Every few weeks, Davis Guggenheim finds himself in an encounter with a complete stranger who wants to talk about the impact of his most famous movie.

“It happened just last week — I was in a bar and someone said, ‘Your film changed my life when I saw it as a teenager,’ ” the documentarian, who directed the landmark 2006 climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, tells THR. “He started a clean energy company that now has dozens of employees.”

Nearly 20 years to the day after its release — Truth hit theaters in May 2006 — you’d be hard-pressed to find a movie with a more profound influence on the American consciousness. Some 4 million people saw the film in North American cinemas that heady spring, while tens of millions more have watched it in other venues since, so many of them shifting their thinking as a result. Built around a wonkily captivating Al Gore presentation, the movie was powerful in its simplicity, bringing home both the science and stakes of the climate crisis in a way no issue-oriented doc had ever landed its message before or, perhaps, since.

And yet as the movie approaches its platinum anniversary, you’d be equally hard-pressed to imagine how it could seem more marginal. To watch An Inconvenient Truth now (I did, last week) is to feel like you just dug up a time capsule — a snapshot of a long-gone awakening.

Unfortunately, doing that also would mean running smack into a Trumpian wall. The president since he came to office undertook dozens of “historic” deregulatory actions. Just last month, his government paid a French energy company $1 billion to abandon two giant East Coast wind farm projects and use the check to invest in oil and gas projects instead. When a public official says lines like, “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” — and that public official is the head of the EPA — the movie’s 2006 words can play like limp comedy.

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

The idea that the movie feels more relic than relevant is equally doomsday thinking, Gore adds, and he encourages Americans not to buy into it.

“From my perspective, the movie is even more relevant today than when it first came out,” Gore says. “Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” he says, adding that many of the solutions the film hopes for have now taken hold around the world, too.

“In parts of Pakistan, the common dowry is now three solar panels and an inverter,” he says. “That sounds like the punchline to a man-walks-into-a-bar joke, but it’s actually true.” (We fact-checked this; it is.)

Guggenheim also believes that the consciousness switch, once flipped, cannot be turned off. “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.”

That generation experienced the movie the way Guggenheim did: as a bolt from the blue. In the summer of 2005, Guggenheim attended — pretty much on a whim — a Gore slideshow at the Beverly Hilton at the invitation of producer Lawrence Bender and activist/producer Laurie David. He emerged feeling changed. Soon we would too.

One element certainly different is Hollywood itself. Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media, which backed the film, closed down in 2024, and Paramount, which released the movie, is now under new Trump-friendly management. Guggenheim says he doubts the company would release the film today.

Truth benefited from a unique confluence of personal drama (Gore and his own journey as the son a tobacco family); an audience receptive to the themes following the success of the eco-apocalypse blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow; and a kind of counterfactual wish fulfillment in which a lot of viewers in 2006 wanted to imagine an alternate universe where the suddenly reemerged Gore was president instead of George W. Bush.

Anchoring the piece were both Gore’s presentation and pieces from an audio interview he did with Guggenheim. They conducted it one sunny day at Shutters and became so immersed that they soon realized night had fallen and they were sitting shooting (sustainably) in the dark.

Watching An Inconvenient Truth in 2026, one can’t help feeling a renewed sense of urgency. Many of Gore’s predictions center on a half-century event horizon, but not even halfway to that point, many of the forecasts have already come true. When Gore and Guggenheim show a time-lapse of the sea-level rise over lower Manhattan, it feels not like some distant prophesy but an accurate description of what would happen just six years later during Hurricane Sandy.

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

Guggenheim says he doesn’t worry about the Trump setbacks either. “In the past 20 years since we released the movie, there have been a series of cycles. We were very focused on climate change, and then someone brings a snowball to the floor of the Senate to say it’s a hoax [Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, in 2015]. But it always comes back up because, unfortunately, there’s always another hurricane or other disaster.”

The movie of course also evinced plenty of hope and in doing do provides an origin story of sorts to the current optimistic vibe of Project Hail Mary. In both films, after all, willful scientists band together to save a doomed planet, and one imagines a cinematic universe in which a younger Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) watched An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and found reason to devote themselves to a cause that would save the world in 2026.

 Gore says he indeed sees a lot of momentum to effect that change around the world. One thing that hasn’t changed: Gore himself. He came to Los Angeles in April for several events (including THR’s own sustainability summit) and would soon head to Europe for a climate conference. Though based in his home state of Tennessee and approaching 80, the former vice president and recurring 30 Rock guest star (priorities) continues to hop around the world peddling his guardedly optimistic (“We will win this, but will we win it in time to avoid some of the most catastrophic harms?”) and studiously nonpartisan message.

Well, mostly nonpartisan.

“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 says. “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.”

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