Director’s Cut: Alex Gibney (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’)

“The Internet is not a good place for secrets.” That’s how Alex Gibney puts it in the beginning of his latest investigative documentary, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” which is as much about the rise and fall of the whistleblowing site as it is of its creator, Julian Assange.

“We Steal Secrets” chronicles the overnight stardom of WikiLeaks and Assange after the site—essentially an anonymous drop-box for secret information and news leaks—published documents exposing highly classified military materials, including the “Collateral Murder” video (footage from a 2007 airstrike in Baghdad where two Reuters journalists were mistaken as insurgents). That same information was also printed in major newspapers around the world like the New York Times and The Guardian, which teamed with WikiLeaks to distribute the information.

What should have been a monumental moment in transparency and free information led to the government playing the “power of nightmares” card, making the American public believe that this information was harmful out in the pubic, while also tracking down the whistleblower, Private First Class Bradley Manning, who will soon stand trail for his alleged leak of the most classified documents in American history. Assange, on the other hand, grew out of control with power and for close to a year has been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London as police wait to arrest him outside the building for questioning from Swedish authorities on sexual acts with two women.

What makes “We Steal Secrets” quite an astonishing work is how compelling it makes out Assange and Manning even though Gibney was never able to interview either on camera—Manning is in a military prison (allegedly enduring torture tactics) while Assange would not talk to Gibney unless the director paid for the interview.

Here Gibney talks to Film.com about following the story and if we’ll ever see a site like WikiLeaks again.

FILM.COM: A big thing I took away from the film is that if Julian Assange were not so self-destructive we would have a completely different view of WikiLeaks and its importance. Do you agree?

ALEX GIBNEY: I agree. To be honest going into the project I thought it was a simple David vs. Goliath story. I had read the Raffi Khatchadourian piece about Julian in the New Yorker and I thought, wow, what a fantastic and interesting character, and even prior to the Afghan War Logs I’d seen “Collateral Murder” online and I thought this is really impressive. But the more I dug into it the more it seemed like a great ongoing opportunity was lost. It’s tricky because the leak of those documents was I think a tremendous boon to understanding a lot of things. And they were very important. But there was a moment there when the whole kind of moral balance of leaks could have been pushed into a different direction if Julian hadn’t been so unable to listen to other people. And frankly if the journalists had been a little bit more adult in terms of trying to work with Julian. But there was a moment that was lost because the alliance between Julian and WikiLeaks and these mainstream news organizations blew apart when the politicians in Washington were able to separate Julian from the rest of the crowd and that was too bad. And I think the media deserves some of the blame for that, but I think Julian also.

You’ve said in the past that you can’t go into these movies relaying on getting a key interview, you have to go where the story takes you. Like in Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and Casino Jack and the United States of Money, you don’t bag the big interview but still find a way to give us an idea of who the main players are.

You have to stick with where the story takes you. You can’t pretend that access is necessarily the only thing that matters. I think that Julian though that access was the only thing that mattered because early on when he became famous a lot of people were coming to him and asking for access and Julian was setting very steep terms for access. I told Julian from the beginning that I was making the movie whether he gave me access or not and he said to me that if I don’t give you access your film will not be legitimate and I found that bizarre. It’s like I did a film on the Vatican, the Pope didn’t give me access! [Laughs] And that’s the relevant comparison with Jack Abramoff, I tried very hard to talk to Jack and I did talk to him in prison but I wasn’t able to film him. At the same time you have to keep pursuing the story and find a way to tell it that seems right. You have to live with the constraints as well as the opportunities.

And you note in the movie that you and Julian did have a big sit down. Was that basically just a way for him to negotiate with you?

Yes. It was a way to negotiate something out of me and to see if he could get more “intel” as he always called it, when I refused to put up big money for an interview. And I joked with him, I said, “You say that the market rate for an interview is a million dollars, I must be the only person on the planet who hasn’t interviewed you.” I don’t pay for interviews. So then he asked me if I’d gather intel on all the interview subjects, in other words would I spy on them for him? I found that a really bizarre request from a guy running a transparency organization that’s supposed to be speaking truth to power.

How long were you and your team trying to get him?

A long time, we tried right until the very end. We kept trying to get him to talk, so this was over the course of two years. Look, I met him early on when we first started, I liked him when I first met him, it was for his 40th birthday party and finally we had this other meeting. And there were a lot of intermediaries who were trying to go to him on my behalf telling him that it’s a good idea that he talk. We tried everything. But at the end of the day Julian wants control, he’s a spin doctor and he wants to believe that he’s the puppeteer pulling the strings of everyone.

And it was a completely different animal to try to get to Bradley Manning.

It’s impossible. The government had him under lock and key. If there was a journalist that ever got to Bradley Manning I didn’t know about it. But it’s a peculiar thing from a filmmaking standpoint, I can’t get to my two main characters. So what do you do?

I think that’s what makes the Mark Davis footage you show very important to your film.

I learned very early on when I was making “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room,” I tried very hard to get to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and I didn’t get to either of them, but there’s always a way to tell a story and you just keep digging, asking questions, going to as many people as you can, and you hope you find a way and then cinematically you have to find a way to represent things that you end up knowing in ways you may not be able to put on the screen. I wanted to know more about the Julian Assange before he got famous, because I talked to a lot of people about that person.

I saw an Australian documentary that was done by Mark Davis, who is a wonderful filmmaker and journalist and does exactly the kind of thing that you should do, just go out and see if you can find Julian, and he found him and he started hanging out with him and starting shooting footage of him. And ultimately I was able to make a deal to license that footage, so you get a sense of Julian before he gets famous, who I think is a more interesting character and frankly the first half of the film you’re thinking sign me up for the Julian Assange crusade. He’s very engaging, self-deprecating, interesting, very smart. So I think that Mark Davis footage was a wonderful way of showing the tremendous qualities of his character. There was an aspect of Julian that was fantastic and then there was another side.

Is the footage we see also in Mark’s film or outtakes?

Both. And Mark is a big defender of Julian and I put him in my film because he brought a lot of balance to that key point in the story surrounding the Afghan War Logs, where a number of journalists said Julian didn’t care at all about the harm that might come to informants and Mark Davis says forthrightly in the film, “No he did cared very deeply.” So that is important because it gives a more balanced perspective of Assange.

And with Bradley Manning you use the online chat he has with hacker Adrian Lamo.

They were published in Wired and when we started making the film some of the chats had been published but not all, then the full batch, as far as we know, were released and it really gives you a portrait of a man that was really extraordinary, and a portrait in his own words. We reckoned for a long time what kind of cinematic tricks we would use, would someone read them? Ultimately we decided that the text is how he presented himself, so this is how we should present him, through text.

By the end of the film I felt Julian Assange was more into the thrill of the “hack” than allowing information to reign free through WikiLeaks. How do you feel?

Well, he says early on that his motivation is “crushing bastards.” Well, that’s a peculiar statement. You don’t want bastards but crushing bastards? That’s the idea? He wants to crush them? He wants to do what bastards do? So that’s a peculiar statement. But there’s also a lot of the idealist in Julian Assange and nobody should forget that. The problem is, yeah, he was one man against the world and didn’t have a lot of opportunity, nor did he allow himself the humility to learn about how he should have been publishing this material in a responsible way.

I don’t think the whistleblower will ever go away, but can something ever like a WikiLeaks be created again?

The New Yorker has now established an electronic drop box for anonymous leaks, and it was designed by Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who recently committed suicide. It’s a powerful precedent, WikiLeaks, that will continue to live on but it doesn’t have to live on only at WikiLeaks.

Before we go, what’s the latest with the Lance Armstrong film that you’ve been making for years now it seems?

Yeah. It should be finished editorially soon and it will probably show up in the fall.

Has the structure of it changed since Armstrong’s admission of using performance-enhancing drugs?

You can figure that since I’ve been working on it since 2008 a lot has changed over that time. [Laughs]

“We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” is in theaters today.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Alex gibney, Bradley Manning, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, Julian Assange, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

Is ‘Christmas Story 2′ Sacrilegious?

“A Christmas Story,” the 1983 holiday classic you grew up watching religiously with your family. You still remember all the lines: “You’ll shoot your eye out.” “Ho-Ho-Ho.” “FRA-GEE-LAY… it must be Italian!” You still want a Red Rider BB gun even though you have no idea who Red Rider is.

Now Warner Premier, the skuzzy, recently shuttered Direct-to-DVD arm of Warner Bros., has produced a low-budge direct sequel, “A Christmas Story 2,” and while many who love the first one will see it out of sheer morbid curiosity, we are definitely not about to drink the Kool-Aid… or in this case, Ovaltine.

If you’re as big a fan of Bob Clark’s 1983 original as we are, then you probably know he already made a direct sequel ten years later, titled “It Runs in the Family” (sometimes referred to as “My Summer Story”). While that movie doesn’t hit the same bullseye the original did, it had a great cast in Charles Grodin, Mary Steenburgen, and a young Kieran Culkin taking over for Peter Billingsley as the precocious Ralphie Parker.

Besides the same director, “My Summer Story” also had something else this new “sequel” lacks: Jean Shepherd, literally THE VOICE of the film, who not only narrated all the prior movie adventures of Ralphie but also wrote the autobiographical screenplays. His warm, nostalgic recollections of childhood defeats and triumphs within a mildly dysfunctional household are what imbued “A Christmas Story” with the Rabelaisian wit that made it so relatable.

If the above-the-line talent on “Christmas Story 2? (or “Christmas Story Boooooooo” as we like to call it) had an ounce of creative prestige to their name, that would be one thing, but sadly it’s not the case. So who are the perpetrators of this cinematic war crime? Slouched in the director’s chair is Brian Levant, a guy who at one time had a gift for cranking out harmless, mainstream family fare (“Beethoven,” “The Flintstones”) but must have forgot to send some studio execs birthday cards because his last few films have been made-for-TV “Scooby Doo” movies. Yikes!

The screenwriter is Nat Mauldin, a TV writer whose big screen claim to fame seems to be bad remakes (“The Preacher’s Wife,” “Doctor Dolittle,” “The In-Laws”). It’s pretty safe to say that without the guiding voice of Sheherd, both literally and figuratively, this new movie seems like nothing more than tired rehashing of gags that worked in the first movie, like giving the old man a new leg lamp. Yawn.

The only notable cast member is Daniel Stern, taking over for the delightful Darren McGavin as the curseword-spewing old man. Yes, Stern was at one time an impressive actor in classics like “Diner,” “City Slickers,” and “Home Alone,” and his narration as the older version of Fred Savage on “The Wonder Years” was in many ways channeling the spirit of Jean Shepherd. However, having not made a good showing in nearly two decades it’s safe to say that his heart probably ain’t in it anymore, not to begrudge a guy a paycheck gig.

Instead of cranking out an in-name-only sequel as a transparent marketing gimmick (we will honestly pay more for a DVD set that does NOT include #2), someone should release “My Summer Story” on Blu-ray, along with some of the other made-for-TV movies from the ’80s that Shepherd made based on these characters. Those include “Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss” starring a “Stand By Me”-era Jerry O’Connell, and “The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters” starring none other than Matt Dillon as Ralphie! Video archaeologists get on that now, please.

Categories: Features

Tags: a christmas story, A Christmas Story 2

Review: ‘Anna Karenina’ Is a Love Story Lacking Connection

Review originally published September 7, 2012 as part of Film.com’s coverage of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.

Dance scenes are something of a specialty for director Joe Wright. His previous work, “Pride and Prejudice,” features elegantly rendered cinematic soirees, and “Anna Karenina” follows right along in its footsteps. Frozen dancers fade into the background, Keira Knightley’s visage shining brightly in the foreground. Sadly, these scenes play much better in the former literary adaptation, as “Pride and Prejudice” was a slow burn … that blossomed into a lovely romance. Not so much for “Anna Karenina,” a film that tries twice as hard and feels about four times as long. Though often visually striking, the story never fully takes off, leaving one of the greatest novelized tragedies of the past two centuries entirely bereft of an emotional connection on the big screen.

For those not familiar with the source material, which has been called “the greatest novel ever written,” the film commences in Imperial Russia during the 1870s. There’s been a mite bit of wee adultery, and Anna Karenina (Knightley) has been summoned to provincial Moscow to salve some familial wounds. She’s from high-powered St. Petersburg, where her husband Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) is an influential statesman. The opening ten minutes of “Anna Karenina” are fairly light-hearted, strutting and preening, a false note that doesn’t portend what’s to follow.

Also Check Out: Stars Take the Red Carpet at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival

Things become intriguing in Moscow for Karenina when Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson) decides he must have her, hubby and child be damned. Anna is largely up for it, though the likely outcome seems to be only misery and remorse. Give Russian scribes this; they know how to wallow in the sadness reaped from poor decision-making abilities.

Broad themes present themselves when considering “Anna Karenina,” the facile nature of lust versus love, the impetuous and rash decisions of the flesh, and one’s duty to spouse and country. And are crazier people just naturally more attractive? The very notion of forgiveness is roundly prodded and poked, much to the chagrin of poor Mr. Karenin. The joy of the “chase” gets its fair share of screen time too, and the verdict seems to be that illicit love is all the more delightful for its roundly expected heartbreak.

Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, there were far too many themes for a two-hour film to broach. Unfortunately, “Anna Karenina” never hits any sort of stride where the narrative arc is concerned. The dark side of love is ruminated upon, sure, but there’s never any real payoff. The film faces the dilemma of a thousand book adaptations before it – it’s too small in scale to offer the epic rewards of the written word, but too large on-screen to hide from its glaring shortcomings. Solid visual moments aren’t enough to sustain an audience, and Joe Wright’s visual style isn’t enough to salvage gaping wounds in the story.

“Anna Karenina” ends up in the ditch, like anyone who has loved and lost, as the perception of desire’s perfection smacks right up against the eventual realization of adoration’s flaws. To its detriment, the film is largely slung together in a co-mingled joyless ball … until all that’s left is regret.

Grade: C

Categories: Reviews

Tags: Aaron Johnson, Anna Karenina, jude law, Kiera Knightley, pride and prejudice, Toronto International Film Festival

What’s the Big Deal?: Tokyo Story (1953)

Of Tokyo Story, Roger Ebert wrote: “It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.” Jeffrey Overstreet observed: “These characters never surprise us with anything showy, lurid, or sensational. They’re ordinary human beings, treated with fierce attention that feels like deep respect.” Philip French called it “one of the cinema’s most profound and moving studies of married love, aging and the relations between parents and children.” This is high praise for a Japanese film that the average moviegoer may not have heard of, by a director who isn’t a household name. Why does Tokyo Story win such accolades in movie-buff circles? Let’s take off our shoes by the door and investigate.

The praise: Every 10 years, the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine surveys a large, international group of critics and film experts to compile a list of the greatest films of all time. Tokyo Story appeared on the two most recent lists, at No. 3 in 1992 and No. 5 in 2002. The movie is also included on Time magazine and Empire magazine’s lists of the best films of the 20th century.

The context: Now considered one of Japan’s greatest directors, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) wasn’t well-known outside his homeland until after his death. His most acclaimed film, Tokyo Story, was made in 1953 but didn’t play in the U.S. until 1972, and it was another 20 years before it climbed onto Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade survey. Which is to say, the story behind Tokyo Story‘s notoriety is as slow-moving as the story in Tokyo Story.

Ozu started making films during the silent era, cranking out a couple dozen of them, mostly shorts, between 1927 and 1932 alone. His work in the 1930s started to move away from comedy and toward drama and social criticism, and though he wasn’t a major box-office draw, he was admired by Japanese critics. His career was interrupted by stints in the military during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, and it was after these experiences that he produced his most significant films. Pretty much everything you’ll ever read about Ozu pertains to one of the 13 movies he made between 1949 and his death in 1962. They deal primarily with ordinary human experiences like family, marriage, and death, though Ozu himself never married or had children.

Tokyo Story was conceived and produced in the same workmanlike manner as most of Ozu’s movies. He and collaborator Kogo Noda (who co-wrote half of all the films Ozu ever made) spent about 14 weeks drinking sake and writing the screenplay. This was followed by a few weeks of scouting locations, then four months of shooting and editing. Ozu used a lot of the same cast and crew from one film to the next, which helped things run smoothly. There was nothing about the project to suggest that it would come to be considered Ozu’s masterpiece; even the title was typically generic. (It was one of four Ozu films to have the word “Tokyo” in it. Other Ozu titles include Late Spring, Early Summer, Good Morning, Tokyo Twilight, The Only Son, and There Was a Father.)

Part of the reason Ozu’s movies weren’t exported to the West in the 1950s, when contemporaries like ???Akira Kurosawa were enjoying so much international success, was that Ozu didn’t make period pieces or samurai movies. Japanese distributors didn’t think movies dealing with modern, mundane Japanese life would be of interest to Western viewers, so they didn’t bother trying to export them.

As a result, when Ozu’s movies did finally reach American shores, cinephiles who were accustomed to Japanese cinema being all about geishas and samurais — because those were the only Japanese movies they’d had access to — were smitten with the sheer ordinariness of Ozu’s stories. Furthermore, Ozu’s movies made it to the U.S. at a fortuitous moment. As film scholar David Desser wrote, “That [Ozu's] films were relatively plotless and steeped in everyday life made them seem if not part of, then related to, the French New Wave or the severe style and themes of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman.” Tokyo Story fit in with the 1960s art-house style, even though it pre-dated it by more than a decade.

The movie: An elderly husband and wife take the long train journey from Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their adult children — possibly for the last time, given their advancing age and the distance between the two cities. They find that while their children are glad to see them, nobody has any time for them. It’s kind of sad.

What to look for: The films tells a seemingly ordinary story involving some seemingly ordinary people. Yet there is something strange and aloof about the way Ozu depicts it. The characters speak in a way that sounds stiff and formalized to modern, Western ears. You may wonder: Is this really how Japanese families interacted in 1953? Or is it just how Japanese movies depicted Japanese families in 1953? Would a Japanese viewer in 1953 have thought, as do we, “Man, it’s sad that these people don’t treat their parents better”? Or would the viewer have thought, “Eh, that’s how life goes”?

You’ll be glad to know that movie nerds have been discussing the answers to those questions for half a century. Ozu’s style was deliberately formal, which highlighted (and maybe exaggerated) the politeness of Japanese society. But he was also documenting the state of Japanese culture at the time, and doing so without much commentary or didacticism.

Desser writes:

“The film is, paradoxically, both intensely insular and immensely universal…. So completely does the film derive from particularities of Japanese culture — marriage, family, setting — that critics have argued over the film’s basic themes. Is it about the breakup of the traditional family in the light of postwar changes (increase urbanization and industrialization, which have led to the decline of the extended family)? Or is it about the inevitabilities of life: children growing up, getting married, moving away from home, having children of their own, leaving their aging parents behind?… Though the film is set in a specific time and place, such questions concerning the breakdown of tradition … are universal in their appeal.”

Ozu’s visual style is definitely uncommon, though — by contemporary, modern, Japanese or American standards. When a director’s visual style is noteworthy, it’s usually because of something flashy, something with pizzazz. The opposite is true with Ozu: What makes his films stand out is how calm and serene they are, yet how inviting and warm.

He shoots most scenes as if from the perspective of someone kneeling on the floor, observing the action. This came to be known as the “tatami shot,” referring to the traditional Japanese mat. The camera doesn’t tilt upward, though. It remains level, looking straight ahead, and it almost never moves. (Roger Ebert says the camera moves only once in Tokyo Story, and that this is “more than usual” for an Ozu film.)

When characters have conversations, Ozu will often have them look almost directly at the camera, as if we are the other person. Then he’ll cut to the other character making his or her reply, also looking at the camera. Even a casual moviegoer will notice that this is different from the usual method of portraying conversations in film. If the tatami shots make us feel like quiet, unnoticed observers, these dialogue shots draw us in, make us part of the action.

Notice also how Ozu will linger on a room (and a scene) after the characters have exited, or cut to it before they arrive. In The New York Times, Roger Greenspun described this as “an acknowledgment that places are sanctified by people and that even when they have gone away, a bit of their presence lingers on.”

The effect of all these devices: it almost feels like we’re living in this world with these characters, kneeling on their floors, having conversations with them, witnessing their lives.

What’s the big deal: Ozu’s visual style suits his material perfectly. If he had been making samurai movies or slapstick comedies, obviously he’d have approached them differently. This matching of content and style is a crucial element of effective filmmaking, and one that’s not easy to achieve. The fact that the characters’ lives are not extraordinary is part of the point. Ozu wants us to relate to them somehow, to see ourselves and the people we know reflected on the screen. One of the reasons the film has endured is that it has accomplished this for so many people over so many years. We may live half a century and half a world away from the story, but we can probably identify with many of its elements. Considering how few films have any emotional resonance at all, let alone resonance that spans time and cultural barriers, that’s kind of a Big Deal.

Further reading: David Desser’s essay, “A Filmmaker for All Seasons,” was reprinted in the book Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, but you can read it online here. You may want to skip the first three paragraphs if you haven’t seen the movie yet, as they lay out the entire plot from beginning to end. As mentioned, the story isn’t exactly the point of the film, but it still might be nice for you not to know exactly what happens beforehand.

Here is Roger Ebert’s review from the film’s 1972 American release, and his 2003 Great Movies essay, both of which likewise discuss the plot in detail. David Bordwell’s Criterion essay is also a good overview.