It's not 'just the facts, Ma'am,' " says Alex Gibney, channeling TV's Dragne t's Jack Webb.
The writer-director-producer, who won the best documentary Oscar this year for Taxi to the Darkside and is currently promoting Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, abhors the notion that a filmmaker can capture reality simply by pointing his camera at it. That's why this disciplined and prolific artist (he also executive-produced Charles Ferguson's Oscar-nominated No End in Sight) connects with the unpredictable, go-for-broke reporter Hunter Thompson, who soared beyond the New Journalism into his own hallucinogenic swirl of fantasy, self-exposure and increasingly addled observations.
"What reading Hunter does is free you up," says Gibney from his New York office. "You realize you can use all sorts of tools to convey the power of a story. Hunter invented a new style to suggest ways of understanding events beyond their literal interpretations."
Gibney strove to make "a movie, not a report" out of Taxi to the Darkside, an expose of American interrogation techniques in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Iraq, centering on the death of an innocent Afghan taxi driver while he was in American custody. Deploying percussive Indonesian gamelan music, Gibney suggested an atmosphere that could (and did) make interrogators go wild. He also gave Taxi a musical structure. Images of abuse became motifs that took on different meanings each time you saw them. Without losing their appalling potency, they became symbols of Middle Eastern tragedy and American complacency and shame. Gibney viewed Taxi as "a Raymond Chandler mystery, a nightmarish Big Sleep" - and, as Edmund Wilson wrote, what's crucial to a Chandler thriller is not the solving of a puzzle but the working out of a "malaise."
Similarly, in Gonzo, Gibney exploits every possible source, from home movies to broadcast TV and feature films, to create an audiovisual collage. The family's estate gave him access to materials never before seen or heard, such as Thompson's cache of audiotapes recording his travels from Las Vegas to Zaire.
The result illuminates the man like those old 3-D portraits that changed expression when you turned them. Gibney, who has great taste in music (he produced the all-star blues film Lightning in a Bottle - and the compilation album), chooses songs that resonate with Thompson's life and work, including New Orleans blues-man James Booker's "Gonzo" and "Gonzo's Blue Dream" - the true sources for the name of Thompson's brand of journalism.
