Moment of Truth: Art of the Steal Charts the Biggest Heist You Never Knew About

Welcome back to Moment of Truth, Movieline's new weekly spotlight on the best in nonfiction cinema. This week, we hear from the director of The Art of the Steal, opening Friday in New York and Philadelphia, March 12 in Los Angeles and currently available for on-demand viewing via Sundance Selects, iTunes and Netflix.

If, as its subject has said, the tightrope-walking exploits detailed in Man on Wire were the "artistic crime of the century," then the skulduggery reported in Don Argott's new documentary The Art of the Steal might be the artistic crime of the 21st century. The film orbits around the Barnes Foundation, a venerated 90-year-old arts repository and educational center just outside Philadelphia, and the home of billions of dollars worth of post-impressionist and early-Modern work by Renoir, Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne and other masters. Before dying in 1951, its founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, left a will explicitly stating the collection was not to tour, be relocated or sold by the Foundation. In comprehensive and wholly entertaining terms, Art of the Steal shows how Philadelphia's art establishment and political leadership colluded to vanquish that dying wish and take control of a world treasure. Argott (who previously had doc hits with Rock School and Two Days in April) talked to Movieline about following the money, the trick(s) to making an exposé and relearning how to look at art.

When did you first become aware of the Barnes Foundation?

Actually, Lenny Feinberg -- our executive producer -- approached us about making a film about the Barnes saga. I didn't know anything about it prior to that. Once he came to us with this idea and kind of pitched it to us that there was this amazing art collection five miles outside Philadelphia that was supposed to preserved there, but the current trustees were planning to move it to the [Benjamin Franklin] Parkway, that was sort of the original story. What we uncovered from just that to where we wound up was miles and miles away from the intent of telling the story. But as you see, it was a prety rich, giving story with a lot of twists and turns, a lot of interesting characters, and a lot of bigger themes that we wanted to explore. We wanted to take it out of the idea of a small, local story. We thought of it as much bigger than that.

What's that like while you're making the film, though? How do you adapt on the fly?

I think that's part of the joy and excitement of making documentaries. With scripted pieces, it's exactly that. You have your beginning, middle and end figured out before you even start the film. The discovery part of that is obviously the acting and performances. Doing documentaries, it does become this journey that you go on. If you immerse yourself in the work and in the story, than you keep yourself open for whatever direction the story wants to take you. it's amazing. It presents its own challenges; there are no guarantees. When you start out, you have no idea how it's going to turn out. What's going to happen? Are the things that will happen going to make the film worse or more confusing? It creates a lot of anxiety, frankly. But it's also what makes it so rewarding when it's done and it does work.

The Art of the Steal necessarily has a probing, exposé quality that your previous films didn't have. How did you also acquaint yourself with that mode of storytelling?

Every story has its own set of rules. With Rock School it was gaining the trust of the people we were shooting. Certainly with Paul and the kids, we needed them to open up and be as accessible as they could be. And the same with Two Days in April. I think the approach for this was pretty much the same. Making documentaries all comes down to access. It all comes down to the willingness to find people who will help you tell the story. This just happened to have more of a historical angle to it. But I think the rules are pretty much the same. We set out to tell the best story we could. The means are different, but you adapt quickly. You have to.

When we originally walked into it, we looked at it more a historical piece. There wasn't a lot of archival material that was available to us at the time. So that posed a challenge. But as we dug deeper, and the more people we found to interview, that would get us going in another direction. And they'd have some archival material they'd lend to us. Slowly but surely we were able to construct the film with not just the people who were willing to participate, but the materials we were able to dredge up. And once we had the linear story in place, it was just a matter of going back and putting a nice coat of paint.

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