Alex Gibney Comes Clean
If you look at documentary-maker Alex Gibney’s canon you will see some recurring themes: political and economic scandal (Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010) and Client 9) and drug casualties (Jimi Hendrix and the Blues (2001), Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson (2008) and The Magic Trip). Throw in contributions to TV series The Sexual Century and Martin Scorsese’s The Blues, and he has covered the whole gamut of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. We spoke to Alex just before the UK cinema release of Client 9, which is out now on DVD.
What attracted you to the story of Eliot Spitzer?
Sex! The scandal was so lurid and so surprising, and also so odd in terms of the timing: he goes down just as the financial markets go down. For all those reasons, and because it was raising all these questions for so many people, about fidelity, infidelity. There’d been a whole whack of sex scandals, and you always had the wife standing next to the guy, and people are like, “Do we have to go through this again? Why don’t they let him stand up there by his own damn self?” All these issues: prostitutes; affair; which is better? It just seemed like a good story, and it had a kind of classic Greek tragedy aspect to it, which seemed appealing to people who may not have known much about Spitzer.
Over here in the UK the story wasn’t that well known. As I watched it and saw he was going after Wall Street I thought, this isn’t going to end well for him.
Right. Exactly. And it didn’t.
Read all of the interview in Issue 28 of Film & Festivals
There are no responses so far.
New comments are closed.