Alex Gibney
Alex Gibney
Philip Alexander "Alex" Gibneyis an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, Esquire magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth23 October 1953
CountryUnited States of America
bogged characters complexity debt directors distracted enables fiction follow key narrative owe people understand
I think myself and a lot of other documentary directors owe a debt to fiction filmmaking. The key was to follow the characters and let the narrative be your guide, without getting distracted by other things. By structuring 'Enron' like a heist film, it enables people to understand enough of the complexity without getting bogged down by it.
beds hospitals keeping market rewarded work
In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?
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Sports are the ultimate secular religion. Instead of being worried about whether your kids will be okay or how your job is going, you have your team, and you can focus all of your angst and your hopes and dreams on your team. I am in no way saying it always relieves any of this!
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The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was 'Waltz With Bashir,' or 'The Gatekeepers,' or '5 Broken Cameras.'
sacred
You have to assume once you go online, anything you put there can be made public. Yet while you're online, you feel like it's a private, sacred space. But you're really broadcasting to the world.
dig good knew
I'm a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the 'Enron' film.
best filmmaker job left
It's difficult for one filmmaker to criticize another. That's a job best left to critics.
bush history
The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.
bush designed guilty innocent legal separate structures war
For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the 'Global War on Terror.'
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When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you out of your minds? You can't include that!'
business except good theatrical
Every film may not be appropriate for a theatrical release, and the theatrical business is not a very good business for anybody except the distributor.
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I remember when I did my Enron film, my executive producers at the time felt very strongly that I should mock the Enron executives more viciously because everybody wanted that moment.
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I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds.
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Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers.