Oscar-winning American documentary maker Alex Gibney talks to TimeOut film critic Peter Calder
KEY POINTS:
As the closing credits roll on Alex Gibney's stunning, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, we see a frail old man, identified by a caption as the writer-director's father, Frank, sitting in an armchair and looking up at an unseen interviewer.
A US Navy interrogator in World War II and Korea, Gibney snr, who died last year, provides a telling postscript to the story his son has just told. In those days, he says, "we had a sense that we were the good guys. You would always get justice from the American people. It was what made America different".
The words are as piercing a summary as might be imagined of the central thesis of a film described by its maker as being about "the corruption of the American character and the rule of law".
Taxi uses the case of a 22-year-old Afghan named Dilawar - an entirely innocent taxi driver, detained on spurious grounds and tortured to death by American interrogators in Bagram prison - as the starting point for a coldly furious denunciation of the atrocities committed by the Bush administration in the name of American people as part of an ill-defined "war on terror". In detailed interviews, including some with enlisted men who faced torture charges, Gibney builds up a picture of indiscriminate state-sanctioned brutality - in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay - that has its roots in the Oval Office and the Pentagon. Gibney shows how the Bush administration deliberately and conscientiously rejected the requirements of the Geneva Convention and of habeas corpus, the legal principle requiring that a detainee be produced in court, which, as one interviewee remarks, was "what we fought the revolution for".
Gibney is aware of the view that films like his are unpatriotic, that they play into the enemy's hands. His title is drawn from Vice-President Dick Cheney's statement, five days after 9/11, that "we have to work the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows" but, in examining the role of torture in inflaming radical Islam sentiment, his film asserts that the approach has failed.
"The war on terror could not have been waged any worse," he says from his New York office where he's stopping for lunch at 5pm. "Remember that the goal of the terrorist is not to capture territory; it is to provoke liberal democratic societies to repudiate their own principles. In that regard George Bush has capitulated in ways that Osama bin Laden could have only dreamt of.
"Investigations in the press and in films like mine are fundamentally patriotic. I'm interested in protecting the safety of my children because I believe it is in danger right now.
"Even [the US military chief in Iraq] General David Petraeus has argued that capturing the moral high ground makes the situation safer for our troops, that to not do that is to put them at great risk and jeopardy. And remember: this is meant to be a war for democracy."
The prolific Gibney has a hand in three documentaries in this year's festival: he directed Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson and produced No End in Sight, the highly regarded expose of the inept political management of the occupation of Iraq. His Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room was one of 2005's best and he has contributed to distinguished television series including Martin Scorsese's Emmy and Grammy award-winning The Blues.
He says he is interested in "the grand cons, where people in power convince the relatively powerless of something that is really not in their best interest. I think one of the reasons that Enron was able to perpetuate its fraud was because no one really asked 'why?' in a fundamental way. They took Enron on faith instead of investigating." Likewise, he argues that the mainstream media have - with honourable exceptions - generally swallowed the administration line.
"Documentaries are talking about things that people in the traditional media don't talk about. I always laugh when journalists talk to me about how recreations in documentaries are 'against the rules'. The nightly news is a huge recreation: pompadoured robots who speak like no human being ever speaks surrounded by a huge stage set of a newsroom. It's a joke."
He derides "the phony balance that you see on the nightly news" by inverting the famous Quaker motto: "It's what I would call power speaking to truth."
As the US presidential election campaign begins, Gibney says he does sense a mood for change. He knows there will be pressure to engage in the old political tactic of "moving on".
Of Hunter Thompson, the incandescently maverick and monstrously substance-abusing journalist profiled in his other film, Gibney says he was "always a fan, though never a fanatic".
He says Thompson, who committed suicide in 2005, made a subject "not unrelated" to his other films.
"At a time when the rich and the powerful confound journalists by insisting they play by these rules which always favour the powerful, wouldn't it be good to look at a man who didn't play by the rules? He had a healthy attitude of scepticism towards the powerful. He ridiculed them in way that other journalists could only envy. Hunter got into the gears of the machine and said there's a lot of oil being spilled here and the flywheel's frayed."
The portrait, of a man who burnt brilliantly from 1965 to 1975 but whose flame dimmed for the next 30 years, is finally a much sadder film than might have been expected. And Gibney says that's apt.
"He was a man of tremendous highs and deep lows. He did some wonderful things and he did some terrible things.
"He was a man of extremes - and in that way he embodies the US as few people do."
LOWDOWN
Who: Alex Gibney, director
What and when: Docos Taxi to the Dark Side, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson, No End in Sight - screening in the Auckland International Film Festival July 10-27.
