GIBNEY: I don’t know if there’s a model. There are a lot of good ones--and they all have good bits and pieces. I always like to refer to The Big Sleep because nobody really cares that nobody ever figures out who killed the chauffer. I like Out of the Past because it makes a mockery of the fact that you can’t do flashbacks. And I’ve always loved Chinatown. There are a lot of them that I think are good. The fact is, too, that I don’t want to be too precious about style. You go into a story and there are certain things about it that demand that you take a certain stylistic approach. I shot the interviews in Enron very differently than I shot the interviews in Taxi. It’s a different story, and the subjects are very different. It’s a certain amount of artifice. Like in Enron, I made sure that there’s a reflective surface in front of the interview subjects because we’re playing with the notion of image versus reality. I don’t want to be too precious about it, but it conveys an emotional message, right? And that’s a conscious stylistic decision I made. It’s not pure reality, it’s a cinematic conceit that I’m bringing to the story. But that’s okay.
MERIN: I’d say it’s more than okay. I salute you for it. Let’s talk about sound. Many directors--of some very good detective films, among them--have told me they’re using subsonic sound, subsonic vibration to influence the audience’s mood. Are you doing that? Have you considered it? And, can you tell me about your use of music--which often seems ironic.
GIBNEY: Sound is important to me, but there’s something about that kind of manipulation that…if you talk about subsonic under-girding of scenes, I don’t know how I feel about that. Maybe it makes me a little uncomfortable because maybe there’s a degree of Pavlovian manipulation that maybe I don’t like. I like to think that even in the Mohammad Al-Qahtani sequence in Taxi, people know we shot him in a deliberate way and rendered him in such a way that you don’t think, don’t realize we were using a cell phone camera at Abu Ghraib. Music is very important to me. The music in Taxi was pretty different than music in a lot of my films, with a couple of exceptions. I mean, obviously, My Little Corner of the World and the tango in the Guantanamo tour sequence. But I thought Taxi would be a more scored film. There are a couple of exceptions. I mean we had fun, well not fun exactly, but there’s the gamelon music that we used during the interrogation of al- Qahtani, which gave that sequence a little different texture. Just like in Enron, instead of using a hardcore bar tune in the strip joint, we used Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach score, where you hear over and over “one-two-three-four,” ‘cause for those guys, it was all about the numbers, but it was also very weird music to be using for strippers. So, I do think about music a lot, and sometimes find ways to use it for ironic effect. I look for ways to get something unexpected out of it. But in Taxi the score is also an attempt to be very environmental--you know, you feel you’re in Bagram. There’s a sense of haunting, a sense of dread in it. But also, I worked very hard with the composer to create a sense of hope at times, particularly at the end, where you’re moving through Washington DC and there’s a kind of undercurrent in that score. I’m a huge music fan. I’m the only tone deaf person who’s every won a Grammy. I like the dramatic possibilities of music.
MERIN: What are your ideas about the rhythm of the film--not only in the pacing of delivery of information, but also in the length of scenes and whether or not you use a stationary or moving camera? How much do you control the film’s rhythm through the editing process?
GIBNEY: Editing is all about rhythm--and not just fast or slow. It’s a certain pace that you establish. And there are different rhythms you establish--rhythm within the scene, and rhythm within the larger narrative. Rhythm within the larger narrative is particularly important because documentaries can exhaust people by the end, because there’s no relief. Particularly with films that get as complicated as mine--both Taxi and Enron. I like the idea of chapters. Maybe that’s an idea I stole from Ken Burns, but I do it differently. I like chapters because they give you a moment to pause. It’s like having a beat at the end of a musical phrase. I would say rhythm is extremely important to me in filmmaking.
