“Julian and WikiLeaks, the very ideals of WikiLeaks, are not one and the same”
Filmmaker Alex Gibney talks about his new doc, We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks.
Julian Assange is the man in the middle of Alex Gibney's documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.
Focus World
Warning: plot points of We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks are discussed in this Q&A.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney doesn't shy away from controversy. In fact, he may gravitate towards it. His previous works cover the fall of Enron (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the Elliot Spitzer saga (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer), and torture during the war in Afghanistan (Taxi to the Dark Side).For his latest documentary, Gibney focused on the story of WikiLeaks—from its successful beginnings in Iceland all the way through Julian Assange embracing Ecuador. The film itself is an extremely thorough look at a complicated tale that still hasn't finished, with both Assange and Bradley Manning currently existing in a sort of legal limbo. It challenged Gibney to craft an ever evolving narrative and inspired him to consider doing a dramatic film about Manning in the future ("We're working on it, I wouldn't say more than that," he told Ars).
Before We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks debuts this Friday, Gibney jumped on the phone for a quick Q&A. He discussed his disappointing interactions with Assange, the interesting scapegoating being done, and the developing role of Manning within the film.
Ars: Assange is built up as the story's hero for much of the film, but by the end he's become an antihero like we see on many TV dramas. Was this a conscious decision or something that developed through your process?
Gibney: It was the latter. It wasn't the way we intended to do it in the beginning. I think I saw it as more of a pure David and Goliath story when we first started.
By the time we got close to finishing, we very consciously structured it so that you feel the burning fire of his idealism early on and then you see that he becomes corrupted by the moment. Some of the very things he opposes he begins to resemble, so this struck me as a very powerful but true character arc.
This will sound funny, but the arc really reminded me of Breaking Bad. Once he defeats his enemy—the US government here—he ends up becoming the same type of villain, maybe even worse.
I don't know about worse, but he begins to assume the same kind of characteristics. His organization becomes increasingly secretive and paranoid. Instead of speaking truth to power, he begins to speak lies to power. He begins to take his supporters and force them to embrace conspiratorial lies about the whole Swedish episode.
So suddenly, he becomes a character who is not a crusader for truth. Rather, he's somebody who believes that because he's good, he's permitted to do bad.
Why tackle this topic now? You use footage from some recent, related documentaries and I know there are other WikiLeaks projects in development right now.
Well there's only one that I know of, which is the Bill Condon film [starring Benedict Cumberbatch] that I guess will come out this fall. Some others were in development but I think have fallen by the way side.
But this tends to be something that I do. I look at stories that hit the headlines, a couple years after the headlines have dissipated, and find things inside the story that maybe people missed the first time around. And I felt this was an important story to do that with, such an important moment in history, that it was important to examine it thoroughly.
I must have missed this news at the time, but one of the most interesting things about your filming was that Assange requested that you pay him for an interview...
Just to be accurate, yes, you're right, he wanted me to pay him. And then he said the market rate for an interview was $1 million.
How far along with the project were you at that time? I know you spent time with him for the film, but did this come up late in the game? He was always suggesting that he might want to be paid and certainly his agents were suggesting he would want to be paid. But I kept telling him from the beginning that I couldn't pay him, I don't pay for interviews. There were a lot of other people who interviewed him who didn't pay him so far as I know.
That process of trying to get him to sit down and talk was a long one. It started at the very beginning and carried right up to the very end; I was still trying to get him to talk. At the same time, I made it clear to him early on that I was going to make the film anyway whether he agreed to talk to me or not. That was one of those things that just did not compute with him. "Why would you make a film about WikiLeaks if I don't agree to talk to you?" as if he was a puppetmaster holding the strings for all stories about WikiLeaks.
Has he still, to your knowledge, not seen the film? He's already taken to Twitter against the project.
Yes, he has not seen the film so far as I'm aware. I don't know how he could have seen it since he's still in the Ecuadorian embassy. And many of his supporters who have come out and attacked the film, like John Pilger or Oliver Stone, they haven't seen the film either. I find that, again, more than a little bit ironic.
Julian has taken to calling it an anti-WikiLeaks film. It's not an anti-WikiLeaks film at all as anybody who sees it would know. But it becomes convenient for Julian to assume that if there's any criticism of him, you're anti-WikiLeaks i.e. the idea of WikiLeaks. That is precisely the reason for going into such detail about the Swedish episode.
Julian and WikiLeaks, and the very ideals of WikiLeaks, are not one and the same. That is to say, transparency and Julian aren't the embodiment of the same thing. You can hold true to the ideal and not have to march in lock step or believe any of Julian's lies.
The film does make that very clear. WikiLeaks comes across as a heroic representation of transparency. But once you hit that twist in the film, it's clear Assange has fallen from grace in terms of this documentary's narrative.
Sure, and in some ways why should we expect Julian to be the perfect hero? He doesn't have to be. But I think there are some people who feel so needy for "the perfect hero" that they have to embrace everything lock, stock, and barrel. They believe he should be beyond criticism because he is fighting the good fight. I just don't find that to be convincing.
Read on for Bradley Manning's evolution in the film and Gibney's surprising sources.
Bradley Manning (second from the right)—caught on film before he became known to the world.
Focus World
To jump off the idea of a hero, you really shined a light on Bradley Manning that I hadn't seen before. Was that the idea all along or did that come about after things with Assange didn't work out? Every film is a journey and this one is no different. When I started, I thought it was going to be almost exclusively about Julian Assange. The more difficulties I had talking with Julian, the more I began to look elsewhere.
I certainly knew about Bradley Manning but initially thought he'd play a rather small role in the story. The more I thought about it, the more important it was that he played a large role. After all, we wouldn't really know much about WikiLeaks. It'd still be a kind of obscure organization that showed up at Internet seminars if it weren't for Bradley Manning. The fame that came to the organization is all due to the leaks that came from him.
And frankly, when the second batch of chats were released, I suddenly realized we had this treasure trove of material in the voice of this character. It was just incredibly powerful. So, yeah, for all those reasons I thought it was important to put Manning in the center of the story where he belongs.
This is another weird comparison, but the Manning stuff brought to mind Catching Hell [about Cubs' fan Steve Bartman]. That film made me reconsider someone who was also publicly ostracized and treated as a scapegoat. Were you attracted to the Manning material because you like telling that kind of story?
Well, I recognize the syndrome. Manning is a scapegoat. And it turns out, as you know from Catching Hell, I'm very interested in this process that societies go through to try and find one person to blame for society's ills. And that seems to be the case with Bradley Manning. The US government is trying to lay all the blame for these leaks on one poor kid. Indeed, they've charged him with a capital offense.
So I recognize the kind of brutality of the scapegoat process. I first became interested in this in Taxi to the Dark Side. Cheney and Bush were referring to the guards at Abu Ghraib as a "few bad apples" as if the whole barrel wasn't rotten—but in fact there was a system of torture.
So in that context, that's what started me in being interested in the very idea of scapegoating. And of course this goes back to the very beginning, when villages used to literally drive goats out of the village and kill them to take all the sings of the village upon them. I'm very interested in what's happened to Bradley Manning as a result. He's caused embarrassment to the US government and he broke an oath for which he has pled guilty and already been punished. But the idea of charging him with capital punishment for this seems outrageous and very in line with the scapegoating idea.
Filmmaker Alex Gibney
Focus World
The person who was, of course, very hard to persuade to come on camera was Anna, one of the Swedish woman. I had been seeking to get her to speak from the very beginning but we were only finally able to persuade at the very end of the process.
It's a bizarre twist on that [anonymous source/hidden identity] tradition. Her image is posted online, but she felt very strongly that on a day to day basis she didn't want people to know who she was walking down the street. In the event that this would be shown in Sweden or on TV, she would prefer that her face be concealed. So we went to great lengths, I had the makeup artist from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo put a wig on her and give her makeup that might help to conceal her identity, or her visage is a better way of putting it.
I can see why, the Assange supporters have a narrow but strong way of thinking and she may be a scapegoat for them.
There's a piece of the film that looks at the dark side of the Internet. That is to say, the sort of easy vitriol that anonymous people post online—which becomes easier because they are anonymous. And the Swedish women were subjected to a lot of it. We show images of them posted online with bulls-eyes over their faces. That's not a pretty picture. Julian Assange has never risen up to say to his supporters, "stop." It's irresponsible.
Any final thoughts?
One of the great features of the film is, people are interested in talking to me about the dark side of Julian Assange. But I went to great lengths to engage this wonderful filmmaker Mark Davis, who followed Julian Assange prior-to and during the Afghan war leaks. He shows a Julian Assange who is tremendously admirable, the best of Julian Assange. I felt it was really important to show that aspect in the movie.
So for those who say it's an anti-WikiLeaks film, they should see that footage. I went out of my way to include it because it's part of a true portrait of who that character is. He's contradictory. Everyone wants to live in a world of white and black, but the world of grey is more interesting. People are inherently contradictory. Sometimes they find a proper balance between the light and the dark and sometimes they don't. But we went out of our way to show the kind of pure idealism of this Silver Surfer of the Internet in that Mark Davis footage.
It's true. Before the begging of this film, I almost forgot about those admirable, early victories of WikiLeaks...
And how important they were and how important the idea of WikiLeaks is and was.
The above Q&A was condensed and edited for clarity. Read more about filmmaker Alex Gibney at his site, Jigsaw Productions. His next film will focus on cyclist Lance Armstrong and "it should be out in the fall."
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