Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 51 written set of questions, you're prob- ably not doing the interview as well because you need to hear the sub- ject's responses so you can take turns speaking based on what they are giving you." Gibney keeps his notes handy but attempts to conduct all of his interviews without an agenda. "I don't go in looking for some- thing," he says. "I go in ready to listen and full of curiosity." But what about the subject who can't get to the heart of the mat- ter, refuses to be candid or isn't telling truth? "Sometimes when people are lying to me, I know that they are lying to me so I ask the question another way to see if they are de- termined to lie to me or not," Gibney explains. "What you as the director have to recognize is when people are trying to be dishonest and find a way to call attention to it in the final film." Gibney says that Lance Armstrong (The Armstrong Lie) and Eliot Spitzer (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) are two examples of subjects who have been untruthful to him during an interview. "When you are asking questions, you have to be in the moment," he says, "and I tend to be more forgiving and gullible in the mo- ment, which I think in a peculiar way is a virtue because it allows the subject to go more easily where they want to go. It allowed (Armstrong and Spitzer) to tell the story they wanted to tell, which I'm OK with. But it becomes a paradox because you have to be will- ing to re-examine your own gullibility in the cutting room." PHOTO: PHOTOFEST Garbus adds that "trust is built over time," referring to gaining access to the hallowed halls of The New York Times for the docu- mentary series The Fourth Estate. "In the early days of shooting vérité in the newsroom, there was 100 percent consciousness of cameras being around," she says. "And then as time went on, people stopped paying so much attention to us." Research and preparation are key O R H I S L AT E S T documentary, Where's My Roy Cohn?, Matt Tyrnauer did copious amounts of research before he spoke to any subjects. That in- volved reading Nicholas von Hoffman's biography Citizen Cohn concurrently with story producers and combing through archival footage of the ruthless lawyer with his editors. "Generally, my research process means meeting with story producers and telling them what interests me," says Tyrnau- er. "They then cast a very wide net of research and they start to see what's out there beyond what I know about." The exploration culminates in a carefully prepared list of ques- tions that the director writes either alone or with the help of his producers. "I inevitably veer from the list," he says. "One reason for that is because I'm trying to figure out what the correct flow of the interview is and invariably the flow is different than I anticipated." Garbus, whose credits also include What Happened, Miss Sim- one? and The Farm: Angola, USA, also doesn't worry about adher- ing to her prepared catalogue of inquiries. "If you're following your From left, Lance Armstrong, director Alex Gibney and DP Maryse Alberti during the making of The Armstrong Lie. F