If you think you may have read a disproportionate amount of coverage here over the last few weeks about filmmaker Alex Gibney, you're probably right. But it's only because the Oscar-winning documentarian has a staggering number of films arriving on the scene at once: In addition to his three movies debuting at the ongoing Tribeca Film Festival, Gibney's Casino Jack and the United States of Money opens May 7 in limited release. Not even Werner Herzog can match than kind of productivity, though as Gibney told Movieline, it was kind of accidental for himself as well.
As the director's definitive documentary portrait of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, Casino Jack has actually gestated for several years. His adaptation of Lawrence Wright's one-man play My Trip to Al-Qaeda -- the personalized counterpart to Wright's bestselling nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 -- came together around the same time Gibney was grilling Eliot Spitzer for an untitled doc about the disgraced former New York governor. (Coverage of the film's work-in-progress screening is here, while Gibney also supplied additional perspectives on Spitzer to Movieline last week.) Finally, Gibney's short film about "the crumbling facade of Sumo wrestling" rounds out the all-star doc omnibus Freakonomics, which premieres Friday as Tribeca's closing-night gala presentation.
I cornered Gibney recently to talk about finding sympathy for Jack Abramoff, making a doc out of a drama, what's special to him about Sumo, and to attempt to get some idea of when he sleeps.
I feel like you must be making a movie as we speak.
That's right. I'm filming right now.
You have four movies debuting over two weeks!
I know! What's wrong with me? What was I thinking?
How does that happen?
I have no idea. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Some of them were supposed to be done earlier, but they took a long time to complete for all sorts of different reasons. So they ended up colliding with each other. I didn't release any movies last year, though. At least I don't think [so]. That was an off year for me!
So one at a time, I guess. Casino Jack and the United States of Money opens Friday -- when did you take that one on?
I took it on a long time ago, but I actually think now it's more relevant than ever. There was a lot of pressure to get the film out during the fall of the Obama/McCain election. I'm so glad we didn't do that because the film might have been perceived as some kind of election issue. I think it's more. I mean, it is an election issue in a particular sense. But it's really a much bigger deal, which is all about elections. Elections have taken over the political process to the point where there is no more discussion of policies. It's only about getting elected, and it's only about getting the money to get elected. I think that having waited to release the film until after that made it more relevant than it would have been had we decided to release it two years ago. It also gave us time to get some people who were in prison, like [former Ohio Rep.] Bob Ney and [Abramoff associate] Adam Kidan.
You ask questions in your introduction: "Has it always been like this? Were we more innocent once, or were we just naive?" What did you personally conclude?
I think it's a little bit of both. I think... Look. The bare-knuckle brawling of the political boss system was not a pretty picture either. Tammany Hall was not a kind of vision of how representative democracy should work. We can't romanticize the past. But I think what has changed is the role money plays in politics. It's become so much more pernicious simply because the economics have changed. Elections are so much more expensive, and they're predominantly won or lost on television. When you're talking about making those spots and buying that TV time, you're talking about a lot of money. So the pressure to raise that money becomes enormous, which means that the compromises you have to make in order to get that money become internalized.
That's really the most dispiriting part. The law always says there has to be a link -- a quid pro quo. But by and large, there isn't that link. There's just a whole steering of your whole set of principles toward the money. And it happens in ways that are sometimes invisible, and you imagine that you're not even doing it. People in big corporations have told me it's not just them doing the influencing; it's congressmen and senators showing up on their doorsteps and basically extorting them. They're saying, "Guys, want a seat at the table? Pay up!"
To that end, you also ask if this is a story of government or personal corruption. When it comes to Jack Abramoff, do you think his corruption was internalized? Was it something pathological, some kind of invincibility issue?
I do think he had hubris. He got so powerful and he was hanging out worth so many powerful people, and he was hardwired into the White House and Tom Delay -- the most powerful people in Washington. And he was making so much money. He was giving a lot of it away, mind you, but he was making so much money that I'm sure he imagined himself to be invincible. I also think that Jack -- unlike [Abramoff associate Michael] Scanlon... I think Scanlon was dirty. Scanlon was more like a mobster. In some ways mobsters aren't corrupt; they're mobsters who know they're committing crimes; that's their business. That was Scanlon's business model, too -- to commit crimes. Jack was a zealot. What he was doing flowed from that kind of zealotry. There's a psychological process of corruption that happens with Jack where he believes that he's doing good. He can't be bad.
What were your meetings with him in prison like, and how did they influence the film?
It's hard to say how they influenced the film. They did to some extent; I certainly became more sympathetic. Now, jack may look at this film and say, "Sympathetic? Where's the sympathy?" But I think I told Jack that I wasn't ever not going to be uncritical of him. He knew I was going to be critical of his actions. But I am sympathetic to how he's been used by Washington as a kind of a scapegoat. It's very easy to say, "Jack Abramoff is the problem. He's gone? Problem solved." It's clearly not the case. So I fund a lot of sympathy. I also came to understand him better, and that caused me to put some stuff in the film that hadn't been there before. He's a great salesman, he's very charismatic. he's an excellent storyteller. So we put in some of those audiotapes of him pitching the Indian tribes. It seemed like you really needed to understand, "How did Jack sell?" Well, this is it.
Even when your films deal with institutional failures, they seem to be personal stories.
I think that's essential. At the end of the day, I don't think it's appealing to make films about a theme -- a broad lecture about a certain fundamental problem. You make films about people and their stories. Out of those may grow some larger understanding of how things work, and I am interested in the big ideas. But I learn it over and over again: Every time I stray too far from the story, it always causes a problem for the film. We showed a longer version of this film at Sundance, and even my editor -- who's always ruthless with me -- concluded that we had cut it to the bone. It was over two hours; we showed it to an audience at Sundance who were like, "No. It's way too long." That's because there was a portion of the film that veered too far away from our central character, Jack Abra
moff. We pulled it out. It was a heartbreaker for me, because it was a great section. We'll probably release it on the Web. But it taught me a lesson: It's about the story.
So how did My Trip to Al-Qaeda come about?
You know, it was kind of a companion piece to Taxi [to the Dark Side]. It was one of thing where while Taxi was about us, My Trip to Al-Qaeda is about the enemy -- even though it ends up being a lot about us, also. I went and saw Larry's play, and I was impressed because it seemed a very personal journey to the Middle East. And by being such a personal journey, it would allow access to a lot of people who wouldn't read the more dense, scholarly material on that topic. It would be like going on a tour bus -- with Larry Wright as the guide.
But it's not a traditional documentary in the Alex Gibney mode, right?
No. At it's center is a dramatic conceit. It's a play, and we shot the play as a play. And that was fun for me, because that give me a spine but also gave me a structure. And there was the dramatic conceit at the heart of it. But in the middle of his set was a TV screen. That was in the play. We made the TV screen a little bit bigger for the movie; we made it widescreen. But that became a kind of magic portal, which meant we could travel freely through time and space -- in and out of the drama -- to create some kind of tension. I think one of the things I miss from the play is that tangible evidence of being in the Middle East. He was talking about it a lot, but I wasn't going there. It's not so hard! You get the photographs or the archival footage or, in this case, I went to Cairo with Larry. Or London. You can go there! And that's what people want to see. That's what documentarians do: You go and get the sh*t and show it. So that seemed like an opportunity to mix. And I give a lot of credit to one of the producers and the editor on the film, Allison Ellwood, who really worked that material pretty hard.
And of course there's Freakonomics. It's so strange: In this doom-and-gloom nonfiction climate, here is a movie by the unofficial documentarian dream team. How did you sign on?
They asked me. I knew about the book, and I read the book, and it seemed like fun, but I have to be honest and say there was one particular angle in the story, just because of who I am and because of who I am and because I wanted to have fun with it.
Which was...?
The Sumo episode. I grew up in Japan; I love Sumo wrestling. I love it visually, as a filmmaker, and I'm really interested in the idea of corruption -- cheating. So, great! Bring it on! Sounds like fun. And the idea of doing something shorter really appealed to me. Now, mind you, mine is the longest, but...
How long is "long"?
24 minutes. An eternity.
Indeed. How involved were you with the other filmmakers?
Not at all. I haven't seen the finished film. I've seen my film -- my portion. I haven't seen the finished film with all the contributions. But I think that was by intent. I've been there. I produced The Blues with Scorsese, and that's what we did there, too: Every filmmaker for himself. And then you go off and do it.