Alex Gibney Quotations

It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in 'Mea Maxima Culpa.'

I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother - they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

We live in a world where everyone thinks they do the right thing, so they are entitled to do the wrong thing. So ends can justify the means.

The whole macho thing has to be reexamined. Because in my view, the Bush administration was weak, not strong. To engage in a policy of torture is a weak policy. Because ultimately, it encourages the terrorists. It undermines our own values. It corrupts our system. And it doesn't get good intelligence.

Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.

When I was a kid, I played sports a lot. My mom and dad were divorced, but I hung out in the neighborhood a lot, and it was all about sports. I would be out all day on the sand lot or on the hockey rink. My dad would take me to baseball games, but he worked so hard, and he would always fall asleep.

When we go to war, our politicians will be guided by our popular will. And if we believe that torture 'got' bin Laden, then we will be more prone to accept the view that a good 'end' can justify brutal 'means.'

Dialogue between people of differing views is critical for fostering understanding in a democracy.

Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there's a certain expectation of documentaries that they're supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether - well, perhaps.

In the case of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, an issue that is central to the film - torture - is so important that I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible and inaccurate in the way they have treated this issue in their film.

I thought it was a classic David and Goliath story, and I was fully onboard Team WikiLeaks. I was very pro the leaks, barring the redaction issue. But I see WikiLeaks as a publisher.

It would be hard to go to your neighbor and say the things people say on the Internet without getting punched out or having your tires slashed.

People who lie, particularly those who lie really big, can't do it effectively unless they feel that there's a righteous power behind what they're doing. You're entitled to lie because the end justifies the means.

Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can't.

Even with a villain, you don't want him just to be some pockmarked punchbag.

The job of a journalist is to find out stuff. The job of the government - sometimes - is to keep stuff secret. There's a natural tension there.

There are many people, including me, who admire the original mission of WikiLeaks.

There's something magical about a home run. It almost violates the space of the stadium. It's a game of the imagination in some ways. Baseball.

When it comes to governments and corporations, we should demand that less is secret. That's where corruption flowers.

Every film is faced with the enemy of time. Only so much story can fit into the 90-150 minutes of time that moviegoers are willing to stay in their seats. Naturally, compression is necessary. So are the exclusion and amalgamation of characters so that the viewer does not become bewildered.

I am furious at the way that we have allowed money to subvert our democracy. I am appalled at the way that the U.S., a very wealthy nation, permits and even encourages a level of poverty that other wealthy nations would not even consider.

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission.

I think the future of journalism is going to be a battle between caution and recklessness. And I think a little bit of recklessness is a good thing, as some of the WikiLeaks cables proved.

I would tell filmmakers: 'Don't just be seduced by the same old, same old. There are interesting things you can explore that may get your film out there to audiences better than the traditional distribution mechanisms.'

I'm not sure why, but I seem to be drawn to stories about abuses of power. But I'm also drawn, not so much to victims' stories, as stories that tend to show how power works. Because if you don't understand the criminals, you can't figure out how to stop the crimes.

It's hard to make a living doing documentaries. Frankly, if it takes you five years to do a film, and that's the only film you're doing, you're in trouble.

Jesus Christ never preached there should be celibate priests. The only reason the church has this is because it's a mechanism of power and control. You can control priests who are celibate.

Sports are the ultimate secular religion. Instead of being worried about whether your kids will be okay or how your job is going, you have your team, and you can focus all of your angst and your hopes and dreams on your team. I am in no way saying it always relieves any of this!

The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was 'Waltz With Bashir,' or 'The Gatekeepers,' or '5 Broken Cameras.'

Why do we even need WikiLeaks? They're not the only organization that publishes leaks. And they don't have some special technology that allows them to post on the Internet with mirrored sites. The idea of WikiLeaks lives on, but as an organization, it's become increasingly irrelevant.

You have to assume once you go online, anything you put there can be made public. Yet while you're online, you feel like it's a private, sacred space. But you're really broadcasting to the world.

I'm a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the 'Enron' film.

I don't consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.

It's difficult for one filmmaker to criticize another. That's a job best left to critics.

The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.

Wikileaks in its essence is a publisher, pure and simple. They were very much in the same position as 'The New York Times' and 'The Guardian.'

For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the 'Global War on Terror.'

Here's where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs. Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient, they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous.

When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you out of your minds? You can't include that!'

Every film may not be appropriate for a theatrical release, and the theatrical business is not a very good business for anybody except the distributor.

I remember when I did my Enron film, my executive producers at the time felt very strongly that I should mock the Enron executives more viciously because everybody wanted that moment.

I'm a sports junkie, and I am interested in athletic will - how you exceed the expectations of your own performance when it counts to deliver something beyond yourself so that you can win.

Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is.

Oscar always opens up doors, especially the night of the Oscars. On that night, you hold that gold man, and it's like having Gandalf's staff. You can go anywhere and do anything. It's a talisman of such power.

There are all sorts of inventive ways to get your film out there: sometimes via the Internet, sometimes via viral screenings in people's living rooms across the country.

To get discounts on some drugs, private insurers are willing to pay top prices for blockbuster pharmaceuticals like Vioxx, despite the fact that Vioxx was rumored to cause fatal strokes and heart attacks.

When the producers of 'Why Poverty?' came to me to do a film about poverty in the United States, I asked if I could do a film about wealth instead. I tend to make films about perpetrators, rather than victims.

Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the U.S. Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren't guilty of anything. Whoops!

But it still serves as a primer for everyone who's watching the trial.

In a busy world, even as information is moving so rapidly, we have to learn who to trust in that regard even as we ourselves have to become more critical of the people who we want to trust. It's a weird situation.

I don't think Steve [Jobs] started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed.

Whether or not he came to believe it - so many people, when they have a mission, come to believe something in a way that may have started out as a slogan. You know, L. Ron Hubbard, not to make a random comparison, started Scientology as a scam.

Steve Jobs did not start started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed. He believed in making people comfortable with these machines, which is why he spent so much time thinking about how to design them a certain way, how to make them so user-friendly and interactive, and why he spent so much time studying the Zeitgeist.

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.

Bill Gates, who is the classic computer nerd, as opposed to Steve who is, like the coolest guy in the world. And who is really doing things to make the world a better place?

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.

Suicides aren't heroic in my opinion. And I don't think anybody ever really knows why somebody commits suicide.

Jobs would have ever have asserted that Bill Gates was not serious about technology. He was a huge pioneer in that world, albeit doing something quite different in approach from what Steve did. He was dismissive of Gates' foundation work as something he did to make himself feel better.

The internet connects us all and provides this fabulous fact-checking mechanism, and yet at the same time, the power of lies is conveyed much more efficiently now because they're accepted so fast.

The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is the result of what police call "noble cause corruption," the belief that because you are dedicated to doing good, you can do no wrong.

The Church must be all-powerful. You discover these horrors within institutions because predators find ways of hiding in plain sight.

In the case of the Catholic Church, it's hard to understand how they so willfully sacrifice the children.

The funny thing about being Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, is that you identify with the Church, just as part of your character. Nevermind what you believe, it's just who you are.

You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.

Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers.

It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard.

What's great about the Sundance Film Festival is the festival takes over that town as it's intended to do. But, it's very focused on a lot of other filmmakers and distributors so it almost feels like, while they're a lot of so-called civilians there, it's an opportunity that you have to see, to show your stuff to the other folks, your peers really, and to get that reaction.

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.

I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds.

I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

No one likes documentaries.

With every project I start out on, there's no footage. It's always a big slog to find the footage.

Early on, I got very nervous -- I thought I had taken on the wrong assignment. I remember thinking, 'You just signed on to make a film about accounting' -- that's like Rule No. 23b in the filmmaker's handbook: Never make a film about accounting.

It's a very complicated story. It still is, even as the trial approaches. My job was to let everyone in on what was going on. With these types of stories, you can get lost in the details when there is a bigger tale to be told. I felt a film could really do that.

In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That's the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?

I think myself and a lot of other documentary directors owe a debt to fiction filmmaking. The key was to follow the characters and let the narrative be your guide, without getting distracted by other things. By structuring 'Enron' like a heist film, it enables people to understand enough of the complexity without getting bogged down by it.