“I got dragged in kicking and screaming,” Joe Berlinger is saying on the telephone. “It’s the last film I thought I would make.”

Berlinger, 47, is talking about “Crude,” his newest venture, a documentary that’s bound to inflame viewers – even as it becomes the target of a face-saving smear campaign by Chevron.

But it’s hard to refute the film’s evidence: that Texaco, now part of Chevron, spent years drilling for oil in Ecuador’s pristine rainforest – and, in the process, polluted the water and the jungle. When Texaco pulled out, it left behind dozens of toxic dumps, poisoned water and an epidemic of cancer among indigenous populations.

“Crude,” a Sundance entry this year, opens Sept. 9 in limited release before going wider. It examines the story by following the court case, which Chevron spent years getting moved from American courts (where it was filed in 1993) to Ecuador. Berlinger was on hand to film the judicial inspections, in which the judge for the case – accompanied by attorneys for both sides, as well as media – visited the various dumpsites and heard from the local people about the before/after effects of Texaco’s endeavors.

Getting to that point, however, took some convincing for Berlinger. The award-winning documentarian, whose credits include everything from “Brother’s Keeper” (1992) to “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” (2004), had no interest in telling the story when he was first approached by Steve Donziger, one of the lawyers for the 30,000 impoverished Ecuadorians who brought the suit, to make a documentary about the case against Chevron.

“All of my red flags went up,” Berlinger says. “First of all, my style is cinema verite. I make films about unfolding dramas; my style is to follow present-tense action – and he’d been working on this case for 13 years. I thought he’d be better off with a more agit-prop kind of filmmaker.

“And there was my other criteria: Ever since ‘Brother’s Keeper,’ I don’t like to start anything without a distributor or a budget in place. I need to have a budget. Bruce (Sinofsky, his co-director on ‘Brother’s Keeper’ and other projects) and I really rolled the dice on ‘Brother’s Keeper.’ We maxed out 10 credit cards, took second mortgages. And it worked. But with this, I thought, who’s going to care enough to pay for a Spanish-language documentary about people dying of cancer in the rainforest? It just felt like a messy, complicated story.”

Donziger, however, was persistent: “He said, if you go and see, you’ll want to make the movie.”

So Berlinger went, flying to Quito, Ecuador, then boarding a smaller plane to hop the Andes and go into the jungle, sometimes by canoe.

“And I was stunned at the pollution,” Berlinger says. “It was 100 times worse than he’d described. It just whacked you over the head. I was embarrassed at being an American, if an American company did this.”

On his second day, Berlinger had an encounter that cemented the feeling he was getting about what he was seeing. He, Donziger, their guides and translators took a canoe to visit a Cofan village, an indigenous tribe that had been living on the same river for centuries. As they watched, the villagers prepared a communal meal:

“They were using a giant vat of canned tuna from the Ecuador equivalent of Costco,” Berlinger recalls. “Now these were indigenous people who had sustained themselves off the waterway for literally millennia. But they couldn’t eat the fish because the fish were all dead or poisoned and so they had to eat canned tuna.

“That image, more than anything, spoke to me. I felt like the universe was tapping me on the shoulder, saying, you have skills and you need to use them to tell this story. How could I go back and turn my back on those people?”

Almost as soon as he made the decision to take a chance on the film, his red flags dropped away, one by one. First, Donziger introduced him to the local attorney, Pablo Fajardo, who had come out of poverty and working in the oilfields to study law and spearhead the case in Ecuador – and who quickly developed an international presence, thanks to a story in Vanity Fair magazine.

“He has this charisma; heroism just oozes out of him,” Berlinger says. “There was just something magical about him: his utter conviction, his fearlessness, his belief in justice. And I thought, Oh, cool, I’ve got a central character with an incredible arc.”

Then, on his first filming trip, Berlinger found himself present for the judicial inspection: “I never imagined it being as dramatic as it was – but here I was and this shit was happening in the jungle, with lawyers in jungle gear pleading their cases. And I thought, Oh, cool, here’s my present-tense action.”

After three trips to Ecuador, Berlinger cut together a 20-minute trailer and began showing it around. Before long, he’d raised $1 million as a budget for the film. It was, he says, cumulatively a kind of Zen experience, in which all of the things he thought he needed came to him the minute he decided to proceed without them: “The great irony was that, as soon as I let go of my criteria and started making the film, things clicked into place.”

The finished film is a damning document of corporate disregard for environmental destruction or the rights of an indigenous population to the land and water that sustains them. Yet Berlinger is scrupulously fair, giving Chevron spokesmen the chance to tell their side of the story and filming the Chevron lawyers’ arguments as the judicial inspections are undertaken.

Having spent years trying to get the case moved from American courts to Ecuador, Chevron now faces the prospect that the Ecuadorian judiciary will issue a judgment – expected to be about $27 billion – against the multinational corporation. At that point, Chevron is expected to try to get the case thrown out – by taking it back to American courts.

“Chevron has promised a lifetime of litigation,” Berlinger says. “The legal system is inadequate to deal with the situation. This case has gone on for 17 years. Really, who wins the lawsuit is not the subject. To me, there’s a much larger moral issue.

“The larger issue is that, for the last 500 years, white people have treated indigenous people horribly. What multinational corporations have done in the late 20^th century is just a continuation of that. They can tell you the reasons why what they did was legal but, from a moral standpoint, it’s indefensible, to go in with complete disregard for the local population and the laws of nature

“This is not an anti-oil film. It’s anti-corporate irresponsibility. You don’t pump toxins into these people’s world. There’s just no moral justification for that.”

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