burning to talk

The screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, best-known for The Full Monty, has written a thriller about climate change. Burn Up is a two-part, three hour mini-series that features West Wing's Bradley Whitford as an oil lobbyist, Rupert Penry-Jones as the ruthless head of a billion dollar oil company and Neve Campbell (left) as an industry colleague who secretly collaborates with environmentalists.

Beaufoy told the Hollywood Reporter that he thought it would be tough getting people within the oil industry to talk to him.

'But I was amazed to find that when I telephoned very top people in the oil industry and asked if I could come and interview them -- not as a journalist, but as a writer of a drama -- I was shown an open door,' he says. 'I found that many truly powerful people in politics and in the oil business had so much they wanted to say, but only on a background basis and for a fictional drama. But many of these people are genuinely concerned about what they are seeing and hearing about the way the planet is headed and they wanted to talk off the record and not to mainstream press.'