My version of The Godfather would open with a voice in the darkness saying, “I don’t believe in America. The American Dream is a once-beguiling fairy tale; show’s over, y’all.” But The Dream is still real to many people, and the violence that powerful private interests have done to it in the last century pains them like a kidney punch.
Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson was one of the wounded, and so is Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Darkside), the far more straight-laced director of the entertaining documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. They share a proprietary sense of outrage over abuses of power they’ve witnessed in their times. For them, America’s Nixons, Enrons and Bush-Cheneys have desecrated the church, the front lawn. For all their passionate trouble-making, there’s no denying that Gibney and the late Thompson, two white males who came up through America’s hallowed institutions (Thompson through the U.S. Air Force; Gibney through Yale), are insiders.
When I went to interview Gibney about Gonzo, I remembered the film’s procession of leathery right-wingers and elites, former Thompson nemeses, who have warm, friendly things to say about “Dr. Gonzo” now that he’s dead, now that his caricature as a gun-toting drughead has endured beyond his politics. I wondered if, in the end, being inside got the hole dug any better than chucking rocks from outside.
STEVEN BOONE: On the way over here I was reading the introduction to John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, and the person mentioned that, with the publishing of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck had his greatest fame, his greatest success. With that, you’d think he would have found some comfort, but he was actually a bit in despair that he was being embraced by the very elite forces he was critiquing. Of course, you have Hunter Thompson with his downward spiral… For you, with this recent run of success, is there any kind of…
ALEX GIBNEY: Despair? (laughs)
SB: (laughs) Well, regret…? Second thoughts? “Where do I go from here?”
AG: I have to be honest with you. I haven’t experienced that. I haven’t reached that kind of– I mean, first of all, okay, I won the Oscar. I feel great, believe me. Walking around with that statue, you feel like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. But I feel like there’s so many other interesting things to do. One of the salvations is to keep having a next project to do and you focus on that, even as you’re looking back. So you don’t spend all day looking your name up on Google.
SB: Well, I do, but–
AG: (laughs) But not all day, maybe 12 or 13 hours.
SB: (laughs) Right. But I look at your body of work and I see a certain political conviction behind it.
AG: Right.
SB: It’s critical, but it is from the perspective of an insider, sort of like your colleague Charles Ferguson with No End in Sight. You came up through Yale, you came up through UCLA, you have your Oscars and your Emmys. You have your… sanction from certain institutions. Does it complicate matters for you going forward?
AG: I understand what you’re getting at and I think it does, to some extent. The danger part always comes with celebrity, you know? You end up going out on the circuit, to some extent and then you get comfortable hanging around with other celebrities and then suddenly– it’s like being an insider journalist in Washington. Hunter talked about that in the campaign trail book [Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72]. He said, “I’m just gonna blow in here and blow out. I don’t have to worry about being here four, five, six years from now, trying to play a game, make sure that this person’s comfortable, that person’s comfortable.” It’s a little bit easier when you go in and out.
But I do think, you know, I’ve had great opportunities. I’ve had a private school education, I went to a good university, I went to a good film school and I know a lot of powerful people. It turns out that that is a good advantage for me because I tend to do films about the perps rather than the victims. When you try to get inside and see what’s going on with the people who are committing these grand crimes, it helps to have access to those connections, sometimes because otherwise you don’t get in the door. But the question is, at some point, do you become one of those people? (laughs)
SB: That’s the question.
AG: That’s the question. Well, you’ll see. You’ll be my judge, and you’ll let me know. (laughs)
SB: But do you ever feel that inner conflict, with maybe posing a certain question or, I don’t know, just bringing a bad vibe into the room…? Have you ever felt yourself back away because, “Hey, this is a nice guy, a decent person.” Sort of like when Hunter Thompson was in the car with Nixon, said he was a pleasant guy to talk football with.
AG: Right. Well, you you always have to kind of separate. One of the big things I’ve learned is… My sister in law once said it: “Everybody’s nice.” And you sit with people in a room and sometimes they’re total assholes and you say, “Well, **** them,” right? But sometimes they’re very nice and solicitous and charming and it is true: When you get close, your tendency is not to–almost kind of a Stockholm Syndrome takes over. But you realize that there are a lot of nice people out there who do horrible things.
SB: How do you contrast yourself with other filmmakers at your level of success dealing with similar subjects– let’s say Michael Moore or Nick–
AG: Everybody’s got their own style. Everybody always asks me about Michael. I always say that Michael does his own thing. There’s no illusion when you go see a Michael Moore film. You know it’s a Michael Moore film and you’re getting what you get. The only people that piss me off are the one that try to hide stuff, pretend to be doing one thing and doing something else.
SB: Like who?
AG: Well, um… Trying to think now… There was, a number of years ago, somebody doing a film about the civil rights movement and they actually faked some archival footage of the movement. They did a re-creation but they intercut it freely with actual footage from the events.
SB: Whaa? Fox News?
AG: No, no. It was on HBO. And there was a big hue and cry over it because it wasn’t like a re-creation where you know the filmmakers shot this with actors. That I have a real problem with.
SB: Well, I was a little uncertain at some points in Gonzo. Actually, I’m pretty sure that when we were listening to audio tape of Thompson and his attorney on the road to Vegas that what I was seeing was a re-enactment.
AG: Right.
SB: But it was pretty slick.
AB: It was. Two things I’ll say about that. First of all, we’re trying to do some fun stuff like Hunter did, like claiming Muskey’s high on this drug called Ebogaine. This kind of tall tale telling. But at the beginning of the film, you see this photograph of Hunter with a gun pointed at a typewriter. Zoom into his hand, where it hard-cuts to a real hand firing the gun. I think its a clue to the audience, you know, “Buyer beware, there’s gonna be some wild stuff.” We’re going to be playing around. Even with that [road trip] sequence, which I love… We shot it with actors who look a lot like Hunter and Oscar. We had the audio tape and we’d go out and shoot Super 8, kind of a home movie. But the deeper into that home movie you get, suddenly you start to see the action from three or four different angles, and you gota be thinking, “This is not a home movie.”
SB: Sort of mirroring Hunter’s techniques, sliding in and out of reality.
AG: That’s right.
SB: Drawing out the people who are really reading closely.
AG: Right. There’s a moment where it’s ambiguous. That’s okay, as long as you resolve that moment at the end.
SB: It kind of reminds me of a documentary I saw a few years back, How to Draw a Bunny, about the artist Ray Johnson.
AG: Oh, I heard about that one. Was that a good film?
SB: It’s a good film, and in style it’s playful and kind of a series of stunts in the way that Johnson’s work was.
[A moment of giddy Netflix chitchat ensues, and then:]
SB: What would Hunter Thompson have to say about these times we’re living in now, or can you speak for him?
AG: I don’t know if I can, but he got very depressed when Bush won in ‘04 and not long after that he committed suicide. I think it’s too much to say that that’s what drove him to suicide. There are lots of other factors that are not so pretty. But I think he would say that we’re seeing the triumph of fear and loathing over that other part of the American character, this sense of idealism. Bush represented to him that aspect of the United States that goes back to its inception. At the same time, he was a big Bobby Kennedy fan and big McGovern fan. I think he’d be an Obama guy now. He would say, “Here’s somebody who understands the need for a prime actor in the theater of American politics. A “together Hunter”–as his wife says– not the drug-addled drunk. The other Hunter would have something to say about it.
SB: Would you be with him on that Obama support?
AG: I am. I like Obama and I think he does speak to a better possibility. My only concern is, will he end up being… Will he make too many compromises once he’s in power? But you know he’s been through the rough and tumble of Illinois politics, so I’m sure he knows better than I how to navigate that stuff. He stirs peple’s idealism in a way that few people have done in the last 30 years.
SB: That’s what ties you to Hunter in my eyes. I view it with a little bit of awe, this kind of idealism underneath it all. Far from cynicism, it’s an idealism that’s been abused– a real sense of connection to America as a concept, American values.
AG: At least that possibility. Not always the reality, but at least the dream. He was always obsessed with the American Dream. I share with Hunter the love of that novel The Great Gatsby. The green light at the end of the dock. It’s destructive because there’s the illusion of mobility and possibility that can be very damaging. That’s why [Thompson] set the death of the American Dream in a casino, where it seems like you can roll the dice and win the big one and then you’re the rich man who gets the penthouse, when in fact you’re always playing against the house and the house always wins. At the same time, that green light at the end of the dock is also a sense of real possibility. There are moments when America makes good on that myth. You can get angry when people abuse that myth and only pretend that it’s so, but you can also celebrate that, from time to time, it’s for real.
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