"Taxi" sticks to the facts — stylishly

NEW YORK — Alex Gibney figured the get-acquainted party was going well enough.

Everyone in his Summit, N.J., community seemed to have tips on dry cleaners, or dentists, or pediatricians. Commuting, of course, was discussed at length, particularly the fastest way to get to Wall Street. And what do you do, Alex, everyone wanted to know. Oh, Gibney said, I produce documentaries.

Which, he remembers with a laugh, is when one of his new neighbors asked him if he wouldn't really be happier living in upscale Montclair.

"I don't know, maybe we've brought the neighborhood down," he says with a smile. "But I think there's been a greater appreciation of those quirky folks who do something besides corporate law or commercial banking. There are a few more oddballs now."

But if Gibney, 54, is still a bit of an outsider, he's a successful one.

His credits include producing multipart, magisterial, nonfiction TV series like "The Fifties" and "The Blues," and co-writing and producing the 2002 documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger." Two years ago, his own documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," turned what could have been a dull story of corporate malfeasance into an art-house hit.

"When he started producing my film, he warned me against [telling it like] a dry, academic policy wonk," says Charles Ferguson, the first-time filmmaker behind the Iraq-war documentary "No End In Sight." "Because, even though it's basically a policy-wonk story, you need to tell it through compelling people. And that was good advice. ... He's a smart, interesting man, and he clearly knows how to make movies."

Gibney's newest and most impassioned film, "Taxi to the Dark Side," details the homicide of an Afghani prisoner killed while in U.S. custody — and the larger story of abuse in America's overseas prisons. Like his films on Kissinger and Enron, it is both deeply felt and studiously calm; Gibney makes room for opposing points of view, and stays determinedly off-camera.

A personal yen for facts

But that doesn't mean the movie isn't personal.

Gibney's father had been a journalist at the newsweeklies, but before that he'd been a Navy man, serving in World War II. In fact, he'd been an interrogator himself, in charge of questioning captured Japanese soldiers after the bloody battle for Okinawa. And last year the veteran insisted — practically on his death bed — that his son haul out a camera and take down his own testimony, before it was forgotten.

"Abu Ghraib really shook him," his son says. "Because, you know, what we're saying now [about the terrorists] is precisely what we said about the Japanese then. Ruthless, fanatical — how can you interrogate people like that? But my father said [the Navy] had made it a point of pride that they didn't use coercive methods. They thought that was sort of what we were all fighting for — that we were better than that. And it was beyond belief to him that we would do it now."

Gibney may have been consciously inspired by his father's wartime memories in making his film, but he had internalized his dad's experiences as a reporter years ago.

Gibney is careful to acknowledge opposing arguments. Although his films may use feature-film techniques — dramatizations, pop music, even clips from other movies — "I don't play fast and loose with the facts," he says.

Surprise witnesses

As withering as its criticisms are of the Bush administration's so-called "Torture Memos," "Taxi to the Dark Side" makes sure to interview the deputy assistant attorney general who wrote them. Even the film's friendly witnesses are often drawn from conservative ranks, such as Alberto Mora, a former general counsel of the U.S. Navy, and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"I made a very conscious attempt not to talk to people from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch," Gibney explains. "Certainly they've done good work and have a lot to say on this, but I didn't want to hear it from them. Hearing it from people like Mora or Wilkerson, people who aren't Noam Chomsky liberals but rock-ribbed Republicans — I thought that was very interesting. Because these people felt something fundamental had been transgressed, and that had changed the way they saw things. And, you know, in drama, you're always looking for the character who changes."

Reporting with vision

Gibney is one of them.

He grew up in Massachusetts, and went to Yale, where he studied Japanese literature. He had brushes with journalism, too, and seemed to be falling easily into the path his father had so blazed. But, he says with a smile, "every kid has their own Oedipal issues."

Determined — he thought — to do something completely different, he set out for film school in California. "I really had two heroes then," he says of his '70s grad-school days. "There were the filmmakers like Scorsese and Coppola who had this personal vision and were still reaching a tremendous number of people. And there were the vérité filmmakers like Fred Wiseman and the Maysles [brothers] and Marcel Ophuls."

Eventually Gibney would find a way to pay homage to both schools in his own movies, combining careful reporting with personal style. And for a director who's as quick to name "Out of the Past" and "Chinatown" as personal influences as he is nonfiction classics like "Night and Fog" or "The Sorrow and the Pity," the template is clear. These aren't just documentaries. They're hard-boiled detective stories.

"David Halberstam and I actually spoke about that once, how mysteries are a great paradigm," Gibney says. "You have this character who is trying to solve a crime. You start in some very seedy places, and you end up in some very high ones, and often the best part of the story is the mean streets the detective travels along the way. So that's a very conscious inspiration to me. I mean, to me, 'Enron' was like a caper film ... . Except then we stuck around after the heist, and saw how many people were hurt."

The path to perspective

Ultimately, "Enron" was about accountability. So is "Taxi," which details a trickle-down culture of abuse, in which administration officials insist on information, officers demand it now and untrained soldiers have to deliver any way they can. And so, while the film's heart is with the interrogated, it has a sense of sympathy for the interrogators, too. Poorly trained and overstressed, they're the last in a mismanaged chain of command, and the first ones blamed when things go wrong.

"When we interviewed [interrogator] Sgt. Thomas Curtis, he said, 'I could sit here and say what we did over there was dead wrong — but go over there and say that,' " Gibney says. "And then he looked at the camera — looked at me — long and hard, as if to say, 'You weren't there, mother — you don't know.' And that's a very important part of the story. We weren't there. We didn't see our buddies killed in front of us. And that's not an excuse, but you have to take it into account. You have to realize that's part of the story, too."

Gibney has other stories to tell. He has an idea for a "a 'Traffic'-like thriller." He's currently finishing a documentary on Hunter S. Thompson.

The Thompson movie focuses on the writing — "everybody is always so busy talking about the gonzo spirit, they forget about the work, which from '65 to '75 was really funny and important." But it also talks about the writer's dark side — the drugs and demons and alcoholism that eventually derailed his career.

Like Gibney's other films, it will play with form and technique. "I don't work in this hermetically sealed world," Gibney says. "I don't want to make films where everything's already decided for you. I think it goes back to something Marcel Ophuls said. I always have a point of view. But my films try to show just how hard it was to come to that point of view."