All these wonderful things

Alex Gibney Talks Creative Choices in CLIENT 9, How He Balances His Huge Slate and the Documentary Golden Age

Note - This is the third in a series of interviews with the filmmakers behind some of my favorite nonfiction features of 2010...

A few years ago, I started referring to Alex Gibney as "the hardest working man in documentary" - but these were back in the days when the man only had two films come out in the same year.  This year, it was nearly impossible to keep track of everything Gibney was doing - from his nonfiction take on Jack Abramoff to his segment of FREAKONOMICS to his HBO project, MY TRIP TO AL QAEDA, to his eagerly anticipated film on Lance Armstrong and his just-announced Sundance 2011 feature, MAGIC TRIP.

And in the midst of all that, the Oscar winner's take on disgraced, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer and the forces that may have helped bring about his fall.  I didn't see the film until a few weeks ago and I really took to it.  While Spitzer and his adversaries are crackling, great characters - and a sex scandal is always good for grabbing your attention - Gibney greatest success may be in laying bare the seeds of the global, financial meltdown in ways that are both entertaining and infuriating. 

We talked last week by phone about his latest film - including some of his somewhat controversial creative choices (including casting an actress as one of Spitzer's escorts and not revealing up front that she's actually an actress) as well as how he balances the huge slate of projects in front of him.  Caution - if you haven't seen the film or don't know anything about Spitzer's story, there are spoilers aplenty.

All these wonderful things:  I finally got to see CLIENT 9 and I really, really liked it and one of the things that I was particularly glad to see was that it upended my expectations going in, pretty much having everything to do with how another filmmaker might have handled it, whether it would be dwelling solely on the sexual nature of what helped to bring Eliot Spitzer down or setting him up to be some kind of saint.  I love that you make a strong argument that in some ways it wasn’t the sex scandal that did him in but the fact that he’d been so mean to so many people that there was really no one to stand up for him when the scandal came down.

Alex Gibney: That’s right.  That’s absolutely right.  It’s a funny kind of film, too, because you don’t come out of it with any easy – in a way it was kind of the fun of doing it, also – but you don’t come out of it with any easy conclusion about what to think.  I think that’s important, too, this intersection of public and private, how do we think about that?  And then, you’re right, it wasn’t just the sex.  Other people have had sex scandals and they’ve survived them.  But Spitzer was like Sherman, Sherman’s march to the sea, he left people in his wake, so not only was there no one to support him, but people were viciously and eagerly and gleefully trying to bring him down. 

ATWT: Yeah, I loved that you were able to get his adversaries in this story, which is something that I think we don’t often see in terms of truly getting both sides.  And if you want to think that he was brought down by quote, unquote big business or bad Republicans, you can, but these guys come across as such great, fully formed characters.

AG: Yeah, and I had a blast talking to those people and I was fascinated by them and I think I showed them in all their complexity.  And you can see how gleeful they are in taking him on, and also how much enmity they have.  But then you step back and well, wait a minute, here’s a guy that everybody’s jumping on because he had sex with a high priced escort – we never heard about that 500 million dollar heist conducted by AIG prior to the global financial meltdown.  That’s utterly escaped our notice.  It’s so funny to me because almost nobody mentions the audio tapes of the AIG people talking about a pretty big crime prior to the economic meltdown.  It’s sort of proof positive of exactly what was going on there.  (laughter)  But it’s always eclipsed by the sex.  There’s just no doubt.

RESTREPO's Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger on Their Unlikely Partnership and What They Learned From Each Other

Note - This is the first in a series of interviews with the directors of some of our favorite nonfiction films from 2010.

How to describe the journey that famed journalist and writer (The Perfect Storm) Sebastian Junger and noted photog and sometime documentary cinematographer (THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK) Tim Hetherington have been on the past few years?  First, they were put together, shotgun marriage-style by Vanity Fair to work in Afghanistan on assignment for the magazine, later realizing that they may indeed have the footage to make a documentary.  Then came surviving an edit, premiering and winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance (where it was described as a nonfiction HURT LOCKER) and now a whirlwind trip on the Oscar shortlist.

Earlier this year, I wrote briefly about seeing their film, RESTREPO, projected over a river in Kosovo, the sounds of machine gun fire echoing off the sides of the mountains and buildings.  What struck me then was the film's refusal to advance an overt political message, although it's not hard to finish the film with some sense of mission futility. 

We met a couple weeks ago as the duo were prepping to launch the DVD of RESPTREPO.  The conversation was lively and genuine – they are comfortable enough with one another to rib each other in front of another writer/filmmaker – and you get the sense that they’re still wondering just how they ended up here, in this situation, together.

All these wonderful things: How did you guys meet? Or how did this project come that you guys worked on it together?

Sebastian Junger: I convinced Vanity Fair to let me follow a platoon for a whole deployment and I needed a good person to work with, a photographer, but also someone who could shoot video, because I had this sort of crazy idea that, if I shot a lot of video, if we shot a lot of video, maybe we could make a documentary.  I just had no idea… It was an incredibly naïve thought, but luckily Tim sort of knew about that world and so, the first trip I was by myself – I was with another photographer that was a friend of mine, but essentially I was on my own – and the project really started on the second trip, when I went out there with Tim.  Tim and I immediately just synched up really well together, he saw the potential in the film and in the project and that was when the project really began.  Ultimately, he was put on the assignment by Vanity Fair.

Tim Hetherington: We met in the airport lounge in Heathrow.  He was changing planes and I was coming…

SJ: I talked with him on the phone and just asked him some questions because I knew how hard it was out there and I wanted to make sure he had his shit together and was fit.

ATWT: And did you guys have any idea that you would still – it’s a long journey to take together.

SJ: No, no. (laughter)

TH: (laughter) No, absolutely no idea.  Absolutely no idea. Yeah, everything just grew organically.  You know, as Sebastian points out, we got on really well straight away.  If we hadn’t got on well, we wouldn’t have been able to have done it.  You know what I mean?  Because the whole process is so super intense – not just being together in Afghanistan in very extreme situations but also being together in the edit, just making decisions together.  I mean, that really, in some ways, there were parts of the edit that really stretched our relationship in ways…

SJ: Yeah, it was hard.

2010 Film Fests (Part One): In Praise of Dokufest and Ashland

Before we dive in to the fall festival season, a look back at the festivals and films that have made this year so notable...

When we set out a couple years ago to try to rank the world’s best documentary film festivals, there were unintended consequences to this notion.  One was that the festivals themselves might care where they might fall on such a homemade list.  The other was that filmmakers – particularly those that were just starting out – would take such a list as some kind of fifth gospel.

Not that we hadn’t taken it seriously.  We had.  But we also knew that lists, as much as they might spur discussion and be insanely linkable, are fallible.

And so, when we ventured out to make a second edition of this list last winter, we tried to make it less fallible.  We asked more than 75 pros in the documentary world to weigh in on their choices.  But still, but still, this is not a perfect system, because we are not Arthur Frommer, and there were/are some festivals that we have yet to attend.  And thus the list is second hand.  A really, really strong second hand, but still…

Thus, when we were invited to a couple of the festivals on our list this year that we hadn’t before experienced, there was a strong sense of excitement and no small fear that perhaps we had led those young, nubile filmmakers astray.

Certainly, encouraging folks to make the trek to southern Kosovo, to the decidedly buzzed-about Dokufest in Prizren, programmed by the much beloved Veton Nurkollari, wasn’t exactly a slam dunk, no matter what our insiders had determined in December.  After all, it’s no easy feat to reach this cultural heritage spot in a country whose independence had just been recognized by the International Court of Justice a couple weeks prior to this week's fest in early August.  Flights into Pristina, Kosovo or even neighboring Skopje, Macedonia require a certain amount of finangling, and these are followed by mountainous roads populated by traffic and drivers that give aggressive a new reputation.

But aren’t the best festivals worth a little bit of effort?

And Dokufest is certainly that.  Artfully programmed by Nurkollari from the best of the international documentary scene, projected onto screens indoor and outdoor throughout the city, Dokufest is actually creating the very notion of cinema in southern Kosovo.  Because for the past decade-plus, since the brutal war that tore up this portion of the Balkans, there has been no cinema in Prizren, which is otherwise a town filled with culture, both ancient and youth. 

No cinema at all. 

The young people of Prizren – and they are legion (if you’re told once that the average age of Kosovars is 25, you’ll be told it 100 times – in fact, the Isreali-made advertisement that runs before the each of the screenings drums home the point: “Kosovo – The Young Europeans”) are, for the very first time, encountering cinema in their streets and in their town. 

And that cinema is documentary film.

And if that isn’t enough to give you a docu-boner, I don’t know what is.

Halfway Thru 2010, THE OATH Leads in Honors, OCEANS Leads in Cash

We're more than six months into 2010, a year that is proving remarkably rich for documentary film, with a strong list of titles vying for festival (and future critics') laurels and for box office success.  We unveiled our 2010 Nonfiction Honor Roll in May (it's now updated to include more recent festivals like Silverdocs, LAFF and Edinburgh) and today we kick off the 2010 Nonfiction Feature Box Office.  [The latter is called a Top 20, but since it's still early as far as the theatrical year goes, we've currently just got the top 10.]

Laura Poitras' THE OATH still commands the Honor Roll, with 7 awards from top festivals, including a Best Documentary win at Edinburgh.  Jeff Malmberg's MARWENCOL is a close 2nd with 6 prizes, including the Cinematic Vision Award at AFI Silverdocs and the Documentary Grand Jury prize at Seattle.  Other films with awards from multiple festivals include BUDRUS, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, A FILM UNFINISHED. FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE, GASLAND, LAST TRAIN HOME, MY PERESTROIKA, PRESUMED GUILTY, RESTREPO, STEAM OF LIFE, THUNDER SOUL, WAR DON DON and Lucy Walker's Audience Award favorite WASTE LAND.

In theatres, Disneynature's release of OCEANS still leads the year, with nearly $20M in box office, followed by BABIES with nearly $7.5M, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (about to cross the $3M threshold) and JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK, currently at $2.3M.  Both RESTREPO and Oliver Stone's SOUTH OF THE BORDER have shown solid numbers in thus far limited release.  Frederick Wiseman's LA DANSE was a surprise box office hit released in late 2009.