The Hollywood Reporter recently gathered Michael Moore, Alex Gibney, Amy Berg, Kirby Dick, Liz Gabrus, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi for a roundtable to discuss documentary filmmaking. Some of the highlights are below:
What personal price have you paid to be documentary filmmakers?
DICK When you make a strong film, if you don't get that reaction, perhaps you haven't made the film strong enough. You're going into a territory — sexual assault, for example — that people want to cover up. If I haven't made that impact, where it's causing people to respond and even to come at me, I really haven't told the whole truth.
GIBNEY That's very important we engage, even if there's hostility — and I certainly have experienced a good bit.
MOORE I wish I just got hostility. (Laughs.)
GARBUS That'd be awesome.
BERG No death threats?
MOORE One thing I've learned is that the person who wants to hurt you does not send you a note in advance. The death threats are great; it's the half a dozen assaults and attempts on my life [that aren't], including a man who built a fertilizer bomb to plant under our home to blow it up — he went to prison — and the others who assaulted me with knives and billy clubs. [In Florida], a really nicely dressed man in a three-piece suit comes out of Starbucks and sees me, and he just turned purple and the vein started bulging. I call it the "Limbaugh Vein" — you know, it's like after they've had three hours of listening to Rush. And he takes the lid off his hot, scalding coffee and throws it in my face. And only because I had this security guy with me [was I safe]. He put his face in front of mine and took the hit. Got second-degree burns. We had to take him to the hospital, but not before he took the guy down on the sidewalk and handcuffed him. After my Oscar speech [for Bowling for Columbine] and Fahrenheit 9/11, I've lived a number of years with this kind of horrible situation.
Are you afraid?
MOORE Well, yeah, I'm afraid. Yeah, of course. But I reached a certain point where I had to just stop being afraid, and I got rid of the security. I couldn't live that way anymore. It was difficult on our family. People around me were afraid they were going be the collateral damage. And so finally I just decided: I'm in my 50s, I've lived a good life. Nobody will say I didn't make a contribution. And if it's going to happen today, it happens today, and you just live with it. And, actually, it was kind of liberating, that day when I decided to get rid of the security.
GIBNEY It's a funny thing that sometimes happens when you're outspoken and very public about it: It gives you a peculiar kind of protection. Because you're being out front. You're not hiding. And that in itself is important.
How do you decide whether to keep going when a subject locks the doors to you?
GIBNEY Usually, when your road is blocked, it ends up causing you to take a more interesting path. [On Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God], the pope wouldn't give me any access, so I had to go around him. Your journey is the interesting part. If you allow yourself to be surprised, and change as you go, anything's possible.
What surprised you, Alex, in making a film about Scientology?
GIBNEY You think of Scientology, and you think anybody who would be involved in that has got to be a wing nut. I met all these people who had left, and they were so smart, perceptive, empathetic. It ended up being a kind of journey into understanding — that all of us can fall into a belief system that suddenly persuades us to do things we might otherwise find appalling.
But aren't we all to some degree prisoners of our beliefs?
MOORE I'm raised Catholic; I went to the seminary to be a priest. But because it's the dominant culture, Christianity, we don't think of it as being strange that this piece of bread is actually the body of Jesus or that we're drinking his blood. So nobody would make a documentary about how mondo bizarro that is. The original texts of all the faiths are pretty good. They all say that you should treat the poor well and be good to your neighbor. It's the institutionalization of these faiths [that's a problem].
Read the full roundtable at The Hollywood Reporter.
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