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Interview: Alex Gibney on We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks

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“The film is about secrets. Who keeps them, who tries to expose them,” said Alex Gibney ahead of the UK premiere of the hotly anticipated We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. 

“Also, unexpected secrets. How individuals have a powerful impact on broader social events, sometimes in very unexpected ways. So it’s a bit of a thriller in that sense, and has some unexpected outcomes.” 
Focussing on the rise and fall of the infamous whistle-blowing website and operation, Gibney investigates the story behind its leader, Julian Assange’s, various scandals and the man who made the world’s biggest information leak possible. His name was Bradley Manning.
“Well, as has been widely known, I didn’t get an interview with Julian; though the search for that or the attempt to get that is part of the story. I spent about a year on and off trying to. I met him a number of times, including one epic six-hour meeting where he tried to get intel for me and I tried to see if he would do an interview.
“I never succeeded, but I think that in the film there’s a lot of material, particularly material that’s very interesting that can’t ever be gotten again.” This material, shot by Mark Davis before Assange was in the public eye, will be new for most viewers. “That period is very interesting, and that will never come again. We’ll never see that person again. But that’s in the film in a way that I think is quite powerful.”
“I never had a chance to get [Bradley Manning], but what we had were these chats [he had online]. Over the course of making the film more of these chats came out and so we were able to create a character for Bradley Manning out of his own words. In a way it’s kind of like an interview, but it’s even better than an interview, it’s his own personal diary… So there’s a lot about this film that’s kind of a spy story.”
In true spy-thriller style, not everyone is who they seem, and informants and old friends come out of the woodwork to give their take on Assange and Manning. Gibney also adeptly explores the nature of whistle-blowing and the courage necessary for the act. With current events involving Ed Snowden taking place now, I asked Gibney if he felt that these topics will continue to renew themselves.
“I do,” he replied. ”I think this is a topic that’s going to get deeper and deeper and more and more people are going to think about it. But I think one of the interesting things about We Steal Secrets is that it’s not a kind of current events primer, it goes deeper than that. It really gets at the heart of really key characters and also how people change and are changed by circumstances around them. That, I think, is terribly important.“
Whether you have followed the Wikileaks story from day one or missed out on key events along the way, an interst in current events, the internet, and secret-keeping or -stealing makes this film one to watch.
“We wanted this film to be approachable by anyone,” said Gibney. “That’s why it’s set or it’s cast kind of in the style of a thriller, because it is a kind of international Bourne Identity in a way – with some unexpected twists.”
We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks is relesed in UK cinemas this Friday, 12 July.

Interview: Jeanie Finlay & The Great Hip Hop Hoax

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Documentary maker Jeanie Finlay’s outrageous new feature, The Great Hip Hop Hoax, is touring the UK. She tells me about “the lies behind the lies behind the lies” behind Silibil ‘N Brains – the fakers who were keeping it real in the 2004 hip hop scene.
 
“The film is really about the biggest rap act to come out of California in 2004 in the wake of Eminem,” said Finlay. “They’re massive, they’re taking London by storm, but what no-one realises is that they’re actually a couple of chancers: one guy from Dundee and one guy from Arbroath. So the film is about the lie and the destruction and the toll it took on both of them. It’s also about what people are prepared to do to get what they want.”
Finlay’s film follows Silibil ‘N Brains, the Scottish hip hop duo who hit it big by donning fake American accents. The film explores the characters they created and the results of the lies they told to get ahead in the music industry.
 
“I read about the story in the paper after it’d all come out, and I knew immediately that I wanted to make this into a film,” said Finlay. “There were so many rich elements: the idea of storytelling and who is telling the truth, of denying your Scottishness – as a child of a Scottish parent that seemed very interesting to me – and just all about the corruption at the heart of the music industry. And the fact that this thing is so crazy, bonkers!”
 
The film incorporates their own video footage of the boys behaving badly, along with interviews from each the band members, Billy Boyd (Silibil) and Gavin Bain (Brains McLeod), and a few of the people closest to them.
 
So what was Finlay’s decision behind interviewing them separately? “It’s because they weren’t friends, they weren’t speaking at all,” she answered. “When I met them they hadn’t spoken for at least 5 years. So every element you see in the film is filmed completely separately. Billy is in Arbroath and Gavin’s living in London so geographically they’re far apart anyway.
 
“Of course it’s about the truth, and it’s a he said he said story. Who’s telling the truth? Billy calls it ‘the lies about the lies about the lies about the lies’. So I was looking for the truth in between the two of them.”
 
I asked if she had ever considered getting them back together.
 
“For a long time… I was going to film a reunion. Then I thought, ‘This is insane, why would I do that?’ I imagined the steps of putting them in a room and I just imagined they would sit there, fist pump, then look at me and go, ‘What do you want?’”
 
“I thought the reality of the situation doesn’t need me interfering. It needs me to reflect the reality, and the reality is that at the end of it all they were really far apart. So why not show that? That’s the truth.”
 
After completing the film at the end of 2012, the former bandmates did, indeed, reunite.
 
“I think it’s a bit of an easy reunion, but they’re making music together again,” said Finlay. “I should be a marriage broker or something!
 
“I think it’s good that they’re speaking, it seemed like a terrible divorce before. But is the world ready for another Silibil ‘N Brains album? I don’t know.”
 
The Great Hip Hop Hoax is released in UK cinemas and on VOD on 6th September. Learn more or request a screening at http://hiphophoax.com

Interview: Scott Clark talks Animation & Monsters University

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Disney•Pixar films have been opening at Edinburgh International Film Festival for many years now. From Ratatouille to Wall-E and Toy Story 3 to Brave, Monsters University now continues the tradition of Disney•Pixar’s fondly held place at the EIFF.

“I’m very excited to be representing Pixar and Pixar is excited to be back, of course,” said Clark. “This is my first time in Scotland. I love Edinburgh. It was fun to introduce the film today.”

Clark has been an animator at Disney since shortly after the release of Toy Story in US cinemas. “My favourite Pixar film is Toy Story. It’s the only one where I wasn’t around. It was the film that got me interested in computer animation and Pixar. When I did my internship it was still in [movie] theatres. I have a lot of fond memories, not only of the film. It’s great that it’s the first computer-animated film but it’s also the beginning of my career and I’ve had a lot of fun since then.”

Since much of the film takes place on campus at Monsters University, the animation team worked hard to get back into the mindset of college life. “We did a lot of research,” said Clark. “We went to Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, and just walked around and pretended we were students. What was funny was that a lot of the people, including the director, we all went to art school… and practically none of us had been in a fraternity or sorority. We also weren’t familiar with certain aspects of the American college culture, and that was part of our story, so we really wanted to invest in it.

“The research is also really fun and, of course, we were also all in college so there were things where we were researching and were like, ‘Ahh, I remember that!’ It was good to go back to that energy and the fun of being in school again.”

Clark also had a lot of fun animating younger, more inventively fictional characters. But is it easier or more difficult than animating humans?

“Well, first of all, animation is hard! Even if you’re animating Cars, which is probably the simplest world we’ve animated, the rules are simpler, but it’s even hard there. But the most difficult challenge is something like Brave, when you have humans. The closer to human it gets, the more naturalistic it needs to be.

“With Mike and Sulley, or a world like Monsters, it’s really fun because they’re caricatures of animals, people, they’re really people through monsters. So we recognise our sister or brother or uncle through these funny characters. But what was challenging in Monsters was the scope. In Monsters University, the scope of characters which we had to animate was just tremendous, every scene, every background. We did not have that scope on the first film, Monsters Inc.”

He also spoke about his favourite scene in the film. I didn’t get to animate much because I was the supervising animator,” said Clark, ”but one of the scenes that I did do was to animate Sulley at the Roar Omega Roar frat party, when he’s not participating then Squishy does the cowboy roping him onto the dance floor move.

“Another animator animated Squishy, then I had Sulley, I animated him getting reeled in onto the dance floor. That was fun for me because I like dancing and I thought it was an interesting challenge to try to, how do I get this character that has long, lanky arms, short, stubby legs, and a neck that sticks out… he’s kind of goofy, he’s not built to dance, so how do I get him to look… he’s confident and cocky in this movie.

“So how do I get that 18 year-old, confident and cocky, but perhaps under the surface insecure and trying to be cool? there’s a complexity to being at a party and trying to fit in and trying to find out who you are and that was pretty fun. As an actor I’m thinking about all that stuff, it’s just a funny scene, but it was fun, and it was fun to get that track and listen to it and animate to it. It’s pantomime, that was all the animator performance.”

Monsters University is released in UK cinemas on 12 July 2013.