There are few documentary filmmakers quite like Alex Gibney. The American picks up on current affairs, and turns over his productions in a swift yet concise fashion, studying and exploring stories that are still ongoing – such as WikiLeaks, and bringing them to the big screen. His latest endeavour is The Armstrong Lie – and we had the great pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss it.
The film chronicles the journey of cyclist Lance Armstrong, who was found to have been doping when competing in races in which he was triumphant. Having fervently denied all allegations – Gibney gets to heart of this lie, and it’s one he was a victim to himself, as this is actually the second attempt to make this documentary, following on from the first project, which had to be dramatically modified, as it was completed prior to the revelations that took place. Gibney discusses his decision to revisit the story and confront Armstrong about the lie, while telling us that he felt betrayed by the sportsman, and now irritated he was when Armstrong spilled his heart out for Oprah.
You spent a lot of time with Lance, what’s he like as a person?
He’s charismatic, he can be funny, he’s easy going in some ways. He likes music. So on a day to day basis, I get on with him, I like him.
Is that important for you? To form an affable relationship with the subject matter?
You hope so. I mean, you don’t want to be conned, but at the same time, when you’re making a film you want to find something human about the person you’re making the film about. You don’t want them to be some kind of cardboard character, you want to experience their humanity.
You must have felt betrayed by him then?
I felt conned. I felt that I had become part of his promotional apparatus, and I really didn’t want to be in that position. You know, even when I started the film, there had been a lot of allegations of doping, and he had swatted them all away. But there was a lot of smoke, so I had to believe there had to be some fire. I think it was more distressing to me that the number of times he’d look me in the eye and just lie. He didn’t say, ‘look I’ve never tested positive’ which was the truth, he said he’d never doped.
Was there a sense that he owed you something the second time around?
Yes. I think he did. Because he had lied to me, straight to my face. In that sense, I think he did owe me something. He reckoned that he did too – it’s one of the reasons why he sat back down again.
Have you spoken to him since?
I haven’t spoken to him since I told him the film was going to be called The Armstrong Lie. He sent his people to see the film rather than he himself going, but hopefully he’ll have the chance to see it in the weeks ahead.
Are you interested to find out what he makes of it?
Sure. I’m always interested to know. I think you make films, particularly one that’s critical about somebody, and you have to look at yourself and be able to say to yourself, that whatever you said in the film, you could look in that person’s eyes sitting across a table from you, and defend it to that person directly. So it doesn’t feel like you could just go off and slam somebody and not ever have to reckon with that.
It must have been quit a turbulent time for you in between creating the original movie, and then the news coming out. You must have been worried nothing would ever materialise?
I did. I was afraid we wouldn’t get the resources, would Sony be willing to back us to go forward? And at what point would it end? And how would it end? Would we be able to make sense of it all? So yeah I was worrying a lot about that, because I knew that times had changed, and when times change sometimes a film has to change, and the film that we made, you know, I was perfectly proud of it, but it wasn’t appropriate for the times [laughs].
When the new developments came to light, did you instantly think, we have to document this and rerelease this movie?
I never lost faith in the idea of continuing on the film. There was a brief period where I thought we could make some minor modifications, but then I realised that minor modifications were no longer a possibility, so it had to be re-conceived. But I never gave in to the idea that we wouldn’t complete it, I really wanted to finish it. Which meant investing my heart and soul in going in a completely different direction than the film would have taken me.
As somebody who does make two or three movies a year, and picks on current affairs, did this stop anything else that you were currently working on?
Yeah it threw a spanner in the works for me, because I had other films I was working on, and then suddenly this film demanded to be done relatively soon after Armstrong had confessed on Oprah. That was hard, because it came at an inconvenient time – but that’s documentaries. Or even for fiction films, sometimes there is a moment a film deserves, and we had to seize that moment.
You’ve mentioned Lance’s interview with Oprah – was that a blow for you, knowing that he was giving a lot out to the world, that perhaps you were expecting to get exclusively?
It pissed me off, to be honest. It did. There was a brief period where he said, ‘I’ll come clean in your film’ and of course that’s what I wanted. At the end of the day, you roll with it, and the Oprah interview became a thing in of its itself, a cultural touchstone, and I found I could riff of it in a way that was valuable.
When it comes to documentary making – and I hope this doesn’t come out the wrong way – but what with Lance’s doping scandal, is there almost a perverse desire for drama from the director?
There better be. I mean you don’t want to make a film about watching grass grow, you would hope that there’s drama in every film that you do, it’s just about where you find it – and I found it in a different place in the first film than I did in the second.
Have you ever been making a film, and then halfway through realised things aren’t quite going to plan, nothing is happening…
Oh, a lot. People say I make a lot of films, I suppose I do, but I don’t make them fast. A lot of the reason I work on more than one film at a time, is because there comes a point sometimes when things aren’t going well, and rather than just saying, ‘oh things aren’t going well, zip it up and let’s move on’ – maybe wait, maybe you stop. Maybe you put the film on hold for a while, while you try to find somebody that you need to talk to, or to dig deeper to understand what really happened.
So what inspired you in the first place, to make a film about Lance Armstrong?
I was interested in will, the idea of will. Both the inspiring part of that, but also the darker side. He has a slogan which he says in the film – ‘win, lose, live, die’. You can see inspiration in that, or you can see that there will be blood in that statement. The idea that somebody would equate losing with dying is pretty radical. That aspect interested me. I was interested in that from the standpoint of an athlete – do you have to have that kind of ruthless approach to a sport in order to be able to win at the highest level?
How about cycling – were you a fan of that sport before this movie? If not, have you found an appreciation for it since?
I didn’t know anything about it when I started, but I have a huge appreciation for it now. I hope some of that appreciation is in the movie. I mean, we had a lot of resources to shoot the Tour de France and I think it’s a tremendously exciting sport, and one that really asks a lot of its athletes. An athlete climbing a mountain that is higher than anything on earth except that of a hummingbird, it’s extraordinary exhaustion and the will to endure pain. That will idea again… I think it’s a great sport.
Is one of the joys to being a filmmaker – particularly documentaries – is that you’re able to choose a subject you might know too much about, and then through work you discover a passion for it?
Yeah man, that’s what’s great about it. You get paid to learn, how good is that?
And we pay to learn from it.
Yeah [laughs].
Do you think cycling will ever fully recover from this scandal?
I think so. I think it’s already recovering. The problem for cycling from which it may not recover, is that it invested so much in being associated with one athlete – Lance Armstrong. Now he’s gone and he’s been officially expunged from the history of cycling, you can’t find his name in the history of the Tour de France – so how do you recover from that? Where’s the new star?
Bradley Wiggins?
Maybe. Chris Froome, I dunno.
What with this and the Wikileaks picture, you do seem to be something of an innovative force in documentary filmmaking, where you are picking up on really contemporary affairs and bringing them to the big screen. Do you feel that’s a responsibility to do this?
Yeah but sometimes I wonder if it’s even a good idea. You get trapped in a kind of whirlwind of people tweeting about it, and misinformation and the 24/7 news cycle moves to fast and passions are so high, might it not be more interesting to focus on something that’s out of the limelight? At the same time, these are things that everybody is talking about – so I’ve become fond of getting in to these stories and saying, okay, let’s see what really happened here.
What makes a news story jump out at you?
If it’s a story. If it’s a compelling story. Not just a news event, or an issue, there’s got to be a compelling story at the heart of it, so you can sit down with somebody and over the course of a few sentences say, ‘let me tell you this story…’ and afterwards somebody says, ‘what happens next?’ If you start to tell somebody a story, even about something you think you know, and somebody says, ‘wow that sounds interesting’ then you know you’ve got a story.
Something that comes with the territory of making films that are so current, if that some of them are left open-ended because they’re still ongoing…
I think you have to leave them open-ended but at the same time you have to come to a place where you feel that they stand the test of time. I try to make films that, even though they’re about contemporary events, they aren’t just reporting the news, but they’re trying to come to some larger understanding of what this moment may mean. When I dig in on a story like Lance Armstrong, it’s about power and the abuse of power – that’s something that tends to fascinate me a lot. Well, that’s a different kind of a film to one that might be about doping – it’s not interesting to me to learn about the latest in the way Lance Armstrong doped. What’s interesting to me is probing something bigger, and deeper.
Have you ever thought about the possibility of revisiting a story? For example, with your WikiLeaks doc – Bradley Manning has since been sentenced. Does that inspire you to go back and look at it again?
I’m looking at that from a fictional perspective.
Is that something that’s quite far down the line, or just an idea?
Oh, we’re moving.
Because next up is Finding Fela! Can you tell us a little about that one?
It’s a meditation on the musician Fela Kuti, a guy who once said that “music is the weapon”. There’s an obvious interest for me in that intersection for him between music and politics, but of course he died some years ago, so the title ‘Finding Fela’ is using contemporary interest in him, like the recent Broadway musical about him, to begin to understand why he is such an intriguing figure. Also, his music is so awesome.
The Armstrong Lie is released on January 31st, and you can read our review here.
