PRINTThe Newcomer: Q&A with Alex Gibney
This Oscar Winner is the Smartest Guy in the Room
February 28, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
For more on each movie, visit our True/False blog.
In Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Alex Gibney impugns not only the energy company’s dubious accounting practices but also the hypermasculine culture and sense of entitlement that bred such acts of corporate malfeasance. His Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side — about an Afghan man killed by U.S. interrogators — follows in its stead by using one man’s abduction to critique the War on Terror.
Related ArticlesGibney is establishing himself as a chronicler of corruption and a vital voice in the growing ranks of documentary-minded auteurs. He often alludes to Stanley Milgram’s experiment studying authority and obedience. “You start hitting just a very harmless little button, just 10 volts,” he says. “In a prison environment in the War on Terror, you just keep a guy up a little bit longer than normal. Next thing you know, you’re at 450 volts.”
Gibney’s Taxi defeated the favored No End in Sight (which, incidentally, he produced) to win the Academy Award for best documentary feature. The newly crowned doc king now travels to Columbia with Taxi and Gonzo, a Hunter S. Thompson documentary that debuted at January’s Sundance.
Vox: In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine about Taxi, you said you wanted to counter the Bush administration’s depiction of torturers as “a few bad apples.” Would you say that your recent films intend to shake our assumptions about responsibility?
Alex Gibney: I think they ask fundamental questions about willingness to take responsibility. Seemingly, no one is willing to take responsibility for the more pernicious things that are happening. It’s that diffusion of responsibility that is concerning.
Vox: Do you seek to make the audience complicit in this diffusion of responsibility?
AG: I’m not trying to attack the audience, but at the same time — I’m not taking myself out of this — all of us almost have to ask ourselves questions as to whether or not we’ve become complicit. It’s clear toward the end of the film that Bush and Cheney are campaigning on a platform of torture. They couldn’t do that if there weren’t some complicity with the American public. I think there are many of us who are deeply upset, but I think there is a part of the American character that does lend itself to the appeal of the dark side.
Vox: Your recent works — No End in Sight, Enron, Taxi — tackle subjects explored ad nauseam in the media, yet you present them in a new and often startling light.
AG: Sometimes, particularly televised media tend to miss the forest for the trees. You see a lot of headlines, but you don’t really see or understand what connects them and what deeper motivations are at work. They tend to be pounded in with a sort of relentlessness that is almost oppressive. But beneath these headlines, there are human stories and very complicated political patterns. One of the things that a film can do is create a sense of compressed ritual and a sense of narrative and human emotion that sometimes gives a new understanding to these current events.
Vox: Do you see a connection between your explorations of corruption and Gonzo?
AG: To some extent, I always thought of the Hunter film as kind of a break, but there are certain consistent themes. He in his own way was corrupted by his own fame, his own success. But that’s not why I was interested in the Hunter story. On the one hand, he was just so wickedly funny, and I wanted to celebrate that. But also he was a guy who, as a political journalist, wasn’t willing to play by the rules, and I think he was able to innovate where people who did play by the rules didn’t. His reporting on the ’72 Presidential campaign was the least factual and most accurate chronicle of the campaign.
Vox: In Enron, you recreated scenes for narrative effect. In Taxi, you stage an interrogation that had previously taken place. Are you particularly wary when manufacturing these kinds of scenes?
AG: For every one of these things when you’re visualizing something or imagining it or rendering it, there’s a reason for doing it. It’s to put the viewer in a certain place and give them an emotional impression of something, but at the same time doing it in a way that also doesn’t fool them. In the case of the Qahtani interrogation in Taxi, I wasn’t trying to fool anybody. This was really the interrogation, and I intermixed it with quotes from the interrogation log.
Vox: Why is manufacturing these scenes necessary in the first place?
AG: Some of the things were so bizarre that you don’t really understand them unless you see them as images. So I felt that I had license to do that. Why not? Why should I be prohibited from doing that during a time when the government is erasing the documentary videotapes of torture? Maybe that’s a necessary step — taking a page from Hunter Thompson. Maybe that’s a necessary step to being able to speak truth to power when the people in power are systematically erasing the images that might upset or disturb or show how corrupt we are.
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