Alex Gibney

Alex Gibney
Philip Alexander "Alex" Gibneyis an American documentary film director and producer. In 2010, Esquire magazine said Gibney "is becoming the most important documentarian of our time"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth23 October 1953
CountryUnited States of America
anywhere gold hold opens power
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.
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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.
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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.
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The Church must be all-powerful. You discover these horrors within institutions because predators find ways of hiding in plain sight.
drawn figure power seem stop stories sure tend
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.
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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.
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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.
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'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?
abuse felt films importance motivates none political power standing
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.
early nervous remember rule signed taken wrong
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.
serves watching
But it still serves as a primer for everyone who's watching the trial.
bad constitution detainees guilty members pointing
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!
asked came films producers tend united
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.
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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.