Alex Gibney Interview

11 months ago 03rd Dec 10:24

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.