Quantcast
Channel: BLAKE DILLON » Chill Magazine
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 15

The Biographer

0
0

Alex Gibney has become a modern-day muckraker, documenting the stories of some of the most miserly men of our time. I chat with him about his most recent project, The Armstrong Lie.

For years, Alex Gibney has challenged the bad guy. He’s taken on WikiLeaks, the Catholic Church, and Al-Qaeda. He’s profiled corrupt businessmen, scandalous politicians, and torturous American soldiers. He’s dealt with cheats, liars, and straight-up criminals. When Alex Gibney has a story to tell, the whole world listens.

That’s why I was damn excited to learn of his latest endeavor, The Armstrong Lie. Here, Gibney details the infamous story of Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal, and helps unravel one of the most fascinating stories in the history of sports. But Lie wasn’t originally penned as another villain close-up. Quite the opposite, actually. The project began as The Road Back, a motivational fiction story that profiled Armstrong’s triumphant return to cycling. Gibney and his crew filmed the entire first year of Armstrong’s comeback, shot every stage of the Tour de France, and even had Matt Damon narrate it. But it was all for naught. Just as the film neared completion, the doping scandal began to erupt.

“Lance’s story had slowly become unbelievable, so the film we’d made was no longer relevant,” Gibney said at the Toronto International Film Festival.

And then there was the fateful tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey in January 2013, where Armstrong finally confessed to using banned performance-enhancing drugs several times throughout his prolific career after years of denial. That’s when Gibney knew that a re-do of the Armstrong doc was possible.

“I asked Lance why he decided to confess, rather than continuing to fight like he always had. He told me his story was no longer believable.” —Alex Gibney, Director

So he went back to the tape. He combed through the hundreds of hours of footage to find something salvageable. Turns out he had quite a lot to work with, and that the meaning of his old clips was much different than originally thought. But why make a film about something the whole world already knew? Did he have something new to add? Or was he simply trying to convince himself he hadn’t wasted years of his life making a film that would never exist? To that, Gibney says there’s a lot to learn in The Armstrong Lie.

“If you’re going to make a film like Titanic, the viewer already knows that the ship hits an iceberg—they know that it sinks,” he said. “The devil is in the details, though. With stories like this one, you see a number of things that you might otherwise not have. You see the mechanisms of the story—the anatomy of his lie. Looking at the faces, looking at the way people talk, looking at how peopled reckoned with this—there’s a power to that.”

Throughout the process of re-making the documentary, Gibney remained in close contact with Armstrong. They spoke often, and even continued to film.

“I had a relationship with Lance,” he said. “But I had to reach out to him and tell him that the film was now called The Armstrong Lie. It was a difficult thing to do. At that point, the nature of our relationship changed. It inevitably became more honest and more forthright.”

During those post-confession conversations, Gibney and Armstrong discussed the timing of everything.

“I asked Lance why he decided to confess, rather than continuing to fight like he always had—defending his story so assiduously,” Gibney said. “He told me that his story was no longer believable.”

Some critics—conspiracy theorists, if you will—believe that Armstrong’s unraveling was Gibney’s dream come true. Given his portfolio of work, they believe he was only making The Road Back in hopes of being around for a positive drug test. But it’s not true. While he tries to hide it, Gibney simply oozes frustration when speaking about the first rendition of the film—you can just tell that a restart wasn’t in the works from the start.

All that said, though, he does concede that Armstrong’s confession wasn’t necessarily the worst thing. At the very least, the truth coming out thrust him back into a realm of filmmaking that he’s more than comfortable in.

“If anything, it allowed me to get back on familiar territory,” he quipped. “Hey, we had to start over. Was I disappointed by that? Excited? Not really. I was challenged to do it, and I was up for the challenge. And, as I went about it, I believe the story actually became far more intriguing.”



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 15

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images