Jay said that the man who sounded the alarm about the Vietnam War was more concerned for the rest of his life about the U.S. and Russia planning for globally destructive nuclear attack that could be launched by accident, or intentionally.

To complete his feature documentary, Jay finished around 40 hours of interviews with Ellsberg on May 1 as work on his film continued through Ellsberg’s illness.

The film, Emma Thompson narrates, is based on Ellsberg’s book Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

Ellsberg famously made copies of the Pentagon Papers and classified nuclear documents during the Nixon administration and leaked the documents to The New York Times and other media outlets in 1971. As a high-level Pentagon analyst, Ellsberg was charged by the U.S. with breaking the Espionage Act, but the case was eventually dismissed because of government misconduct in evidence-gathering in 1973.

Jay credits Hollywood star Streisand with throwing key fundraiser birthday party that year to underwrite Ellsberg’s legal defense to the point his trial could continue until all charges against him and co-defendant Anthony Russo could be dismissed based on the government’s gross misconduct.

“If it hadn’t been for that fundraiser that Streisand organized, they [Ellsberg and Russo] would have run out of money, and Dan probably would have spent the rest of his life in jail,” Jay recounted.

“In the film, we have him [Ellsberg] telling the story of the party because, indirectly, that ability to keep the trial going and his case getting kicked led to the whole uncovering of the Watergate scandal, which led to the downfall of Nixon, which led to him not dropping nuclear weapons on Vietnam, which I think is pretty clear is what would have happened otherwise,” the director adds.

“I think he felt frustrated that he wasn’t able to accomplish more, that, in spite of overwhelming evidence, you can’t get a serious conversation going in Congress, in the media, with the U.S. President. It’s almost like talking about nuclear weapons is taboo,” Jay said.

In the feature doc, now in production, Ellsberg warns that the nuclear weapons arsenals of the U.S. and Russia are still very much a threat to global peace and that an all-out nuclear war remains capable of being launched from missile silos or submarines on a few minutes’ notice.

Jay says The Barbra Streisand Foundation is among early investors in the documentary, which is currently assembling a rough cut that sales agent UTA can shop to cable TV and streaming platforms for a possible U.S. distribution deal.

Jay, a veteran producer and co-founder of the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, directed Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows. He will helm How to Stop Nuclear War, while Earl Katz (Hacking Democracy) and Rob Johnson (Taxi to the Dark Side) will executive produce.