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Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room won acclaim for its inventive, expressive but journalistic and rigorous expose of the facts and finances behind a story that came to represent turn-of-the-millennium capitalism gone mad. Now, with Taxi to the Dark Side, which opens today in New York and expands nationwide in the coming weeks, Gibney's looking at a very different kind of power, and a very different level of abuse. Winner of Best Documentary honors at both the Tribeca and Chicago International film festivals, Taxi's uncompromising look at the death of an Afghan cab driver named Dilawar at the hands of U.S. military interrogators at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan in 2002 has made it one of the films selected for the 'shortlist' of films eligible for this year's best Documentary Oscar. Gibney's interest in the material isn't just academic or moral; his late father served as an interrogator for the U.S. Navy during World War II. At the same time, Gibney's film is fiercely principled: " ... if you study Osama Bin Laden's words, if you study other terrorist groups throughout history, the goal is to get liberal democratic societies to publicly undermine their own principles. Well, in this case? Mission accomplished." Gibney spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco. Also, you can listen to the interview by clicking below:





Cinematical: Your previous film, (about) the last days of Enron, was similarly about the excesses of power, but a lot lighter. Were you looking for something that didn't quite have the kind of comedic potential for your next project, or did you stumble across Taxi to the Dark Side in a moment of fortune?

Alex Gibney: I guess I stumbled across it -- the way someone would stumble across a corpse in a dark room. It was brought to me, in fact I was on a panel talking about Enron, and a very angry attorney who was on that panel said "if I helped get together some of the money, would you do (Taxi to the Dark Side)?" And I said I would. And my father also encouraged me to do it, because he was a Naval Interrogator during World War II; I felt honor-bound to do the film, but it was a tough one to do, it was a very dark topic. But I will tell you that in earlier cuts, I tried to render this subject in a tone that was more similar to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, that had dark humor in it. Because there was dark humor to be found in this story. But I found that viewers, as we showed this story to them, once they saw and heard the details as to how Dilawar was murdered, they weren't in any mood for jokes. This tended to be a much more serious subject that took us to a much darker place.

Cinematical: Say what you will about the excesses of Enron, but at least they didn't kill anyone; automatically, you're dealing with that (in Taxi to the Dark Side). Someone brought you the kernel of this story; was it your decision to focus on Dilawar, to follow that one narrative thread through the process?

AG: Yes, it was my decision to focus on Dilawar. Because you can't make films about things and sort of abstract ideas; you have to make films about characters, about people. And the story of Dilawar, to me, seemed very powerful. Because he was a pure innocent. And there was something that haunted me in Tim Golden's original article; he had said, I think in the very last page of the article, a very long, front-page piece in the New York Times, that they discovered on day three of a five-day interrogation that Dilawar was almost certainly innocent. And yet over the next two days, they tortured him mercilessly anyway. And it told me something about the kind of momentum of torture has that was haunting to me. So, for those two reasons, it felt right. And the other key reason for the Dilawar story, I think, was that what was interesting about the Dilawar story is that as you follow it, it's kind of a murder mystery; it takes you to different parts of the torture system; the people who interrogated him are sent to Abu Ghraib; the people in his taxi are sent to Guantanamo -- in effect to cover up the fact that they had arrested an innocent man. And all those roads ultimately lead to the White House. So for all those reasons, the Dilawar story seemed a great one, the most right.

If I had a few less kids and a lot more free time, I could see myself being a full-time film-festival groupie. I'd discard everything in my wardrobe that wasn't black, gray or chocolate and, like a freakish, feverish soul in search of my next fix of cinematic nectar, I'd follow the migration trail through the film festival circuit. I'd move from city to city, always staying in a Courtyard Marriott so at least I'd have some kind of safe familiarity to come home to at the end of a long day of extended periods of sitting on my ass in a darkened room interspersed with lively bouts of powerwalking three miles in 10 minutes, deftly maneuvering around elderly people with walkers and moms with double strollers, to make it to the next screening.

If I was living that festival circuit life, baby, I'd hit 'em all. The big ones, the small ones, the specialty fests for every subgroup you can think of. I'd winter at Sundance and summer at Telluride, and in between I'd hit everywhere from Newport to the Hamptons to Vancouver. And right about October 5-19, I'd be living it up in Chicago for the Chicago International Film Festival. And yeah, I suppose it's rather telling that I'm so dorky I get excited looking at festival schedules for fests I'm not even attending. Anyhow, here are some highlights of the CIFF lineup:

A week or so ago, whilst discussing possible candidates for a year-end, Cinematical-wide Ten Best Films list with a couple of the bloggers, I realised that, despite the absolute power I weild as editor, I'd have a tough time getting a few of my picks into the top ten, for the sheer fact that I was the only one on staff that had seen any of them. The only solution was to create a seperate list. What follows are seven films which, though they've made the festival rounds or have wrangled some kind of microdistribution, have yet to break through to the top level. In short, these are seven great films that I've seen, and that you probably haven't.

7. I Am a Sex Addict

In the latest in his ever-growing line of personal docu-narratives, San Francisco-based filmmaker Caveh Zahedi plays himself – the titular sex addict who comes to admit that his personal fantasy world, through which he justifies everything from sex with whores to the taking of hallucinogenic drugs at in appropriate times, has become his ultimate undoing. After taking us through twenty years of highly quixotic relationships (and that's sort of putting it mildly), at the end of the film, Caveh walks down the aisle with wife number three. How can a man whose entire life has thus far been defined by spectacular romantic failure suddenly about-face for a happily-ever-after? Not so fast: the film closes on what is probably real footage of the wedding, and after kissing the bride, Caveh walks past the camera with a familiar look of terror in his eyes.

 

There may be no fantasy more commonly ingrained in us than that of physical reconstruction - of making over and starting over and, essentially, getting over the gulf between who we are and who we think we deserve to be. The most recent cultural manifestation of this common thirst for self-renovation is the string of "reality" makeover shows – Extreme Makeover, The Swan; to a slightly different degree, the "life makeover" shows like Made, Pimp my Ride, and EM: Home Edition; and on some level even American Idol – all of which are structured around the climactic reveal of the new self. And whilst the "stunning reveal" may be the logical, necessary conclusion of the rebirth fantasy, there's no after without the before – the New You only stuns because memory of the Old You still lingers. The makeover only makes its impression in relief.

When Marc (Vincent Lindon) shaves off his image-defining facial hair in Emmanuel Carrère's La Moustache, he waits until his wife has gone to the store. His eyes twinkle with the prospect of surprising her, and when he hears her on the stairs, he playfully hides his face, first behind a towel, then behind her own back. But Agnes doesn't notice that Marc has changed, and when the couple go out to dinner, three more friends fail to recognize Marc's transformation. Marc silently seethes through the meal, quietly livid over the lack of recognition. When he finally presses Agnes on it that night on the way home, she thinks he's joking. "You've never had a moustache!" she insists.

Though screenings continue for several more days (and I'm still frantically writing up reviews from my sojourn in the city), the Chicago International Film Festival held its award ceremony this weekend, and honored a mostly international slate of films, including NYFF hit The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and one of the more controversial films that I saw whilst in town, La Moustache. The international jury awarded its top prixe, the Gold Hugo, to My Nikifor, a period piece about an artist struggling under Communist rule directed by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Krauze. Second place in that category went to Lazarescu, whilst the documentary grand prize was awarded to The Boys of Baraka. Moustache, a dark French psychological comedy that sparked much discussion over its open-ended, non-linear narrative, took home the FIPRESCI Prize, which is awarded to emerging filmmakers, and Inka Friedrich and Nadja Uhl, the very good stars of the German, Dogme-esque Summer in Berlin, shared the actress prize.

I'll be posting reviews of Moustache and Berlin today and tomorrow. If you're in Chicago tonight, try to check out Alicia Scherson's Play. An award winner at Tribeca, it screens tonight at 6:15 PM at the River East.

I wasn't immediately taken with The Puffy Chair, when I first saw it last spring at SXSW. The dictionary definition of "unassuming", the video-shot road trip comedy of discomfiture follows the disintegration of Josh (Mark Duplass) and Emily (Kathryn Aselton), a couple whose multi-year relationship melts down when Emily accompanies Josh and his brother Rhett (Rhett Wilkins) on a roadtrip to his parents' house. A minor hit at Sundance, it eventually won the Emerging Visions award at SXSW, and already halfway through that festival a kind of Puffy Chair mania seemed to be in the air. In short, I think my hype allergy flared up before I had even seen it; I walked out of the film's screening at the Paramount Theater and prompty shrugged. But in the months since, I haven't been able to get its first sequence out of my head, and so I made a point to see it again at CIFF.

Puffy opens on a tight, shaky shot of Duplass (the film's screenwriter and co-producer, as well as its star; it was directed by his brother Jay, and "executive produced" by their parents) goofily dancing with a fried chicken drumstick in his hand. The handheld shot opens up to reveal Josh and Emily, sitting across from one another at a kitchen table, deep in the middle of what we'll soon realise is an all-too-rare moment of euphoria for them. And the mood starts to fall apart as soon as we're in it: when Josh thanks his girlfriend for making him dinner, Emily quickly slips into baby talk – all the better to passive-aggressively express her displeasure over Josh's impending journey. "I wanted to make sure you knew what you were leaving behind," she coos insistently. "I wanted to make sure you knew how much you were going to miss me." Josh plays along: "I know," he sings, trying to match her register. "So much I'm going to die." Without dropping the affectation, he drops some exposition: the trip is really important to him; he's really looking forward to getting out on the road; he's eager to get away. Emily suddenly drops the singsong act – and if this is her standard cadence, it's no wonder Josh needs a vacation: "Yeah, I know," she snaps. Josh's cell phone rings, and he takes the call. Within moments, the attention-hungry Emily has upended the dinner table and stormed out of the apartment. "Just the TV," Josh says into the phone. "I'm ... I'm gonna go turn it off." Needless to say, the happy, dancing, fried chicken reverie has been completely lost.

Tuesday night saw KOTM hitting the Chicago screen for the last time as part of the 41st CIFF.  There was another great crowd, which made it that much worse when the film started and the audio kept cutting in and out.  This is a filmmaker's nightmare, and suddenly we were experiencing it.  I tried to keep my cool and find a Festival staffer to figure out what was wrong, but I was freaking out on the inside.  At first I thought maybe the problem would go away, but the film kept playing, and suddenly people were missing dialogue. Eventually they finally got a clue that they should stop the film, rather than let it keep playing while the audience sat there unable to hear what the characters were saying.

Elizabethtown, Camerone Crowe's much maligned latest film, opened the Chicago International Film Festival last Thursday night, and people were still talking about it on Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday ... but not in a good way. Everyone I talked to who went to the opening night gala, at which Roger Ebert conducted extensive pre-screening on-stage interviews with Susan Sarandon and Cameron Crowe, seemed overwhelmed. A festival staffer – looking both ways to make sure no one was listening – told me that the interviews were part of the problem. "They're up there, talking for hours, about something we haven't even seen!" The same staffer told me that he hadn't seen the Toronto cut, but that the version that opened CIFF (which is presumably the cut that opens wide this Friday) felt long, draggy and aimless. "There are good ideas there," he said. "It just doesn't come together." He also confirmed that the infamous Susan Sarandon in the funeral parlor scene is still there; it is also, in his words, (still?) "uncomfortably tasteless."

I'd been sick the whole time I was in Chicago, and, for the first few days, after shuttling around in the cold from film to film to film, all I wanted to do was go back to my hotel and eat soup in bed. But Monday night, my last night in town, I slapped myself in the face and forced myself to go out and party. It's a tough job, having to hang out with smart, interesting and funny people for hours on end, but someone's got to do it.

Generally, CIFF sponsors two parties a night: a dinner, and a "late night event". Monday night's dinner was somewhat sad, a soggy-calamari-strewn affair in an empty sports bar on Madison Street. On the left, that's Nick Redman and Vassilis Katsikis. Nick is a filmmaker and a member of the CIFF documentary jury, and Vassilis is the director of World Cinema entry, the experimental pseudo-documentary CCTV. They arrived at the airport at the same time and came, brutally jet-lagged, to the evening's first party together. I sat with them whilst they debated whether or not to go on to the second, which was to be held at a legendary former-speakeasy called The Green Mill. The promise of the ghost of Al Capone got Nick there; I didn't see Vassilis, so I assume he went out to the hotel.

Nick, a documentary filmmaker and frequent festival guest, said something interesting about the psychological downside of sitting on a jury. "The worst part," he said, "Is when you realise you've given the award to the wrong person." Joe Swanberg asked, "How soon does it take you realize?" Without missing a beat, Nick responded, "About 10 minutes."

I'm back in New York after five hectic days at the Chicago International Film Festival. The Festival is still going strong until October 20, and whilst I really wish I could have stayed in town longer, Joe Swanberg will continue keeping his diary for us. And as I was too busy the past few days festivaling to actually write anything, I still have lots to post about – from party gossip to the details on Peirce Brosnan's disasterous post-Bond venture – so keep your eyes peeled. Below you'll find a quick guide to what we've already covered – and don't forget about our recent coverage of NYFF and Fantastic Fest as well.

CIFF: An Introduction
Kissing on the Mouth's hometown debut
Making it in the Midwest panel
Everlasting Regret, and making the political personal
Meeting Melvin Van Peebles the wrong way
Fortissimo Pictures Party
Free Zone
"I'm beginning to respect bass players.  They are lazy, but they deliver."