It’s not every day that you meet a man prophesied to save the world. Wanting to be respectful, I asked Patrick McCollum how he prefers to be addressed.
“Patrick is fine,” he says over Zoom. “I’m Reverend Patrick. I’m His Excellency Patrick.” (I stuck with Patrick.)
McCollum is the subject of Gabe Polsky’s film, The Man Who Saves the World?
As it always should, punctuation matters. It’s no spoiler to say there’s a lack of evidence that McCollum has succeeded, given the world’s current state. But as shown in Polsky’s earnest film, he’s certainly trying.
For McCollum, it’s a sacred mission.
It was foretold among Amazon Indigenous peoples that a man with a round face, blue eyes, and gray or little hair would come to unite them to save the rain forest.
Some believe McCollum is that man.
Viewers may immediately think: Aren’t Indigenous people the ones who have been safeguarding the planet all along? After all, they’re not the ones razing precious acres. Why would people eternally in harmony with nature need a great white savior?
But who am I to argue?
At 75, McCollum is a unique figure who has lived a far more varied life than most. He’s been a Methodist and a paganist, a carnie, a prison chaplain, and a jewelry maker to the Queen of England. At one point, he says, he was deemed a minor king in Ghana.
Initially skeptical, Polsky hired a private investigator to look into McCollum’s claims. Most, Polsky says in a voiceover, are true or “have a basis of truth.”
Does he believe McCollum is he-who-has-been-prophesied, the chosen one who will save the world? Polsky hedges, which makes him relatable.
“I think that there’s a lot of truth there,” he says. “I don’t think in the end, you could say you know, ‘He did it–he saved the Amazon–he is the guy.’ I’m not sure. We want kind of these black-and-white answers. There’s always a part of me that’s skeptical until I see it and experience it; there’s always going to be that sort of little bit of doubt on that. And then the next thing is whether Patrick has a key role. I go back and forth, to be honest.”
The project came about when another producer called Polsky to tell him about a story that was “pretty far out.” The filmmaker was open to exploring it.
“I really had nothing to lose except my time,” Polsky says.
Still, making this documentary wasn’t easy. Filming in remote locations entailed certain risks. And, without the backing of a streamer, financial worries loomed.
“Literally, until now, even, I sort of doubted myself,” Polsky admits. “I had a spiritual crisis, like, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I spending so much time on this story? Is this guy crazy? Am I crazy? What am I doing? Where is this going? What is this all about?’”
Aside from the personal existential dilemmas, audiences will share these questions. Yet, McCollum’s life is compelling. A life, he swears, that already ended once when he was 15, and in a motorcycle crash.
“I went through a tunnel of light, and I saw God, and God spoke with me,” McCollum tells me, matter-of-factly. “I was negotiating with God as a 15-year-old, like, ‘No, I don’t want to die. I want a new motorcycle. I want to date.’ What God said to me was, ‘I can let you go back, but there will be pain. If you will serve me, I will let you go back.’ And then I fell through what was that tunnel, but now it wasn’t light, and everything was like just darkness, and you could feel there was something around me, and I fell faster and faster and faster, hit something, and all of a sudden, I hear, ‘We’ve got him back.’”
Surviving the accident not only gave him a second chance at life, McCollum says, but a guiding force.
“On very rare occasions, I hear a voice, the same voice I heard in the tunnel, that actually tells me to do things,” he says. “But for the most part, it’s much more like I find myself in a circumstance where something really needs to happen that has to do with humanity, or that kind of thing. And I have learned that when everybody says it can’t be fixed, that if I step into it, amazing things happen.”
McCollum’s charisma pulls people into his orbit. He’s undeniably interesting. The reverend crafted a violin, then taught himself how to play. He paints. He’s building a house. On a walk, McCollum points out the properties of different herbs and notes that he talks to plants “in English and sometimes I talk to them in various magical languages.” He is certain they understand him.
Polsky went in with an open mind.
“I spent a lot of time, and money too, and just had no idea where this was going, but something was pushing me,” says the director, who also served as writer and producer on the project. “I kind of ultimately felt inside that there was a lot here in the story, and that I knew how to weave it, and that ultimately there was this fascinating character who I knew could lead the film–wherever it went.”
Polsky spent two-and-a-half years working on the 87-minute film, which opens at Cinema Village in Manhattan on Oct. 24. It’s being shown at theaters and events during a national rollout. Polsky is working hard to get the movie seen–even selling tickets.
Chronicling the story of a man who defies pat classification isn’t simple. There are scenes of McCollum in the rainforest, among Indigenous people welcoming him. There are also shots of him at home, puttering around the stove, saying, “My life revolves around me making my own homemade mocha Frappuccino.”
Despite multiple health issues, McCollum charges ahead. He walks tirelessly, pushes himself, and communes with nature.
It was a decade ago, he says, when four South American Indigenous elders from South America approached him and revealed “this prophecy that the Amazon will be burning,” he says. “The animals will be dying. The water will turn to poison, and all of our wisdom will cease to be, and it potentially can destroy everyone on the planet.”
No one, save the corporations profiting from the destruction, doubts the urgency of the situation.
But few could bring more gravitas to the issue than someone who had long worked with Indigenous peoples around the world and dedicated her life to preserving the natural world. Jane Goodall, featured in the film, was one of McCollum’s closest friends and a strong ally.
A week after her death, he immediately brings up how sad he is. “I had weekly Zooms with her for decades,” he says. True, Zoom hasn’t been around for decades, and it’s those kinds of statements that stop the more linear-minded among us. But in the film, Goodall attests to their bond.
“He probably is the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met,” Goodall says. “He’s different from other people.”
Goodall admired that McCollum “seems to have been put on this planet with a mission. He’s got this inner conviction, which is a real conviction, that he’s supposed to be going to save the Amazon, which will, in fact, affect climate change all around the world, and affect all of us.”
It’s lovely to see the primatologist chatting about the connectivity of nature. “Indigenous people understand that and if enough ecosystems collapse, then that’s the end of humanity and the end of life on Earth as we know it,” she says. “We need to spread the word to protect nature.”
And, as always, you know Goodall is right. She acknowledges his goal of uniting the tribes. How, even united, do Indigenous people stop the ravaging of the land?
McCollum says it begins with listening.
“I’m a strategist, and I’ve been recognized in many places, in other contexts, as a major global strategist for dealing with conflicts and complex issues,” McCollum says. “And so besides reaching out to the Indigenous people, I also reach out to the government, the president. So, I helped create a circumstance where the president of Colombia, for example, met with the Indigenous peoples for the first time and listened to their issues.”
Polsky gamely follows McCollum into the rainforest. There’s a showdown of sorts when the filmmaker asks tribal leaders about McCollum, but since that could be considered a spoiler, we’ll leave it there.
As Polsky sees it, “It’s open to interpretation, like what his role is, and he is a peacekeeper, that’s his main thing, and a connector and tries to get parties together. So, it makes sense why he would have that role. I don’t know if they get so technical about it, you know, the Indigenous peoples, whether you’re white or this, everybody’s got a role to play. You know what I’m saying? There’s that scene. I think it’s sexy for people to market this as like, oh, you know, this is the white guy, that kind of thing, or for, let’s say, festival curators, just to focus on that thing. You know what I’m saying. But it’s not really what this is about, you know?
“At its core, it’s about what stories we believe and why and who we are,” Polsky adds. “It’s about Indigenous wisdom and connection and what that means. It’s about the divide between how Westerners think and how Indigenous people think. It’s a completely different language—a different way of seeing the world.”
The post Is He the ‘Man Who Saves the World’? appeared first on The Daily Beast.
