Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“Alex, you’re here in a really fascinating time with this whole issue of leaks, of the government’s effort to crack down on leaks. In fact, I can’t really think of a more timely time for you to be discussing this and having us all here,” said Politico’s Josh Gerstein at an exclusive screening of “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” at the E Street Cinema.
Alex is Alex Gibney, Oscar winning filmmaker.
Alex Gibney and Josh Gerstein
“You probably thought it was coordinated to the Manning trial starting in a couple of weeks,” added Gerstein, “but now we find it’s almost more timely today with the stories about the Associated Press’ phone records being searched that came out last week and the story about tracking of the Fox News reporter at his meeting with the sources that came out over the weekend.
Even just today, we had a statement that folks may not have heard about from the White House talking about whether they would or wouldn’t prosecute journalists. The president through his spokesperson today said that he concluded that journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their job. He also said, again through his spokesperson, that he thought that the debate in the last couple of weeks had raised “legitimate questions” about the tactics that have been used for these investigations, but they didn’t elaborate beyond that.
I’m just wondering what you think about the relationship of the controversies, what have we learned about in the last couple of weeks, to this story. Part of that question, I guess, is the very basic issue of whether you think that Julian Assange meets the definition of a journalist, and why is it that this issue is coming to a head with the White House and others really being forced to confront some of the core questions here now, and this saga has been going on for the time that you’ve been doing the movie and years before that?”
“Well, I think it’s been a slow momentum,” responded Gibney. “I think it’s been a slow momentum that accelerated through the Bush administration right on to the Obama administration. Some of that I suppose is peculiar to the Obama administration, but it’s also a matter of how the executive doesn’t want to give up power. The more power the executive gets, the more power the executive wants.
“I think rather than … Obama said he was going to bring into a year of transparency. He’s going to recognize the whistle blower. But his administration has done just the opposite. More secrets remain kept. Far from recognizing the validity of the whistle blower … It’s funny the way Obama thinks to proceed. He’s always being very good at articulating broad principles, but not in practice. The administration tends to do something very different. I think you see, unfortunately, something close to criminalizing journalism as momentum is rolling forward.”
“Can you talk a little bit more about the film? There’s a section where you talk about your efforts to reach out to Julian Assange and your six-hour negotiation with him at that British mansion that he was at or country estate,” asked Gerstein in this well presented Q and A.
Tell us a little bit more about that. My understanding is supporters are not terribly happy with the film. Is the issue that it becomes more than simply whether you would or wouldn’t agree to an interview but whether many others affiliated with the movement would be encouraged not to take part in the film and why?”
“I’m not sure what the movement means. In terms of Julian himself, I think Julian had a rather limited view of what it meant to be interviewed and based on the conduct of information, I joked with him when I had the opportunity to.
I said, “I may have been the only person in the planet who didn’t interview him.” You could see he was interviewed quite frequently by a lot of people. I think he took the view that an interview was not about the exchange of information but it was an opportunity for him to shake, cultivate, and manipulate force.
In that regard, he kept wanting to be assured that he can see cuts of the film, that he could shape the story, that or, failing that he could be paid, or failing that, that I would spy on other interview subjects, which seemed a rather odd request for somebody who was concerned about source protection. It was a bizarre experience, because he behaved, in its regard, in a very different way than the principles he espoused,” reponded Gibney.
“One of the objections, I heard a bunch of objections from his followers, is different aspects of the film. One is they feel that you did downplay the danger, the criminal liability that he might face here in the US for what he has done.
What’s your take on whether that is completely fanciful in your time, whether it’s … As you’re saying, there was a need and may still be a grand jury and panel across the river here in Alexandria that was looking at these issues. Do you not feel he was in criminal jeopardy, or what’s your final analysis on that one? ” Gerstein
Alex: “He may be in criminal jeopardy. There is a grand jury now. I think you have to unpack these issues. The problem, it seems to me, with Julian was that he complained at a lot of these issues, and demanded, say, the followers that you vilify two women in Sweden in order to be able to be a full ally of the transparency agenda, which I found a little bit bizarre.
Whatever happens with the grand jury investigation, I’m not sure that anybody’s proven that had anything to do with what’s going on in Sweden. That to me became the problem. As I dug deeper into the story, the question was, well, was this a private matter? Was this a criminal matter purely to do with Sweden? Or was this a honey trap either launched by the CIA or was the attempt to get him to go to Sweden an attempt by the United States in conjunction with the Swedish government to send him back to this country?
I found no evidence of those last two things whatsoever. The fact remains, at it said in the film, that there is a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. Both are true, but I think, to me, the issue with Julian is how he twists and distorts the facts in ways that are not accurate.”
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
“In WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS, Oscar® winner Alex Gibney traces the roots of Assange’s activism, starting with his days as a fearless teenage hacker accessing international information from Melbourne, Australia. As is the hallmark of all his films, Gibney creates a complex portrait of a canny, technologically sophisticated but sometimes self-important individual, upending facile analysis.
Few contemporary figures have divided public opinion as strongly as Julian Assange, the Australian-born hacker-turned-free speech advocate. Some consider him a hero and martyr who, through his website WikiLeaks, helped uncover abuses of power, ranging from a devastating 2007 helicopter attach in Baghdad that killed 12 innocent people, including two Reuters employees, to the release of thousands of classified State Department foreign policy documents. Others, including several prominent pundits and politicians, view Assange as nothing less than a war criminal and have openly called for his assassination. In the wake of the revelations, Assange has been boxed into a corner. Public funding for WikiLeaks has been blocked, undermining the organization. And suspiciously two Swedish women have come forth to accuse him of sexual assault. Assange is currently sequestered in London’s Ecuadoran Embassy fearing the possibility of extradition for the release of the documents and violation of Swedish sex laws.” Production Notes
“I’ll ask one question as a journalist, and then we’ll open the floor here,” said Gerstein. “Just out of my personal curiosity, in addition to you, the film being the large part narrated by Australian and British friend and colleague or counterpart from the Guardian, who worked in this project with Assange, a gap that would seem to me for American audience is the relatively modest role that the New York Times plays in the movie.
You do have a clip from a New York Times reporter and I think you talked about the article that Joe Keller wrote about the experience of working with Assange. Would you tell us a little bit about your relationship with New York Times and financially making this film, and whatever you might need to talk to them about the issue that would be illustrated through these interviews.
Alex: “There was a lot to cover in this film. I felt that a lot of ink, and indeed, digital bytes on, for the camera has been spent on the issue of the negotiations between Julian and various journalistic partners.
Page 1 heads on a bit about it and so have the New York Times. There’s been another film done by Channel 4 which focuses in detail about it. Bill Keller had written about it ostensibly. A lot of people had talked about the day-to-day relationship between Julian and the journalist. I felt that there were other things to cover in the story, so if I got bogged down in that, it would pull attention away from other things, principally Bradley Manning.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures
One of the things I discovered in the story was that while I started the story with the intent of doing the film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, I became convinced that there was a main character at the heart of the story who had gone missing, and that was Bradley Manning. I wanted to spend a lit of time with that. For those reasons, I left a lot of that out.
While I sought out a number of New York Times reporters to speak to on background, I didn’t seek out anybody to be interviewed because I didn’t want to dig into that. Nick Davis to me was a little bit different. One of the reasons I was interested in Nick, was it was a bizarre circumstance I found myself in in the making of this film.
When I got hired to do this, and of course I really wanted to do it, but I was called by Universal Pictures of all people, asking whether or not I wanted to do this film, already Julian Assange had become this huge celebrity surrounded by lawyers, by agents, book people, movie people, so forth and so on.
Everybody, including Bill Keller and the people at the Guardian, were being snatched up by big movie studios to take part in fiction films based on this. Nick Davis was one of those people who was a little bit pissed off that The Guardian, The Guardian was also preventing me, not the Times preventing to reach out to me, but The Guardian was preventing me from getting to people because they felt that there was a proprietary thing going on and they owed their allegiance to people there in business wherever they made the movies and so forth and so on.
Nick Davis was a little bit pissed off about that. He didn’t want to cooperate being the individualist that he is. Also, he played a peculiar role in this one in the sense that he went out and had that conversation with Julian and persuaded him to come on board the journalistic organization. Unlike some of the other people at the Guardian, he had a far more balanced view of Julian.
In doing my reporting on this, I found that there are a lot of people who wanted Julian to be a pure, unalloyed perfect hero. There were a lot of people who wanted him to be a pure unalloyed perfect villain. I found that the fact was that he was a little bit of both. So Nick to me exemplifies that ability to see the contradiction in Julian.”
WE STEAL SECRETS opens in Washington on May 31 at AFI Silver Theatre.
The Trailer:
