20 years later, Al Gore and his director defend their controversial climate movie 'An Inconvenient Truth'

Former Vice President Al Gore and filmmaker Davis Guggenheim touted their controversial documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in a Wednesday interview marking 20 years since its release. According to the director, the claims in it seem "actually pretty moderate" in retrospect. 

"An Inconvenient Truth," a polemical but also wildly popular environmentalist documentary, warned that climate change is a looming threat to humanity. IMDb summarized of the film, "Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim follows Al Gore on the lecture circuit, as the former presidential candidate campaigns to raise public awareness of the dangers of global warming and calls for immediate action to curb its destructive effects on the environment."

The two men behind the documentary looked back on the film and its impact over the past two decades as they were interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter for its 2026 Sustainability Issue. The interviewer noted that the documentary, starring the most "delightfully square prophet," was compelling, to the point where "I wanted to jump from the couch not just to change a light bulb but the world."

"Unfortunately, doing that also would mean running smack into a Trumpian wall," the writer lamented of the Trump era.

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"But Gore sees it differently. In a mid-April interview, he said that any despondency over the Trump rollbacks should be countered with a simple thought: They won't last," The Hollywood Reporter wrote.

"The fact that public opinion is so strongly on the side of doing something makes it inevitable that we will solve the climate crisis," Gore said, noting, "The availability of the solutions has advanced far more rapidly than I had hoped [in the film] 20 years ago."

"From my perspective, the movie is even more relevant today than when it first came out," Gore continued. "Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation."

One example of people clearly being impacted by environmentalist narratives, Gore said, is that, "In parts of Pakistan, the common dowry is now three solar panels and an inverter. That sounds like the punchline to a man-walks-into-a-bar joke, but it's actually true," something which the Hollywood Reporter reportedly confirmed.

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Guggenheim agreed, saying, "You have a whole generation that grew up with it and changed their lives because of it," he says. "That's not something one president can undo."

One aspect they recalled getting pushback for was a timelapse that showed the sea-level rise to the point it drowned Manhattan. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the prediction did seem to anticipate what would happen shortly afterward with Hurricane Sandy six years later.

"That time-lapse was what we were most criticized for - we were called alarmists; we were told we were being aggressive," Guggenheim recalled. "And in many ways, you look back and it was actually pretty moderate, the way we called a lot of it."

Guggenheim went on to suggest that as much as some people deny climate change as a hoax, "there's always another hurricane or other disaster."

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The piece concluded with Gore praising China at the expense of President Donald Trump.

"China has made massive investments in the energy sources of the future and an appreciating asset, while we are, under Donald Trump, foolishly and recklessly doubling down on a depreciating [oil] asset," Gore said. "But I am not worried. Donald Trump is not the first time there's ever been a climate-policy recession. And every time, the policy comes back stronger than ever before."

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House and did not receive an immediate reply.

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