Alex Gibney
![Alex Gibney](/assets/img/authors/alex-gibney.jpg)
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
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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.
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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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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.
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I'm a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the 'Enron' film.
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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.
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Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.
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When I was a kid, I played sports a lot. My mom and dad were divorced, but I hung out in the neighborhood a lot, and it was all about sports. I would be out all day on the sand lot or on the hockey rink. My dad would take me to baseball games, but he worked so hard, and he would always fall asleep.
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I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to stop the crimes.