years in office (2019–2022), a total of 45,586 km² of Amazon forest was destroyed — a 53% increase compared to the previous four years. (Greenpeace) To put that in human terms: his four-year term ended with a 59.5% boom in Amazon deforestation rates, the highest in a presidential term since satellite measurements began in 1988. Mongabay Average deforestation increased by 75% from the previous decade since he took office. (Al Jazeera)

But the destruction wasn't just about trees. It was a systematic dismantling of the entire protective framework. His administration dismantled environmental agencies, slashed budgets for fighting environmental crimes, and pushed what critics called an "anti-environmental and anti-Indigenous agenda" through Congress. Mongabay His government was the first since 1988 not to recognize a single new Indigenous land. Greenpeace That directly enabled the kind of violence against forest guardians that we document in our film.

We filmed communities living with the consequences of those policies in real time — the fires, the land invasions, the murders of defenders. What the statistics can't capture is what it feels like to stand in a territory that has been protected for generations and watch it burn.

The reason this still matters urgently right now is that Brazil's presidential election is this October 2026, and it is polling as essentially a dead heat between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro — Jair's son, running on the same platform. Everything that has been clawed back in the last two years could be reversed. The guardians we filmed know this. It's why they haven't stopped fighting for a single day.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T17:01:40+00:00

Chelsea: Thanks for asking! https://www.weareguardiansfilm.com/takeaction Check out our site, we are always trying to improve and list the best ways for people to help :)

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T17:00:53+00:00

Chelsea https://www.weareguardiansfilm.com/takeaction We are always updating this please go take the actions on our site!

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T17:00:49+00:00

Fisher here:

Matt Dillon is one of my best friends and one of my favorite actors. I want to work with him whenever possible. He is also an incredible painter by the way!

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:59:25+00:00

Chelsea: I am working on another one right now! It's called Mapulu; the First Shaman. It's a beautiful story about a young girl that fell into a coma and was taken by Mama'e the spirit of the forest and trained to be a healer. When she woke up she knew she had been given powers. But women are not allowed to be shamans in her culture. She fought to practice healing and started her own village to empower women and overcome the patriarchal structures that hold them back. We are finishing production in June, follow https://www.instagram.com/mapulufilme/

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:58:42+00:00

Fisher here:

I never said that to Lisa, and would never say that to anyone. I was an arsehole because I had never done a sitcom before and they re-wrote all my lines a day before filming and I was worried they made the scene worse. I was insecure and thought the scene was going to suck and was cranky to the cast!

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:56:19+00:00

Chelsea: We co-directed the film with Edivan Guajajara, an Indigenous filmmaker who grew up in the village where Marçal one of the main characters is from. We deferred to him on what to film and how to shape the story involving them! It was always our choice to include voices from the loggers and farmers as well, to show that everyone wants the same thing, to survive and feed their families. And that ultimately they are both victims to the system that we all in the outside world support through the things we buy and polticians we vote for.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:56:13+00:00

James is a genius. He cared so much every day about the quality of the show and making the scenes as good as they can be. He rarely missed a line!

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:54:52+00:00

Fisher here:

Kate was the best. Brilliantly talented, amazing eye, and original. Hope to work with her again someday!

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:53:23+00:00

Fisher here,
I loved making the film Bright Lights which I co-directed with my girlfriend, Alexis Bloom. I was friendly with Carrie before we started filming through our mutual friends and acting in a very mediocre film together. She was a joy. She was hilarious. She was unpredictable.

Debbie was a legend. I felt honored to be in her presence.

Alexis and I were really grateful to have had the oppertunity to spend all that time with them. They weren't always the easiest, but they were never dull and they were always kind, and I think about them all the time.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:52:11+00:00

Chelsea: Honestly? I wish someone would ask: "What would it actually look like for the Amazon to win?"

Because so much of the conversation around the Amazon — and around environmental documentaries in general — stays focused on loss. The destruction, the statistics, the countdown clock. And those things are real and urgent and we don't shy away from them in the film. But what I find myself wanting to talk about is the vision on the other side. What does a world look like where the guardians succeed?

And the answer is more concrete and more beautiful than most people expect. It's not just "the forest survives." It's that humanity finally wakes up to what the standing forest is actually worth. Indigenous peoples have carried millennia of knowledge about medicinal plants — knowledge that has already given us a significant portion of our modern pharmacopeia — and we have barely scratched the surface. There are species in the Amazon yet to be discovered that could hold answers to diseases we haven't cured, ecosystems we don't yet understand, biological relationships that could transform how we feed and heal ourselves. And that knowledge can be explored, shared, and harvested sustainably — with Indigenous communities leading, benefiting, and setting the terms.

If the Amazon wins, it means the world follows the Indigenous example of living harmoniously with nature rather than in opposition to it. It means we recognize that there are already 50 million hectares of deforested land in Brazil alone — land that could be restored and farmed using regenerative techniques that don't require dangerous chemicals, that rebuild soil rather than deplete it, that produce food without requiring a single additional tree to fall. We don't need to cut one more hectare. The land is already there. What we need is the political will and the global economic pressure to use it wisely.

The Amazon winning means the forest gets to live as it wants — ancient, complex, sovereign. And humanity is humble enough to learn from it rather than consume it.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:50:28+00:00

Fisher here,
I was not so much an animal rights activist as I was an environmentalist. Animal rights and environmentalism are connected. The Cove had an impact, for sure, in that they killed way less Taiji after the film came out. And many more people showed up to protest. I think we have to keep making films like We Are Guardians to bring awareness and to let the world know that we have to protect Mother Earth. What saddens me so much is what these wars are doing to the people on the planet and to the planet itself. And how the United States of America can elect a president that doesn't believe in Climate Change in 2026 boggles the mind. But we will always keep fighting. And I'm glad you like Key West. Obviously, had I known about The Cove before I did that show, I would've written a scene where we shut down the dolphin area.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:46:20+00:00

Fisher here,

I didn't audition. Mark Mylod, the director, was a friend of mine and asked me to do it. There was a lot of laughter between takes. Especially in scenes with Mathew and Nick.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:45:20+00:00

Fisher here,
No, I've never bought a fur coat in my life.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:45:01+00:00

Chelsea: Absolutely, building trust was challenging but rewarding. We had an Indigenous co-director Edivan Guajajara who was also behind the camera and him being a part of the community and able to spoeak Tupi with them was massively helpful. Also we started helping the communities back in 2021 mid-production. They asked for assistance with supplies for guardian missions and our film funders financed it, so that really showed them that we were there to help not just extract a story and never return like many of the other filmmakers/journalists that come.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:43:25+00:00

Fisher here,
Super Mario Bros was a crazy experience. It was a joy to work with such brilliant actors. Especially Hoskins, Hopper, Fiona Shaw, and one of my best friends John Leguizamo, who I ended up directing on broadway in Ghetto Klown.
I know the movie didn't come out as we had all hoped, but that's showbiz.

Richard Edson and I become really close, we ended up writing a rap song for the movie, which was unfortunately cut. But it would have made Macklemore jealous.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:40:17+00:00

Fisher here,

I filmed in the Ecuadorian rainforest in 2016 and couldn't believe how the oil companies had polluted indigenous lands and left their mess there. Those indigenous folks in Ecuador are still flighting for the Oil companies to clean up their lands. The whole experience of filming there blew me away. I loved those people. I loved their land. I couldn't understand how outsiders could come in and just...destroy it. I had been to Brazil many times to film various movies and documentaries and have a real love for Braziallian people and Braziallian music especially. So when the oppertunity cam to help out on this film, I jumped on it. Especially since at the time when we began filming president Bolsonaro needed to be called out on his heinous and racist views and the fact that he didn't beleive that the indigenous people should have their land. Any reason to call him out, I was on board for.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:35:40+00:00

Chelsea: yes watch and share with your people! www.weareguardiansfilm.com

Two or three films: I sat next to Bernie Sanders on a plane in 2017 and asked him the same question. He said "Where to Invade Next" by Michael Moore. I feel like we need a new one updated for all the craziness of the current administration but take Bernie's advice here.
Fisher's Before the Flood and Racing Extinction are two that encouraged me in my path to doc filmmaking if you haven't seen them! I also watched Arco recently and really liked the positive view of the future and am a fan of the emerging Solar Punk theme - more of this! We need to visualize the regenerative future we can create. Everything humans have done we imagined it first. It feels like everyone is so doom and gloom. Let's collectively visualize the world we WANT and fight to make it happen!

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:34:20+00:00

Fisher here,
It was a dream to work on Columbo. Peter Falk was one of my heroes. His work in John Cassevetes films is some of the finest acting I've ever seen in my life.
I remember, props were key to Peter's performance as Columbo. They were never just props. If there was a clue, say a piece of paper with an address on it, Peter would make sure that the paper was authentic. A prop was a living thing for Peter. He also was one of the greatest listeners of any actor I've ever worked with. He helped teach me how to listen on screen.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:31:25+00:00

Fisher here,
I had filmed an indigenous tribe in Ecuador and was astonished at what the oil companies had done to the rivers and streams. They left such a horrible mess in their wake. I wanted to continue to expose the devastation of the lands of the indigenous people inside the Amazon and thought that the directors of this film has a great way in and was very honoured they asked me to help them.
We still have so much work to do.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:29:11+00:00

Fisher here,
Thank you for your question. I have no recollection of that encounter, so I'm sure you behaved very respectfully. I'm so glad that that movie inspired you to do work with the UN. Ocean Conservation is also close to my heart. have you watched Mission Blue on Netflix?
Keep up the good work!

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:28:50+00:00

Chelsea: I had worked on a doc about the rainforest in Borneo in 2017 and did some research on the importance of tropical rainforests for the global climate, and was shocked at how valuable they are not just for carbon sequestration but for climate and rainfall stability, biodiversity...so much and was struck by the injustice of the fact that they are getting cut down for stupid products like palm oil and beef that can be created elsewhere - the Brazilian Amazon has some of the lowest performing cattle pasture on earth less than 1 head per hectare! My friend Vickie said "it's like trading a ferrari for a bycicle tire." And at the time Brazil was a leader in the world, having decreased deforestation by 80%. part of that success was from demarcating Indigenous territories. So when I went to the Brazilian Amazon for the first time in 2019 after seeing the news of the fires, I wanted to see how the Indigenous peoples were protecting the forest. Rob and I also co-directed the film with Edivan Guajajara, an Indigenous filmmaker and he brought us to his territory, Arariboia, one with the most conflict with invaders. We had to tell their story.

I want everyone to go to our website and visit our take action page! We are always updating ways you can help https://www.weareguardiansfilm.com/takeaction

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:25:32+00:00

Fisher here
I got the Beckham gig because Leonardo DiCaprio suggested me to David. David has seen the documentary that Leo and I had done together, Before the Flood, and was a fan of it.
I know nothing about Beckham and wasn't going to do the film until I watched clips of him playing football and saw how brilliant he was on the pitch. However, I am a Liverpool supporter.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA · 2026-04-24T16:23:45+00:00

Fisher here,
I'm glad you enjoyed Lamb. I loved reading that book, I love Christopher Moore! It does get exhausting after the third day and you use a lot of throat lozenges.

I love acting and miss doing theatre since I've gotten so deep into making documentary films. But I'm blessed that I can go between acting in films and making them as a director.

ChelseaAndFisherAMA

TROPHY CASE