By Elliot V. Kotek
(Moving Pictures Icons issue, June/July 2006)

Having drifted on a raft of identifiable icons in recent years, Academy Award®-nominee Alex Gibney has shifted his gaze from the corporate world (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Who Killed the Electric Car?) to the political world (The Trials of Henry Kissinger), the world of music (Herbie Hancock: Possibilities; The Blues) and the literary insanity and ingenuity of Hunter S. "Dr. Gonzo" Thompson (the upcoming Going Going Gonzo).

Dutifully dubbed as our Dean of Icons, Gibney offers up the following words of wisdom to Moving Pictures' queries on the ins and outs of documentary filmmaking:

Moving Pictures: After all this retrospection, who or what remains iconic to you?
Alex Gibney: They tend to be iconoclastic icons: Thelonious Monk, Luis Buñuel, Bob Dylan, Marcel Ophuls. For me, the iconic iconoclastic American novel is "The Great Gatsby," because it has so much to say about the American dream and its dark shadow. Hunter Thompson, I am discovering, loved The Great Gatsby. He quotes it in his book "Hells Angels," which is exactly the right way to understand it. The Hells Angels are mythic American outlaws who, at the same time, in their own way, are also pursuing the American dream. Hunter's tragic dimension is that he often found himself trapped playing an iconic role for the counterculture. 

Henry Kissinger was an icon; he still is for some people. Inspired by the Christopher Hitchens' book, Eugene Jarecki and I explored his dark side, which few were willing to do in part because he remains such a valuable media commodity as a foreign policy icon. Larry King certainly isn't going to have Kissinger on his show if everyone acknowledges that he is a war criminal. Better to pretend that he's not responsible for the slaughter of millions of people. Icons drive ratings better than iconoclasts.
 
I have been spiritually lucky and financially unfortunate to have been a freelancer most of my life. It's not easing trying to make a living goring sacred cows.

MPM: What particular challenges did you have in gaining access on Enron?
Alex Gibney: Enron was very hard because of all the legal wrangling surrounding the story. There was a criminal case and many civil suits. None of the lawyers wanted their clients to talk. Yet the emotional trauma of this story was so great that people felt they had to talk. Many people talked to me off-camera and ultimately a few talked on-camera. Just as important, we began to persuade people to give us their archival footage. A key part of the story was the image of Enron versus its reality. All those videotapes of the company presentations, skits and employee meetings showed the con at work: creating an iconic fiction of the company that would cause the stock to rise. The executives at Enron were mythmakers; they were more like movie studio execs than energy company magnates. They created a beautiful movie that everyone wanted to believe in. But underneath it all was the horrific carnage of their law-of-the-jungle corporate culture, a web of deceit and unchecked greed. Yet so powerful was their myth that the top executives believed it themselves; they still do. At the trial in Houston, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling have created a defense around the idea that Enron was a great company! They were right and everyone else was just...well...wrong!

MPM: The classic question for documentary filmmakers: How much of a role in the disruption of truth does the camera play in the modern documentary?
Alex Gibney: I think the camera has always played a role in "disrupting" the truth, and it always will. For me, the term "cinema verite" has never meant "truth"; it means what it says: "film truth." Introducing a camera into a situation may cause people to behave differently, and yet, in their very reactions to the camera, they also betray facets of their character.

MPM: Is this true or false: Modern documentaries are statements of opinion, and reflective of the filmmaker's viewpoint rather than explorative meanderings on their subject.
Alex Gibney: Everyone's still hung up on this idea of "objectivity." "Surely Michael Moore is 'not objective,'" is a comment I hear at every Q&A session. Of course he's not objective. But then neither is the nightly news. Indeed, the nightly news has become the most craven kind of icon-building machine, lending its microphones to the rich and powerful. What the news should be doing is what the framers of the Constitution intended a free press to do: speak truth to power. That's what the first amendment is for: to protect people who try to root out corruption so that democracy can be meaningful for "the people" and not just the well-heeled big-shots in the smoky back rooms.

Is there any doubt in anyone's mind that, when they go to one of Michael's films, they are seeing the world according to Michael Moore? I have a different style than Michael but I approach the filmmaking enterprise in the same way: creating my version of the way the world works. Yet, I also want to quote Marcel Ophuls, one of my favorite "founding father" filmmakers, on this subject. He said (I'm paraphrasing here) that he always has a point of view; the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view. That gets to the documentary essence of what Shaw said: "An argument between a right and a wrong is melodrama; an argument between two rights is drama."

That's why, in the Enron film, I show so many events from the point of view of the perpetrators rather than the victims. When the West Coast traders are taking down the California grid, I play raucous rock 'n' roll rather than a dirge. That's the way the traders would have wanted it. But, at the same time, there's no doubt about the way that I feel about what the traders did. It was utterly despicable and morally bankrupt. But I admit that they must have had fun while they were doing it.

I believe that the best documentaries showcase a point of view but are also a search for the truth. Hunter Thompson's best writing - from '65 to '75 - displayed a dramatic tension between good old shoe-leather reporting and rants and raves. In his later writing - far less effective in my view - he voiced amusing opinions but he cared less and less for the facts. An honest search for truth - even if it can never be found - is vital. Look at the people in the Bush administration today. They tell us bald-faced lies every day. "We do not torture," says Bush, even as he was vigorously opposing a bill to outlaw torture. What they are preaching from their bully pulpit is the gospel according to Karl Rove: There is no such thing as truth; there is only the pursuit of power. Well, I think the best documentaries really do speak truth to power. And truth can be a powerful weapon in the hands of people who care about the facts but do more than just "report" them.

MPM: With Going Going Gonzo, competing documentaries on Thompson will hit the marketplace around the same time. Knowing that in advance, how does the filmmaker seek to maintain an enthusiasm for his project?
Alex Gibney: Only one way: Have confidence in your own approach. There may be many docs on Hunter. Some may be good. I believe that mine will explore his character and his legacy in a way that will be unique. This is common in the world of books: How many JFK biographies are there? There should be more than one film about a subject. Not to toot my own horn, but someone should go take a look at a series I did called "The Fifties," based on the book by David Halberstam. One by one, people are taking those stories and doing them as longer docs or as fiction films. I have no problem with that. I did my version. -MPM

Renamed Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the film was released in 2008 and earned Gibney an award nomination for best documentary screenplay from Writers Guild of America, West.

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Alex Gibney: Curator of Iconoclasts
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