Alex Gibney's latest film is called We Steal Secrets, and it
couldn't be arriving in cinemas at a more appropriate time. As Edward Snowden
remains on the run from the US government, the questions raised about
government surveillance and public privacy in Gibney's film
feel strikingly pertinent. We Steal Secrets tells the story of WikiLeaks
through the rise and fall of Julian Assange and the moving case of Bradley
Manning, and Gibney finds a compelling path through this complex material with
typical intelligence and skill. It's another excellent documentary from one of
the most consistent and prolific filmmakers working today, and I met Alex
Gibney recently to discuss it.
Ever since We Steal Secrets was first screened it seems
you've been coming under attack from WikiLeaks and Assange loyalists. What has
that been like for you? Were you prepared for such a backlash?
I guess I should have been prepared for it because I'd seen
it. In fact, when I visited Julian and had this extended 6-hour negotiation, he
was busy preparing this long letter attacking a Channel 4 documentary. What I
wasn't quite prepared for was the piling on from people who desperately need
Julian to be a kind of pure, unalloyed hero, and therefore any criticism of
Julian is seen as an attack on the ideals of transparency. I think Julian likes
to put himself in that position and one of the things that the film is about is
that we shouldn't allow Julian to put himself in that position. You know,
nobody's perfect, certainly not Julian, and we shouldn't mistake the man with
the mission.
I think the film shows both his virtues and his flaws.
Right, I agree with that, and that's the other thing. The
criticism doesn't engage with the fact that a lot of the film is a pretty
romantic vision of him.
So does the film reflect how your own perception of Julian
altered, because you were making it as these events unfolded in real time?
I was making it in real time and my perception changed, but
we decided to integrate my change of perception into the context of the film.
There are somewhat unsavoury aspects to Julian's character that you see early
in the film that then come back to haunt us later. It's clear as a result of
his legal case in Australia that he doesn't like to be held to account. The
policeman who interrogated him said he always felt he was a martyr, that he
never liked to accept responsibility for what he had done. He hates being held
to account even though he loves holding other people to account. Well, later on
I think that becomes a real problem for him. When the Swedish episode crops up
I think that becomes an opportunity to look at how his unwillingness to be held
to account becomes a kind of perversion of the very ideals of the organisation.
I guess the irony is that WikiLeaks would never have
achieved such status without someone like him at the helm, but it was his
status that was eventually its undoing.
I agree with that, Daniel Domscheit-Berg for one would never
have been the kind of charismatic figure to attract all of this attention to
WikiLeaks. When Julian is sitting in a makeup chair in the film and he says
"The organisation has to have a face, I wish it didn't have to have a face"
– I'm not sure I believe that last statement, by the way – I do sense there was
a problem there. He needed to present a face, he was a good one, he attracted a
lot of attention and interest, but over time I think Julian began to assume
that he and the principles of WikiLeaks were one and the same. Therefore, if
you attack him for whatever reason you are attacking the principles of
WikiLeaks.
In the film we see your unsuccessful attempts to get an
interview with him, but in hindsight do you think the film is stronger because
of this failure? Perhaps an interview with him might have dominated the story
too much?
I don't know if he would have dominated it too much, but I
think by the time I came upon Julian Assange, which was after he had become
hugely famous, he had become very much a celebrity and he was presenting a kind
of celebrity face to the world. Now, there may be others who can capture a more
intimate version of Julian Assange, but I'm afraid he was at that time a
pamphleteer, a propagandist, and he was not interested in showing any kind of
insight into his own thinking or his story. I fear, based on my meetings with
him, that the interview would have been long, ponderous and speechy.
I guess the lack of an interview with Assange also gave you
the opportunity to shift the focus from him to Bradley Manning.
Well that to me was the big bonus, and I think that's why
the film did become better. By not having Assange's interview, Bradley Manning
emerged, and Bradley Manning really is the hero of the film, not Assange.
I think a lot of people who go to the film for Julian
Assange will come away from it thinking about Bradley Manning.
Correct, I hope that's right.
There's a surprising emotional impact from watching his text
conversations with Adrian Lamo unfold on screen.
This was the biggest leap of faith we made creatively in the
film. We wondered at the beginning, how do we represent Bradley Manning's
chats? Initially we thought we had better get an actor to read them, because
that's the only way it could be successful, but then we thought that was wrong,
it was dead wrong. What was so essential about those chats is the way that information
was conveyed, i.e. via text. It was someone sitting alone in a room, texting
somebody they don't even know, and sharing their most intimate personal details
with them. We felt that we should embrace that, and luckily we were working
with this company Framestore – you know, they did the special effects for Harry
Potter and so many other things – and we said, please take this journey with us
and let's keep discussing how to present this stuff. Those chats in particular
ended up being the simplest things but actually they were the most complicated
thing to render. We just couldn't get them right, in the rough cut they were
just white text on a black screen, but we wanted something that conveyed the
idea that you were inside in the internet, and to be both digital and human at
the same time. They came up with a process that was at once digital and
analogue, they photographed images from a TV set to give it an analogue quality
in addition to the digital quality, and that's how we came up with what we ended
up with. It's a subtle thing, but I think it's important.
It's a good time to be reminded of what an extraordinary story
Bradley Manning's tale is. A troubled individual given access to all of these
secrets, he's betrayed by Adrian Lamo, and now he's on trial where it seems
they're going to hit him as hard as they can.
Right, it's unbelievable. They're trying to hit him as hard
as they can and I think they're trying to hit him in a very reprehensible way.
His lawyer did a rather brilliant thing, which is to plead guilty to the
technical charges of leaking, because after all let's admit that Bradley
Manning did break an oath in the military. He's a soldier who took an oath to
protect these secrets and he leaked them. It's interesting that Manning – as
opposed to Assange – is willing to be held to account, but he said don't hold
me to account for spying, I'm not a spy. I didn't leak these materials for
financial gain, I didn't leak them to a foreign power for some unique political
advantage, I leaked them to the world because I want to make the world a better
place. They're trying to say he's aiding the enemy and there will be a lot of
testimony about how stuff he leaked ended up on Osama bin Laden's computer.
Well, I'm sure a lot of articles from The New York Times and The Guardian ended
up on Osama bin Laden's computer.
Do you think he's being used as an example to warn others
what will happen if they cross the government in this way?
Yes, they're trying to do what the British Navy used to do –
"Hoist the wretch," you know, hang him on the yardarm for the rest of
the crew. I think they're also trying to divert attention from the lies that
they're telling, but that I think will ultimately fail.
One part of the film deals with that, when it shows the US
reaction to Julian Assange. They made the story all about him, saying he had
"blood on his hands," etc. and that distracted from the content of
what he leaked. Can you see a similar thing happening with Edward Snowden,
where the story is now all about this young man on the run and people have
stopped talking about what he exposed?
It's a tactic being repeated, but I think in the case of
Julian Assange it's unfortunately a tactic that he helped the US government
achieve. I think if he had been more conservative and a little bit more careful
with redactions, the US government would have had a much harder time separating
him out from The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. So he made a
mistake; they corrected it by the time of the Iraqi War Logs, but he made a
mistake because that's what the government is always going to do. In the case
of Snowden, in a way it's understandable from Snowden's perspective, he doesn't
want to spend the rest of his life in jail and he assumes that things will not
go well in an American courtroom. At the same time, one of the most admirable
things about Snowden when he first came forward was that he said,
"Actually, I'm not going to hide, it's ok to disclose who I am because I'm
willing to face the music." Now, by being on the lam in the transit area
of a Moscow airport, he has distracted in a way from the very things he was
trying to expose.
The responsibility also lies with the media not to get
distracted from the meat of the story.
Well, yeah, it does. This gets into the territory that I'm
interested in, which is where people say we shouldn't follow personal stories
and things should only be written about institutions – well, really? How many
stories would we read if it was about "Citizen 5259B who said this,"
right? I think we're human beings and we're interested in human stories. The
problem becomes when governments and those who sometimes oppose governments end
up having to present duelling narratives, and it's all about who gets to tell
the best story.
We Steal Secrets is a study of human nature in many ways.
Yes, it's about human nature but I would also like to say
that We Steal Secrets is about human beings and it's about institutions. It's
about both, and you can't do one without the other.
This idea of total openness and freedom of information that
WikiLeaks was aiming for, do you think that's something feasible and
attainable, or is it our human nature that will deny that?
I think it's human nature that we will always want to keep
secrets, and it's also human nature that we will always want to leak them. It's
all about the balance, and I think one of the reasons you're seeing so many
leaks now is because things are out of balance. Governments and corporations
are keeping far too many secrets. As a result, leakers are pressure valves
allowing those secrets to pop up. If governments and corporations would keep
fewer secrets then I suspect there would be fewer leaks.
The government wants to have it both ways, though. Revealing
no secrets of its own while spying on its people.
Correct. The title of the film is We Steal Secrets, and
that's said by Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA and the NSA. It sets
the whole story in context, because governments are guilty of stealing secrets
all the time – and by the way, they're guilty of leaking secrets all the time.
They do it, but they don't want citizens to do it. It gets to a territory of
rough justice, that's what this world is about. Who has the moral high ground?
Who can tell the better and compelling story?
Rather than being a film that originated with you, this
project was pitched to you by Universal. Did that affect your process or the
way you approached it in any way?
I was nervous about it initially, but one of the things they
did – and they did it for a pretty good reason – was that they gave me final
cut. They gave me final cut so I could go to anybody who participated in the
film and said, "Guess what, by contract I have final cut. When you're
talking to me you're not talking to Universal, you're talking to me." To
their credit, that's what they did, and frankly they were great. They were not
intrusive at all. Marc Shmuger as a producer was a fantastic creative force,
helping to shape the story. There was no corporate agenda in that sense, they
just wanted to tell a good story that would hopefully be compelling and people
would watch.
I guess it must have been good to have the support of a
major studio when the smear campaign started as well.
I guess so, but at the end of the day...you know, it's funny
you should say smear campaign because of course Julian Assange accused
everybody of running a smear campaign against him in the Swedish episode. But
at the end of the day, fine. Run a smear campaign, go for it. It's all about
dialogue. What has disappointed me about the smear campaign is that it's just
that, it's a smear campaign. It's not much tethered to rational argument. It
has as much to do with religious faith.
And much of it has come from people who haven't seen the
film.
Yes, in many cases people haven't even seen the film.
They've read the annotated transcript but the annotated transcript doesn't
include any of Bradley Manning's words, so what is that? I read a recent review
by Robert Manne, who is actually in the film, an Australian academic, he takes
as gospel some of the things that Julian says in the annotated transcript.
Look, it's all about trust at the end of the day, there's a lot of things that
Julian says in the annotated transcript that is inaccurate. As a filmmaker, the
other thing that kind of pisses me off about the annotated transcript is that
people aren't seeing the movie, they're reading a transcript. I didn't make this to make a
transcript, I made a film. Even filmmakers like John Pilger and Oliver Stone
criticised the movie by reading a transcript. So the next time Oliver Stone
makes JFK, should I just go and read the transcript?
That's the weird thing about it, because Oliver Stone went
through a similar experience on JFK so surely if anyone is sympathetic to your
situation it should be him.
I think his thought process is simple, which is Julian is
good and the US government is bad, and anything that criticises Julian is bad.
When you take on these enormously complex, sprawling
subjects, how do you find a clear narrative line? What's your way into a story?
One of the things that helps me is to come up with a kind of
genre that will be applied in cinematic terms. Enron was a heist film, Taxi was
a murder-mystery, and We Steal Secrets is a spy thriller. So that gives you a
clue about how you're going to approach it. But at the end of the day, we had a
three hour and thirty-minute cut on the first go-round, so you have to keep on
shrinking the story in ways so, just like writing a screenplay, everything
folds in on itself. Something you choose here about a character has to pay off
later on, and you have to keep that in mind as you keep shrinking the story
down, so you pay more attention to story and narrative than themes. At the same
time, if you end up getting the story right, you can be pretty complicated
around the edges, knowing that people are going to follow the story, and that
allows for a lot of nuance, ambiguity and thematic detail that you otherwise
wouldn't get.
We talked about how this story was unfolding as you made it,
and it many ways it's still unfolding. How did you know when it was time to
finish the film? Was it hard to let it go?
It was hard to let go but at the same time we recognised
that things were going to go on and on and on. So the question was, at what
point could we come to an end that felt satisfying in the context of our
narrative? Once Julian entered the Ecuadorean Embassy we figured that was it.
Now we had the two key protagonists both in prison and that seemed like a good
place to end the story, so that's what we did.
Finally, I know you've been working on the Lance Armstrong
film for a long time.
Since 2008.
I understand that film is nearly finished, is that right?
We just locked reel four today. Sony Classics will release
it and I think it will be in festivals in late summer, early fall. I'm proud of
that one. I think it has turned out pretty well.
We Steal Secrets is released in UK cinemas on July 12th.
