Alex Gibney Seeks Truth

Published Aug 10, 2021, 4:00 AM

Alex Gibney is one of the most respected and prolific documentary filmmakers in history. His stories feature strong characters and a propulsive narrative that often exposes malfeasance or incompetency, and the victim is often the little guy or our highest ideals, like democracy. Gibney has made over 30 has made in the last two decades, including Taxi to the Dark Side, his 2008 film about the CIA’s use of torture for which he won an Oscar. Alex Gibney talks to Alec about his latest film, The Crime of the Century (HBO), which he wrote, directed, produced, and narrated, and which explores the crime and manipulation at the center of the nation’s opioid crisis. He also talks about inheriting his anti-authoritarian views, early lessons working with Scorcese, and what it was like to take on a legend like Sinatra.

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I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. Alex Gibney is an old school truth teller. Watching one of his documentaries focused on strong characters, there's a propulsive set of facts that expose malfeasance or utter incompetence. Often the victim is the little guy or our highest ideals like democracy. No matter the topic, Gibney's films are always a fascinating, intense, and enlightening ride. Gibney's most recent film, The Crime of the Century, which he wrote, directed, produced, and narrated for HBO, tells the origin story about the heart of the opioid crisis poisoning our nation. Big Farmers celebrated its marketing muscle, using parties to lure doctors to write scripts. This was a new drug cartel. There were drug deal was wearing suits and lab coats. Basically, here's some moneys. Yes, I'm looking at this, and I'm gone, clearly we're breaking the law. Alex Gibney has made more than thirty films in the last twenty years. In two thousand and eight, he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Taxi to The Dark Side, his film on the CIA's use of torture, whether he's taking on scientology or Russian interference in our elections, or iconic figures like Steve Jobs, Lance Armstrong and Frank Sinatra, give Meey never flinches and his stories stand up. In fact, he can't think of a time when he wanted to reissue one of his docs to make a correction. I can't think of a time when it did happen. And I think about that a lot, because I try to find a moment in time where it feels like we're absolutely right, and sometimes, you know, I'm afraid that things may come out that would cause me to want to redo it. But I I sort of feel like the films represent a certain wisdom at a moment in time, and it's it's best to leave them. I am kind of following up in a film I did and doing another film to kind of dig a little bit deeper the film I did, a Taxi to the Dark Side. I'm doing a kind of follow up to it. But I've never been motivated to really go back in it's it seems like such a painful process. But I usually do think about, like if I'm going to end this film here? Why are we ending it here? And will it stand the test of time? When the film is over, do you ever privately follow up about certain aspects of it? Does you're caring? Does your curiosity? Does your concern end when the film is distributed? No, the ghosts of all my films tend to follow me, and I often keep in touch with sources and interview subjects, and in odd ways, they keep coming back two films I make henceforth, so they kind of reverberate. It's it's a little bit like that moment in in Ghostbusters where they say, don't cross the streams. My streams are constantly getting crossed. It seems like characters from one film are intruding into another. They all stay with me, which becomes a little bit vexing. Sometimes it's hard to keep them straight. In your career, your fabulous career, You've made thirty films or so in the last twenty years, one an Oscar. But of course documentary films have become content for streamers and major major broadcasters. What are your observations about that change during your career. What was it like in the beginning, Well, in the beginning was terrible. My wife used to tell me, I want you to go out and get a job, and whatever you do, don't mention that you're interested in documentaries, because they'll kick you right out the door. So I had to be very cautious. And then there was that terrible era of cable television where every channel had to be branded, which meant if you were clicking through channels, as soon as you got to a channel, it had to look like it was the street channel or whatever, and which meant that as a creator, you were just cranking out sausages. It was the worst possible thing. But then I discovered, particularly for political documentaries, there was a moment where theatrical films could say things that we're pretty potent so long as you made them entertaining. And that was a huge revelation which changed everything. And because suddenly you weren't operating in a commercial environment where it was the least common denominator and basically we were trying to sell audiences to advertisers. People were buying the content, that is to say, they go to a movie because they wanted to see the movie, not because they wanted to buy soap. So that was great, and I think that's what helped to explode the moment that we're in now. My only concern about streaming environment is the extent to which some of the streamers began to start relying too much on their algorithms so that they come to you and say, well, our algorithm says that at you know, minute thirty two, you should really be changing the narrative to this so that we'll keep our viewers. We're hearing a little bit of that, and that to be a nightmarish. Is that a contractual thing for you? You're an Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker. Is it understood that you have final cut or is that all boiler plate in a contract? No? I mean I I, generally speaking have final cut. Their very few instances where I don't have final cut. But there are some and and particularly some of the films that I produce where I'm not directing them per se. That's where we're hearing a little bit more of these notes, because I mean, in addition to what I do, I have a company that does a lot of other stuff, and you get a lot of these notes that refer to to algorithms, and it becomes a scary process. I mean, even the studios trying to make it a science, but it's never been a science. It's always been they try to widgetize something creative, and that's that's impossible. Well, as I often say, all of their algorithms and all of their research and so forth is to achieve the lingering fantasy of the risk free entertainment product. And I often say to them, the pursuit of the risk free entertainment product is absurd. I mean, there's no such thing absurd. You know, we can only rely on our instincts and the instincts that got us where we are now. When you talk about your company and you talk about what you're producing and not producing, I want you to explain what's the difference between an executive producer and a producer. There's a couple of different types of producers. How do you function as a producer in your company's work. On the projects where I'm named as a producer or an executive producer, I generally have a creative role, and sometimes it has to do with raising the money, but often it has to do with having some say or guidance in terms of the overall creative direction. Though you know, we try very hard to empower our directors to do films the way they want to do them. But sometimes on a series in particular, where you're coalescing around something like I did a series for Netflix for a couple of years called Dirty Money, which I was very proud of. It's all about corporate malfeasance, and you know, we purposefully engaged directors to do things their own way. That said, you know, it came out of my experience on en Ron, which was one where you invest in the wild criminality of the purpose and it's a kind of colorful, kind of heist like vibe that you engage in. So as executive producer, I'm trying to encourage the directors to lean into that kind of thing without being overbearing about it. So sometimes I'm the beard and sometimes, uh, sometimes I come come out a little stronger than that. You now have what like a hundred or a hundred and twenty people working at Jigsaw. So the company itself, that is to say, permanent employees as fairly small. It's like fourteen or fifteen people, but at times we can have as many as two hundred people working in the in the space on various projects. So that's where things get pretty daunting. Are you ever sitting in your office screaming into a cushion or you're gonna cry and you're telling your staff please don't bring me any more projects to do, because there's the fear you're gonna become the Jeff Coon's of documentary filmmaking, where like you're running from room to room and going yes, no, change this brightenness. Yeah, well, I really try. I mean, that would be the stereotype. And I do scream into my pillow, but usually not because of that. I mean, if if I can get projects made great, But I purposely tell you know, the other executives at the company, there are many projects here I don't want to be involved in, not because they're bad projects, but because it's important that they run themselves, because otherwise I get spread too thin, and who needs that. Then it becomes a kind of proxy system. The whole idea is to create a company that will run of itself and last long after I've left the field. Well, when you talked before about these streamers and their algorithms, what I found with some of the even in the podcast world, what they're basically saying is we need eight episodes because we don't get into the grave until episode six. Episodes one through five we break even six, seven and days when we make money, so we need eight episodes. And I'm like, well, I think I got six good ones, and they're like, we need eight episodes. Do you find that that's challenging for you in terms of when you make films sometimes? And we try, honestly to push back on that, because the last thing you know, you want is to do a story that feels like it's run out of gas and you just keep flogging it. So yeah, sometimes we do get that, but then sometimes the algorithm changes, Like you know, some of the streamers are like, well that's the way we used to think, and now now it's back to five is the magic number or whatever? You know, haven't you heard? And yeah, exactly, you clearly didn't. The website you go to how many episodes this week? It's far dot com right, Yeah exactly. Now you have a great volume of work where you are developing material, making films and series and so forth limited series with some great, great writers, so great, I mean to just keep you alone and Larry right, who I worship because you worked with Larry before, and going clear Going Clear, or in my trip to Al Qaida, and and also obviously Looming Tower. So what was your first connection with Right? Somehow we were put together on my trip to al Qaida, which was a play that he had done about a one man play that he started about the writing of the Looming Tower. And we got together on that and I did a doc about it. It's part half of it, or a lot of it is the play itself. And then we cut in and out of the play to do various documentary thing and we got on really well, and so then we were determined to do other stuff together. You know, I have a kind of a shorthand I think with writers because my dad was a journalist, and that's the business I was supposed to go into. It was around me all my life. So in my films, well I make them consciously as films. They also they have what I would call journalistic baggage. That is to say, I'm really invested in in a journalistic aspect of them that tries to get the facts right. But with somebody like Larry Right, it's a similar process in terms of the storytelling aspect of it. You know, at greater lengthen the new Yorker pieces or in his books, which often come out of his New Yorker pieces. There is at once a kind of fact finding discipline and also a storytelling discipline where you're trying to engage an audience to come along this journey with you, and part of that is investing in the propulsion of the narrative, which is I mean, that's storytelling, right. So Larry and I got on really well because he's always talking about stuff like that and and devices that he uses in his writing and and so ongoing. Clear that was maybe the biggest collaboration we had in terms of impact. The Leoming Tower was also, you know, had pretty broad reach. When you do a Crime of the Century. When you do with something with HBO, the budgets pretty high, correct, it is, relatively speaking. Relatively speaking, though, and on this one it it got a lot higher than the original budget because our original deal with HBO said we were going to do a two hour film, and then when we showed them the material, they said, well, this is clearly you know, going over the bounds of the two hours, you've got much more material than that, and they let us expand it to a four hour and in the case of Crime of the Century. I mean, to be honest with you. We actually started out working with the Washington Post. There were some journalists There's Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein and others who had first made me kind of aware of the breadth of this story. And along the way, you know, I decided they had were focusing mostly post Sackler, and I decided I really needed and wanted to tell the Sacular part of the story to get the breadth of it. And that's what led me to Patrick, And in fact, Patrick and I ended up teaming up on not only this, but also a scripted version of the Sackler story called pain Killer, which is going to start shooting later this fall. When you're working on the Sacular story as well as perhaps other stories, is there ever a fear of litigation? I mean, talk about a deep pockets opponent off you wind up getting litigated. Were you're afraid that they would suit you? Yes, And that's why the reporting has to be really good. And I give a lot of credit to HBO for being really rigorous about that. But once you have the facts right, being very brave, I mean I learned that on Going Clear. You know, there were a lot of lawyers attached to that film, but we were very good about getting our facts right. And it's not only the stuff that's in but the reporting that surrounds it. That's what gives you the foundation to put some of the stuff you put in the film. And so with Patrick, because we were working in different media, we were able to share things that we might not otherwise have shared. If he was, say, another filmmaker, and he would give me some documents, I would give him some documents. And also we could geek out with each other. I mean, when you're deep into a project like this, very few people, particularly significant others, want to hear from you about the arcana of the opioid crisis. You know, it's like okay, Han, that's enough. You know, we've got embedded in your wife's like honey, what's wrong? And like look at the molecular structure of this active ingredient. Look at this molecule. Have you ever seen a molecule? Now? But when you're doing these projects you talked about all the lawyers attached to Going Clear. We were talking before about how the early days for you because you work so much in unearthing truth and facts and there's a journalistic stripe to what you do that you've got a staff of people doing research and maybe you have a part time lawyer. I'm kind of joking here, and now your company, the difference is you've got a lot more people on the payroll doing research. You have ten lawyers on the payroll. You know what I mean? Like, do you need more of everything to get the facts clear? You know, we don't operate the company that way. And and actually while we started to veer in that direction, I think we're going back to baseline to be a little bit more entrepreneurial. What we do is try to set it up more as units, you know, try to function not as a machine or a factory, but more like a studio where each film or series has its own people and and it's a small but dedicated group, and attached to them are are sometimes lawyers we frequently work with, and sometimes journalists we frequently work with, but they're attached to that particular project. So each one is bespoke, it's has its own DNA, and that tends to work out better because sometimes these things take a long time, like Crime of the Century took close to three years to do with a small group that really gets intensively into the subject. That's what allows it to happen, rather than a kind of big machine which attempts to crank these things out. They can't be cranked out because the rhythm of them sometimes depends on when you get documents or when you get people to talk at the pace of their own. But I'm even talking about the creative DNA biology of the project to project. I'm just talking about resources in terms of when you're first starting out, you might not have everything you need. And as you become this phenomenally successful filmmaker, one thing it affords you to do is to have more people come on and do more research and deepen your research, and have more legal help to protect you. Now, you know, I was in Sundance. I saw you there. I went to the screening, and uh, I'm in that rarefied position where I'm friends with Tom. I mean he's he's a friend in terms of my career. You know, we don't see each other for long periods of time where we pick up where we left off. He had me come into a couple of smaller parts and two am I movies and so forth. And I've often speculated and I even wrote in my memoir, So I thought, what was it? What did he need this involvement in this organization, in this uh, in this faith, or whatever you want to call it. What did he need it for? I wasn't quite sure what its purpose was. You know, he has everything, you know, wealth and fame and legacy and the respect of the community. He has everything you could possibly imagine in a career as as as a movie star. So what did this add to his life? And I I speculated about that in my book. I came up with an answer. But when you were doing Going Clear, the scientology community, which is diverse, I mean there's different people. Was not all just Tom incorporated maybe, but all those people have been able to in some way chew away any real close examination. And when I watched your movie, I was mildly taken aback by how deep you got. Your film was among the first people from a major filmmaker to say that the the institution is guilty of certain abuses. I mean they abuse people. Their attitude to me was always like, hey, man, we're not hurting anybody. You know, we manipulate people, no more or no less than U S military recruitment companies, do you know. I mean, we have a certain kind of a thing we do to get people to want to join and sign up with us, but no one's being abused or hurt. And you and what was the genesis of that movie? Why did you decide you wanted to go further and look into that even further. You know what's interesting about that is that I had been offered to do that movie any number of times, and I had always turned it down because I always felt it was too fringed. There weren't that many scientologists in the world as opposed to say, the Roman Catholic Church. I did a film about the church. Coincidentally or not, two weeks after it premiered, the pope resigned. So um, you know, I was familiar with deep seated religious organizations and also you know the pushback you can get. But in the case of Going Clear, it was Larry who convinced me. Larry Wright who convinced me to take it on. There's a phrase in his you know, subhead of his book is the prison of belief, And that idea was really interesting to me because then it was a deep dive into scientology and indeed, the abuses of scientology. I mean that that's the reason to be concerned, is that the prison of belief leads to real human rights abuses. But the other reason I was interested in it is because people like to demonize scientologists as crazies, and the prison of belief allowed me to put scientologists in a mainstream tradition of how people invest or get lost in a prison of belief, whether it be religious belief or political belief, and can't get out even though the bars of the cell are open. So that's what really motivated me to get there. And then as we dug in, we took testimony and checked facts and found out stuff that other people hadn't found out before. And and I actually had a pretty big impact on the Scientology community itself. There are a lot of people who either left the church or who as ex members of Scientology, suddenly felt empowered to speak up in a way that they hadn't been able to do so before. Because because Scientology using its threat of litigation, because they had launched the maybe the most expensive lawsuit ever against the media company when they went after Time Warner, you know, people were afraid. And HBO was incredibly impressive in terms of its ability to back us up once we convinced them that we had the goods. Filmmaker Alex Gibney. One person who never sought risk free entertainment was Sheila Nevins. As the head of HBO documentary Films from nineteen seventy nine until her retirement in two thousand eighteen, Nevin's laid the groundwork for our current golden age of documentaries. However, when she started in the early eighties, HBO wouldn't even use the word documentary. When we did promos for films, we would call them docutainment. We invented this luetic word because we're afraid that if we said documentary, people would feel that it was for the elite and that it was about politics, and that it was not going to be about human stories. And so we we hid behind this word docutainment. And then slowly but surely it took a good years we began to say, well, maybe it's not such a dirty word, and reality programming sort of said real people can be interesting in a trivial way. So then somehow it went docutainment. Reality TV yea documentary, go for it, say that real people, people without celebrity, people who are trying to survive in a complicated world, saying their own words and say it in their own words. To hear more of my two thousand seventeen conversation with Sheila Nevans, go to our archives and Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Alex Gibney talks about his first job out of film school, cutting trailers for exploitation films. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Alex Gibney has said he inherited some of his anti authoritarian ways from his family. His father was a journalist who specialized in the culture and policy of postwar Japan. His mother founded the health education department at Boston's Children's Hospital. His parents divorced when Alex was young, and when he was a teenager, his mother remarried a champion of civil disobedience. My mom in ninety eight fell in love with William Sloane Coffin Jr. He was at the time being tried for conspiracy with Dr Spott and Austin, and she had known him from before, and he was a very charming and charismatic guy, and he wooed her and they ended up getting married and we moved to New Haven when I was I think a junior in high school, and ultimately I did go to Yale from And was it filmmaking? I mean, what was the first time you picked up a camera as a child. Were you interested in filmmaking as a child. Were you a huge filmgoer. I was into it as a kid, and I was always into cinema. But the thing that I think really changed me or turned me around were these great film societies at Yale, and there was there was always an interesting film on every night. You know, this is pre video, so you you go to these film societies and sit and watch and and at the time, documentaries and fiction films were distinctions, weren't made. It wasn't like one was up and one was down. They were all interesting. And I can remember you know too in particular that really floored me. One was Gimme Shelter by the Mazel's Brothers, you know about the Rolling Stones, And the other was Exterminating Angel by Louis Bunuel, and I thought, wow, you know, the possibility for expression in this medium is so enormous. So that's when I started to veer away from what my dad had in mind. For me, which was to be a print journalist. Did you seriously? I did? I did. But he lived in Japan for a lot of his life, and I was studying Japanese literature at the time, which meant I was like head buried in these endless character dictionaries. I started to veer away and and found my own direction. But he really wanted me after college to go and take the interviews at Time Life Newsweek, you know, and and and go into family business, which is what he had done. What did you study of Yale Japanese literature? Yeah, and I'm impressed because of all the Japanese documentaries you've made. It's incredible. Well, I did study under Donald Ritchie, the great Japanese film critic who knew so much about court Sawa. And I'll give you one. I'll give you. I can do one film quote in Japanese, which is Chiotto's it. And that's uh, that's the end of your Jimbo. He says, I'll wait for you at the gates of hell. Oh my god, my god. Now when you know when you make it. So you're studying Japanese literature, and yeah, you're not. You're making films at the same time I did, Uh, you know, I was studying film with a famous documentary named Murray Learner. He did a lot of those docs about the Newport jazz and folk festivals and that in store from now teaches at Colombia, and so she was she was one of my advisors. I mean she was very young then, as as we all were. So I was studying film and and ultimately towards the end of my sojourn there, I was starting to to to move into that territory. And then I went to u c l A Film School. So so you go to graduate school and and how many years you were you in l A. Well, I ended up staying in l A for a good many years, like twelve thirteen years. But and I never actually finished u c l A. That they're happy to claim you cling me to their bosom now, But I loved it there. I just I got a job with the Samuel Goldwyn Company at the time, and I started doing things like cutting exploitation trailers. What exploitation trailers did you cut? Oh? There was one called my favorite was one called shock Waves. It was a film about mutant Nazis who come up from the ocean floor that's where they went to a secret cat underwater cavern. They manufactured a group of mutant Nazis that couldn't be killed, and their ships sank somewhere in the Caribbean, and then one day a fishing boat happened to dislodge it, and up they came out out from the water that I thought they were in Buenos Aires. Peter Cushing. Peter Cushing was in it. Peter Cushing was in it. Brooke Adams was in it. There's a there's a line that caused them as a TOTN call death call creatures, small horrible sent any you can imagine. Oh god. That was a documentary about that. Well. The other trailer I did was for it was for a TV trailer I think for the First Assault on Precinct thirteen. And there was one the Nicholas Meyer Rock called Invasion of the b Girls. These were women who were half human, half b and when they'd have sex with you, they'd sting you to death. I know that woman, I know her. Yeah. I went out with her a few times. Yeah I got I got out on stage, but she tried and tried her best. Now I had a small part in Looming Tower I was very grateful to come and work with you guys, and I understand you're doing more of that. Correct, You're gonna be doing more narrative work. Yes, with luck, that's gonna I'm doing a feature this coming year, and this is one that's a real passion project. It's a story I've been thinking about for a long time and it took a long time to get the script right. But I'm really looking forward to doing it. And a guy named Matt Cook he wrote a Patriots Day which was directed by Peteburgh, but interesting to me, he was a in the infantry in Iraq and this is ah, this is very much of a war story. It's actually Vietnam War, and it's what it's really about is how hard it is to be a hero. And with Looming Tower, what was your input into that? I mean, you know, Larry Danny Futterman and I were um, you know, co conspirators early on in terms of coming up with the kind of the overall concept because Looming Tower is a vast book, and so how to contain it and how to focus it, And we decided to focus it on this battle between the FBI and the CIA in the run up to nine eleven, and to focus on to Harraheem's character. Uh, you know, Ali Soufan is the guy in which he was based in and Jeff Daniels character John O'Neill, and obviously you know, I mean you played George Tennant, who was a critical character in this battle between the FBI and the CIA. In terms of the overall conceit, I had a lot of input. I think that it's fair to say that Danny and I had some creative differences on it, and I want some and lost others, but that's the way things go. Now. There was some talk about another season of that then that didn't happen. Did you realize that that was the right thing to come about or were you disappointed that there wasn't another season of that? I was hugely disappointed. I really think there could have been a great one. And in fact, out of that, I'm now doing a dock which tells part of that story that I really wanted to tell in season two, because you know, when we originally came up with the concept, we had a notion for season two and then season three, and for a lot of reason, seasons who didn't happen, So so I'm I'm just in the process of finishing because it's the twentieth anniversary of nine eleven, so I'm just in the process of finishing something that leans in to sort of the next chapter because Ali Soufan goes on and he ends up interrogating the first high value detainee as a member of the FBI. But that's that detainee ends up being the for the patient zero, the CIA's Torture Program filmmaker Alex Gibney. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Alex Gibney talks about what he learned early in his career from working on a series about the Blues with Martin Scorsese. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Alex Gibney is known for his films that challenge trenched power, but he also has a deep catalog of work featuring musicians from an early blues series with Martin Scorsese to Jimmy Hendricks, James Brown, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones, and Frank Sinatra. When Gibney is working with a subject as lionized as Sinatra, I wondered, is there an expectation he'll put a shine on their legacy? Trust me, as the Sinatra family will tell you about some of the conversations we had. They weren't always pretty. They were of the opinion that I didn't shine the statue enough, though I think I think Tina over time came to to become a much bigger believer in in in what we had done, even though she was that skeptic going in. So you know, I had editorial control so I could do what I wanted. I was focused in this film, though a little bit more on Sinatra the musician and as kind of Gatsps character who kind of represented both the American dream him in the American Nightmare. And that to me was was interesting because because I have to be honest, I mean, Frank Marshall was the one who who encouraged me to take this project on, and I was not a big Sinatra fan. I knew him as kind of the guy who you know, hung around with Spiro Agnew and I wasn't that interested, but I became, you know, in doing the film, which is one of the great things about doing docs. You become curious and you learn about a subject. I became a huge admirer of his in terms of his ability to tell stories in three minutes through his voice, but also the tension, the rough and tumble tension between where he came from and and where he was ending up. And you know, we could have we've gone deeper into the Mabvia's up probably, and but I think that there was enough there to give you a sense of what was going on, and that it wasn't like we skipped it. And I think also the other thing that was tricky about him was his romantic life, which I think we we did a pretty good job of dealing with. The one woman who completely flummoxed him. Um av A Gardner. So Ava Gardner, I mean, I'm a fool to want you? Is the one song Frank Sinatra wrote, Uh, maybe he wrote two, but that was the most famous one. And and she kicked his ass, Ava Gardner did. And and then he turns around and does this terrible thing to me a pharaoh, which we chronicle in the film, where he basically serves divorce papers honor or has his lawyer served divorce papers on her while she's on the set of Rosemary's Baby, and then she went on to point out that Rosemary's Baby out grossed his film that was released at the same time, that she made sure he knew that, so anyway, that that was a great experience though, and and a lot of people have come to me about that film, and it's become one of the films of mine that people like an awful lot. I loved it, loved it, and and only highlighted my point that him in this work that I've done, I mean, I did a podcast. We've done this for now nine or ten years, and I love doing this because of my just my curiosity. And if there's one person, I mean, I'd probably write him a check for a million dollars to sit down and do the show with me, it would have been Sinatra. And that's the thing that's always so agonizing about the world we live in now, where people are not not so much expected, but they're allowed in a way. People have much more of an expectation of you being more forthcoming about the challenges and the struggles of that kind of work. And I thought to myself, God, wouldn't have been great to get Sinatra on film and do a real interview that wasn't Larry King or some of that other crap, you know, to really make him sit down. I don't think I've ever seen I did you ever see an in depth interview with Sinatra where he really even touched on his pain, and I think he was a guy in a lot of pain. He was. And one of the things that we got that was so valuable. I mean, not only did we get this sixteen millimeter film of his first retirement concert in which we kind of used as a structure to tell the story of his life, but the more important thing we got were a couple of audio taped in reviews that were done at great length because part of the problem with most TV interviews, particularly back in the day, they were either rolling these huge video cameras where you're having to sit under these massive lights and everyone's sweating, or their film cameras and you're changing the magazine, you know, every twelve minutes. With audio, you could really have a conversation, which is what, of course I try to do when I'm doing my interviews, to just have a conversation rather than ask questions, and it was those interviews with Sinatra, the audio taped interviews, which I think he was doing to explore whether or not he might want to do, you know, an autobiography. Those are the gold for us because they were very candid, as well as a few sort of off the cuff kind of Q and A sessions he did, including one he did at Yale, which was wildly fun, you know because when you got him in a moment where he didn't feel he wasn't kind of prethinking his answers, he was gold and you could feel his pain, his ambition, his passions. It was. It was great and and he's his sort of profane reactions to everything around him. Now, I want to imagine, as silly as this is, that Alex Gibney is collaborating with Marty Scorsese and they're on the set together shooting something and Alex Gibney says, don't put the camera there, Marty, Why would you put the camera? How? What's that collaboration? Like? It was a producer on a series called The Blues, which he was the executive producer on, and that was Marty Show. So he's a genius, and so my job on that series was to lay out the bats and balls so that players could play. That was my job, and the glory of that was that it really started my career in a way because it was like watching men at work. Now in that case, they were all men. There were no women. But you know, between Marty who directed a film, Clint Eastwood of Invendor's Antoine Fuqua, Charles Burnett, I got an up close seat to watch them all work in this nonfiction arena, but nevertheless giving it a personal take, so that these were authored works in nonfiction. It changed my life and my career. Now, for you, do you tend to be with the same group of people shooting, you have a you have a crew that you prefer, or have you mixed it up with the people you've used for your cinematic crew. Well I mixed it up a lot. But there's one woman, Marie's Alberti, who shot. She shot the wrestler, she shot Creed, but she also shot Enron Taxi to the dark Side and others and Armstrong laws. She was a key collaborator for me early on because she took a weakness of mind, which was cinematography and visualizing the frame. I came up as an editor and really expanded my horizons in that area. She's an extraordinary talent because you bridged the worlds of documentary and fiction. So Marie's the key collaborator for me for a long period. She was also did a bunch of Going Clear as well. But then the editors have been I've been just blessed. I mean, and those people I tend to go back to over and over and over again, Alison Lwood, Andy Grieve, Sloan Clevin, Mikey Palmer. What about music score? Music score, I've used a bunch of different people, but I keep coming back to the same ones. And I kind of cast composers depending on the project. I've a guest and Robert Logan, you know, I used them on Taxi to the Dark Side, but also Robert has kind of Eastern European background, so on Citizen K this one about Russia, I used them and he was magnificent. And then Will Bates I've used quite a bit, who's really an extraordinary talent. And also Pete Michelle who did Client nine. So I do like using the same person, but it feels almost like casting for some of these films. I know composers all like to feel like they can do anything, and they're probably right, but you know, I kind of cast them depending on what the film is about. Will Bates did a magnificently creepy score with the theorem in that wonderful weird instrument for Going Clear, which I found tremendously useful. Now people view you, I mean, you're heading off, it seems like into a more dedicated period of making narrative films. But people view you as a great truth seeker. You know, you want to go out and I don't want to say catch the bad guy. I don't want to make it like as a prosecutorial, but exposing abuses of power seems to be a really in my mind, that obviously potent theme in the work you do. Does it have a fade or are you like you describing the chemical molochist or what right as you see? Are you still walking on the beach of vacation and you're looking at phone going God, damn it, I can't believe these people? Did you know? Is outrage and indignation follow you everywhere you go? I'm afraid so uh, and I wish it wouldn't And you outline my vacation. I'm about to go on a vacation for two and a half weeks, and I'm sure I'll be consumed with the issue of torture when I should just be keeping my lobster claw and butter. Right, give me three docks that you wish you made. You mentioned give me shelter, which I love. That's one when we were kings and waltz withold The sheer stories we tell would be another one. It's not really my style, but I love it, absolutely love it. I turned to some people from the Hampton's Film Festival and I said, let's show a doc I found out that Albert Mazls was visiting his daughter in sag Harbord that weekend, and I said, I want to screen a film in the dead of winter. And they said, no one's gonna want to come and watch a documentary film at Bay Street in February. I said, you watched. I said, everybody's looking for an excuse to get the f out of their house. We showed gimme shelter. Brian Cosgrove, my friend who's a DJ out here at the local radio station, Big Rock and Roll of the Nut Uh, and we contact Mazel's and he comes and does the Q and a afterward, we packed the whole place. Two people came and we showed this movie, and people literally got a contact high watching Altamont, and it was like, what a great vibe, so fantastic. And two things I always stunned me when I watched the film. First of all, it's a cinema verite murder mystery, and one of the directors is less heralded, Charlotte's Wearing, who's the editor, and she put the structure together magnificently, so it plays like a murder mystery. The other thing that's interesting is a lot of that film is about listening and watching, and you wouldn't think that that would be important, but that scene where they're all listening to wild horses is just an exquisite scene. And then the scenes where they're watching the footage at altamount and realizing their complicity and the violence, those are magnificent scenes, and you they're just so counterintuitive and and testify to the kind of poetry that the Mazal's brothers and in this case Charlotte's Wearing, we're really into, and that that film just deserves to be seen over and over and over. I love that moment where like you said, they're listening to Wild Horses, and they're listening to their radio show. And Charlie Watts says, after Sonny Barger is yapping about the angels and their mantle and what they need to do, and Charlie, Charlie watsays, right on, Sonny, you know they're all they're all just so overwhelmed wondering how much how much gas did they throw on the fire. Well, let me just say this. I mean, I'm obviously a boundless admirer of yours. You're one of the great filmmakers of the last fifty years. You've made so many great, great, fascinating and significant and important and entertaining documentary films. So I hope when you go on your trip you'll put the phone in a drawer and and but take it out for the last couple of days, because I want you to be tortured and haunted for just the last couple of days of the of the trip. I'm gonna I want to get you back in the zone. I'm with you, and and there's a woman who's very much on your side who would agree. So I'm going to do the very best I can to to hide the phone under a rock for at least part of the trip. Yes, definitely, my very best to you on all things. I loved Crime of the Century. It was the idea that you could see how much the government is for sale, is to watch these people change laws and change legislation to suit the purposes of these people in this industry. It was absolutely numbing to me. That's one of the most numbing parts of the film. Thank you, Alex. A great pleasure talking to you, Alex Gibney. His latest film, The Crime of the Century, about the opioid epidemic, is available on HBO Max h I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by My Heart Radio. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donny Hue and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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