Alex Gibey is an Oscar and Emmy award winning director and producer who has delivered hard hitting documentaries such as Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
His new movies Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, is a documentary based on Hunter S.Thompson and his Gonzo style of journalism that has made him an icon and object of fascination.
Your new film is Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson so what is it all about?
It’s about the Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson the guy that is memorialised by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and it’s about a guy who doesn’t play by the rules, an outlaw journalist, and how important that can be when getting at the truth that playing straight is not always a good thing.
And what was it about this man and his story that you thought would make a good feature?
Well I think, particularly as a young man, he was a superhero and his superpower was the ability, I suppose, to take unlimited amounts of drugs and consume massive quantities of alcohol and at the same time be utterly coherent, and more than coherent to channel an anger, a righteous anger, into humour and he was one of the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century. And yet he was a very public figure and a very engaging guy and that really comes off on screen, he has a movie star quality I think.
And how did you go about putting the film together in terms of getting the footage, deciding what to use?
Well putting it all together was always tricky but two things I think that were really key for us one is the estate gave us total access to the Hunter Thompson archives, which was a huge collection of audio tapes, he would take his tape recorder with him everywhere, photographs that he took, he took great pictures particularly of the Hells Angels, and then all sorts of footage taken of him by all sorts of different people, whether is was 16mm or later on DV cam.
And then we had clips from the movies Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the Bill Murray movie Where the Buffalo Roam. And in this case there was only one person who could read the voice of Hunter and all those glorious word that he had written and that was Johnny Depp and once Depp came on it really took the film to the next level.
Well that leads me to my next question really Johnny Depp narrates the film how did you get him on board?
We kidnapped his children (laughs). No we got him involved because he was a huge Hunter fan and finally we got him to see a rough cut of the film and he liked it, but he was more than a Hunter fan here was a guy who, when researching for his role in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, went up and lived with Hunter he shaved his head, he began smoking cigarettes with a cigarette holder and shooting guns.
So he stayed in Hunter’s house for long periods of time and now I think he breathes the same air that Hunter breathes he inhabits his spirit and so I think at some point Johnny felt that he couldn’t not be involved he had to do it, and that was lucky for us.
and were there any other angle or stories that you had to leave on the cutting room floor?
I wanted to spend a little more time with a book called The Curse of Lono a very funny book that has hilarious illustrations by Ralph Steadman, who is Hunter’s great collaborator, but there just wasn’t time.
There was also The Rum Diary, his novel that Johnny Depp is going to make into a movie, but I kind of figured that Johnny can do that we don’t have too so yeah there were other stories that for one reason or another had to be left out. But that’s why I think that the DVD is going to be so rich as it will be filled with all sorts of stuff that we weren’t able to cram into the film.
The film also talks to Juan his son how did you get him involved in the project and how open was he about his father?
I think Juan was pretty open and we got him involved really early on and we convinced him that we were going to do a serious portrait of his father and that the writing was going to be the centre of the film, and he liked that a lot.
And we got his son involved not only to do an interview, which was very candid about his father because it couldn’t have been easy being Hunter Thompson’s son, but also there are a number of scenes in the film where magically photographs and paintings of guns sprint to life and suddenly the guns are firing and we got Juan to shoot all of the guns, we figured that no one could shoot them as well as Juan could as his father and taught him how to shoot the guns.
And what are your personal views on Hunter S. Thompson?
I think that he was one of the great comic writers of the twentieth century he also had a great vision of the deep contradictions of the American character an I think that is what really made him great.
And how does the writing process work for you?
Well for Gonzo I assembled Hunter’s word so every word is Hunter but I assembled them. It’s a peculiar process the writing process because it really comes at the end I mean part of it is structuring and with Hunter you needed to try and structure the narrative with stuff that he had already written, so that was trickier than structuring the narrative and throwing in rough narration and writing it properly at the end, we couldn’t re-write Hunter.
But writing in a documentary is all about the editing and finding that simple story around which everything can get complicated and I think there it’s important to think more about movie making I think Enron was a heist film and Taxi to the Dark Side was a murder mystery and Gonzo is a road movie I think.
And is there any particular message or image that you want to the film to portray of Hunter?
There is a kind of image of Hunter walking off into the distance with his strange funny lope, towards the end of the film, towards the mountains of Aspen and it sort of reminds me of that mythic shot of John Wayne in The Searchers framed by the dark hallway as he walks off into the desert alone, there’s something about the lone frontiers man walking off into the distance that is very powerful.
But with Hunter they is a funny bouncy gape almost as if he is laughing at the image as he is indulging in it.
And this film follows up Taxi to the Dark Side what is it about the documentary that you like so much as a filmmaker?
It captures a kind of messy, irrepressibly, contradictory reality and sometimes you can’t make this stuff up it’s wilder and more intriguing than fiction often.
And yet the new documentary, that I call it but it might not be that new, increasingly people are throwing out the old documentary form book they are playing with form in a way that is very satisfying so its not just a record it’s an altered record and that record that has a lot in common with fiction films except that there are no paid actors. But the reality is often more messy than the neat and tidy reality that you see in movies.
Taxi to the Dark Side focused on a taxi driver being beaten to death by American soldiers why did you want to tell this story?
It was a very important story is was a murder mystery that lead from the battle field of Afghanistan all the way through Guantanamo Bay to the White House and it’s a story about he corruption of the American character how or leaders, and to some extent with the complicity of the American people, could establish, in the attempt to spread democracy, could establish the opposite of it a policy of torture.
It was shocking to me and devastating to my dad who encouraged me to take it on but that was what we wanted to convey, that the United States had corrupted it’s own character by following this policy of Bush and Chaney which was torture.
Gonzo: The Life and Works of Hunter S Thompson is released 19th December
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Alex Gibey is an Oscar and Emmy award winning director and producer who has delivered hard hitting documentaries such as Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
His new movies Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, is a documentary based on Hunter S.Thompson and his Gonzo style of journalism that has made him an icon and object of fascination.
Your new film is Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson so what is it all about?
It’s about the Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson the guy that is memorialised by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and it’s about a guy who doesn’t play by the rules, an outlaw journalist, and how important that can be when getting at the truth that playing straight is not always a good thing.
And what was it about this man and his story that you thought would make a good feature?
Well I think, particularly as a young man, he was a superhero and his superpower was the ability, I suppose, to take unlimited amounts of drugs and consume massive quantities of alcohol and at the same time be utterly coherent, and more than coherent to channel an anger, a righteous anger, into humour and he was one of the greatest comic writer of the twentieth century. And yet he was a very public figure and a very engaging guy and that really comes off on screen, he has a movie star quality I think.
And how did you go about putting the film together in terms of getting the footage, deciding what to use?
Well putting it all together was always tricky but two things I think that were really key for us one is the estate gave us total access to the Hunter Thompson archives, which was a huge collection of audio tapes, he would take his tape recorder with him everywhere, photographs that he took, he took great pictures particularly of the Hells Angels, and then all sorts of footage taken of him by all sorts of different people, whether is was 16mm or later on DV cam.
And then we had clips from the movies Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the Bill Murray movie Where the Buffalo Roam. And in this case there was only one person who could read the voice of Hunter and all those glorious word that he had written and that was Johnny Depp and once Depp came on it really took the film to the next level.
Well that leads me to my next question really Johnny Depp narrates the film how did you get him on board?
We kidnapped his children (laughs). No we got him involved because he was a huge Hunter fan and finally we got him to see a rough cut of the film and he liked it, but he was more than a Hunter fan here was a guy who, when researching for his role in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, went up and lived with Hunter he shaved his head, he began smoking cigarettes with a cigarette holder and shooting guns.
So he stayed in Hunter’s house for long periods of time and now I think he breathes the same air that Hunter breathes he inhabits his spirit and so I think at some point Johnny felt that he couldn’t not be involved he had to do it, and that was lucky for us.
and were there any other angle or stories that you had to leave on the cutting room floor?
I wanted to spend a little more time with a book called The Curse of Lono a very funny book that has hilarious illustrations by Ralph Steadman, who is Hunter’s great collaborator, but there just wasn’t time.
There was also The Rum Diary, his novel that Johnny Depp is going to make into a movie, but I kind of figured that Johnny can do that we don’t have too so yeah there were other stories that for one reason or another had to be left out. But that’s why I think that the DVD is going to be so rich as it will be filled with all sorts of stuff that we weren’t able to cram into the film.
The film also talks to Juan his son how did you get him involved in the project and how open was he about his father?
I think Juan was pretty open and we got him involved really early on and we convinced him that we were going to do a serious portrait of his father and that the writing was going to be the centre of the film, and he liked that a lot.
And we got his son involved not only to do an interview, which was very candid about his father because it couldn’t have been easy being Hunter Thompson’s son, but also there are a number of scenes in the film where magically photographs and paintings of guns sprint to life and suddenly the guns are firing and we got Juan to shoot all of the guns, we figured that no one could shoot them as well as Juan could as his father and taught him how to shoot the guns.