Morgan Freeman Interview: THE BUCKET LIST, GONE BABY GONE, Jack, and a whole lot more!

Morgan Freeman (w/Jack Nicholson) in The Bucket List.

MORGAN FREEMAN: HOLLYWOOD’S WORTHY SAGE
By Alex Simon

If Orson Welles was everyone’s idea of the voice of God during his life, Morgan Freeman has most likely assumed that mantle for the next generation of filmgoers. With his stentorian voice and Zen-like presence, Morgan Freeman has appeared in nearly 80 films and TV productions, since making his debut in a bit part in Sidney Lumet’s classic The Pawnbroker, in 1964.

Since then, Morgan has won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor (for Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby), along with another 32 award wins and 27 nominations. 2007 has proven to be a banner year for an actor who just seems to be getting busier, and better, with each passing year. After beginning the year playing (appropriately) God in the comedy Evan Almighty, he has also appeared in Ben Affleck’s critically-acclaimed directing debut Gone Baby Gone, Robert Benton’s Feast of Love, and Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List, in which he co-stars with another American treasure, Jack Nicholson. The two play terminally-ill men who write up their “bucket lists,” a list of things they want to do before they kick the bucket.

Mr. Freeman sat down recently with us over breakfast at The Four Seasons, dispensing equal parts, humor, truth and wisdom. Here’s what transpired:

I just saw Gone Baby Gone last night…

Morgan Freeman: It’s surprising to me that that movie is doing as well as it is.

Why?

I just didn’t expect it: little movie, terrific performances. It was a solid script. The story’s different, very different story. I really think if you give people something different, off the beaten path, they’ll want to hear what you have to say. And I think this is a case in point.

I really like the fact that Ben Affleck had the courage to be so bleak.

Yeah. Again, that’s what made it so different from most of what’s out there right now.

I got the feeling he watched a lot of movies from the ‘70s before shooting it. It had that gritty, neo-realist feel that so many of the great films from that era had.

I don’t know if he watched a lot of those films, or if that’s just his sensibility. I’m not contradicting what you’re saying, but we didn’t really discuss that. It would be interesting to ask him if he’d done a lot of boning up beforehand. But it was a great choice. And Amy Ryan, who played the girl’s mother, boy, was she outstanding.

She was so convincing that at first, I thought she was a local that Ben Affleck had discovered.

No, she was so believable. Just amazing. It will be interesting to see what Ben comes up with next.

Working with Ben, was it a different experience working with a director who’s also an actor?

It’s different, but everybody is different. Everybody has their own approach to things. You want to think that because an actor is now directing that their approach would now be more “on your side,” so to speak. I’m more of a hands-off person and Ben is very hands-on. But the proof is in the pudding, no matter what.

Well, it had an amazing cast of actors. And for Casey Affleck, this is really his breakout year.

Well, I just watched The Assassination of Jesse James, and was just blown away.

I thought that was maybe the best movie of the year.

Yeah, in fact, I had to keep rewinding it and watching it over because I felt I was missing things, it was so rich.

Didn’t it remind you of early Terrence Malick, or Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the way it just sort of washed over you?

Yes, very much. Casey was great, and I thought Brad (Pitt) did a great job. Just kept it very low.
I loved how everyone just looked so grimy, and had bad teeth. They all looked like they hadn’t washed in a few weeks, and you’d guess that life was like that back then.

Yeah, everything, down to the tiniest detail was right there.

Whereas in the old movies, like Henry King’s film Jesse James, Tyrone Power had perfect teeth and it looked like all his shirts had creases in them from the dry cleaners!

(laughs) Yeah, guys slept in their clothes all winter, out in fields…

Maybe once a month had a bath.

Maybe. If there was a woman somewhere. (laughs) Although if you don’t sweat much, you’re not going to smell bad, but you do shed skin every day.

I know that all my friends who’ve been in the service say it gets pretty ripe out in the field if you’re in close quarters with your boys.

Yeah, it’s not like a gym. I remember when I was first in the service, they’d drop you out in the middle of nowhere during basic training, and force you to get down in the mud and crawl around. It was nasty.

Where’d you do your basic?

Outside of San Antonio. Long time ago…(laughs)

You got to work with one of my heroes this year, Robert Benton, in Feast of Love.

Sweet man. Now there’s a guy who’s been in this business for a long time. He’s as quiet as can be. Quiet. And that’s how he directs. Just quiet. If he wants you to shift your performance slightly in this direction or that direction, that’s what he’ll ask you to do: “I want you to try something in this direction. See what happens…” Smart man. Uses a very unusual paint brush. I loved him. Loved working with him.

Well, if you look at his filmography, it says it all. He started out writing Bonnie & Clyde, for God’s sake.

Bob wrote Bonnie & Clyde?

Yeah, with David Newman. He started as a screenwriter.

I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know Jack Nicholson was a screenwriter.

Sure. Got started with Roger Corman in the ‘60s.

All these things go by me…(laughs)

He actually directed a really interesting picture in the early ‘70s called Drive He Said, about college basketball players and student radicals.

Yeah, I remember the title.

Bruce Dern played the coach and Robert Towne played a professor. Towne was a hell of a good actor, actually.

Well, acting is not all that difficult to do if you’ve got some modicum of intelligence. If you’ve got that, it’s fairly easy.

Let’s get back to Feast of Love. It was a very sweet movie.

Yeah it was, although I read a review from somebody who called it “saccharine.”

I thought it maybe treaded the line, but never crossed it.

I didn’t think so, either. When I saw it, I kept watching it to see Bob’s hand in it, just to see how the picture came together. I thought he did a really wonderful job.

You can tell it was made by a mature filmmaker, because you don’t notice he’s there.

Thank you! Please don’t show yourself.

Right, keep the camera still, get your actors in the frame, in focus, and shoot. The Clint Eastwood approach.

(laughs) Right! Right. I love Clint for that. He’s one of my favorites of all the directors I’ve worked with. He knows what he wants. He arrives prepared, and he leaves prepared. When he’s got what he wants, he’s gone. I love that. I’ve worked with him now twice, and am gearing up to work with him again on a story about Nelson Mandela, The Human Factor. It’s about a moment in his life during the 1995 World Cup championships in South Africa. It was early in his Presidency, and a very clarifying moment in South African history, when they really felt like they were going to make it, when it all looked like it was coming together. We have this terrific script, written from this guy's terrific book.

Have you met Mandela?

Oh, many times.

What were your impressions?

I can’t tell you anything you don’t know about him. His life is pretty much an open book, but he’s…have you ever met Bill Clinton?

Yes, briefly.

He’s like that. When he’s in your presence, you’re in his presence. When he’s talking to you, he’s talking only to you. It’s completely disarming. When I first met him, I was meeting him as the ex-President of a country. And I’d never met the leader of a country before, except for Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. I didn’t clam up on him, because you don’t want to be in that position and have nothing to say—even when the fact is you don’t know what to say sometimes, unless you’ve got a bone to pick!

Or you meet the person, and they have nothing to say.

Right, and I prefer to be with people who have something to say, which makes it easier for you to have something to say. I met the Imam, the sheik of Dubai. He’s a fascinating guy. He’s the leader of this state, not a country, because the United Arab Emirates are what comprise the country. Dubai is one of seven states in the Emirates. He’s got the idea that you have to build, build, build because eventually, the oil is going to run out. If the oil doesn’t run out, the price is going to go down so low eventually, that it might as well run out. I’m talking wishful thinking now, that eventually this country’s leaders are going to understand that it isn’t about money. It’s about sustainability. Right now, if you mention alternative forms of energy to anyone in the government, all they’ll want to talk about is what it will cost, which is stupid. It’s going to cost you more to establish it, than it’s going to cost you to run it. But we have to do it. Of course right now there are a lot of politicians who are in, or come from, the oil business, and the unions, and so on. So if you ask the oil industry and the auto industry to start re-cranking, and come up with a car that gets 40 miles to the gallon, or that will burn something other than oil and gasoline, you’ll get an argument about what it will cost to develop that. If you have a car that can run on E-85, which is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, do you know what the savings is on that in terms of using fossil fuels?

I can only imagine.

Just one day, one day, just look up in any major city in the world, and just look at the cars. Don’t think about the airplanes, or the trains, the boats, just the cars, running up and down the road, burning gasoline and diesel fuels. With biodiesel, you can make diesel fuel out of bacon grease, for God’s sake! So why aren’t we doing that? They say “the cost.” It’s got nothing to do with the cost. It’s “the cost” that’s going to kill us.

And they neglect to take the most expensive factor in that equation, which is the human factor, which is a more expensive factor than money.

And we say “they,” and that’s a vague term just in the process of talking about it. And I prefer to use the word “we,” really.

Sure. Who puts the politicians in office?

Right. We do.

The question is, why do we put the politicians in office? Where do our priorities lie?

Oh my God! Exactly.

And why do they run for office to begin with?

I know why you run for office. In politics, there is the come-on of making a change, getting things done. Unless you’re in politics, you don’t realize that you don’t get to go in and change things, and get things done. You go in and you play the game.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Right. Do you want to get something done? Why did your people vote you in? It ain’t about anything but money, on some level or other. What about something like health care? I’ll tell you what the response will be to questions about health care: numbers, numbers, numbers. You want to talk about the big political issue here? Let’s talk about children’s health care. Which children do you think we’re talking about here?

Poor people. Black people, brown people, recent immigrants.

Right, now let’s look at the numbers again.

Let’s talk about Hurricane Katrina.

Yes, let’s.

But you know what Katrina taught me? I think that racism, as we knew it in the ‘60s, is not the driving force behind discrimination anymore. Now it’s based on class.

Yes, been that way for years, since the early ‘80s.

Right. Most of the folks on the Gulf Coast that got hit, were poor whites. And they were treated as badly as the mostly-black population of the lower ninth ward in New Orleans. It said so much.

Right, we’ve got to stop talking about race. It’s not race. It’s money.

I don’t know that this country has ever cared about poor people. I don’t mean certain leaders haven’t cared, I mean we as a country have never truly cared about those who have less than we do.

No, for the simple reason that the country is pretty much based on the freedom to pursue your dreams. In India, if you’re born into a certain caste, that’s where you stay. Great Britain, same thing. Not here.

No. Here you can buy your way out.

Here you can buy your way out. You can come up with an idea that will allow you to become a king.

Well, look at you. You grew up poor, right?

Yeah, but let’s redefine “poor.” I think there are two kinds: there is a certain level of poverty where people tell their young: “This is where you are. This is where you are always going to be.” That’s a poverty of the mind, a poverty of the spirit. Then there’s another kind of poverty where you just don’t have a lot of money, but there’s a belief system in place. And in this country, it can work very well. We’ve tried to shut it down among the Mexican immigrants. That’s why they’re here. They view this as the place where you can transcend your position in life. I don’t think the country is ever really going to become socialist, however.

Of course not. This country is built on the bedrock of capitalism. For capitalism to exist, there has to be an underclass.

There must be. Right.

It will never change.

Not in our lifetime, anyway.

No, I mean it will never change.

Well, if it does change, we won’t be who we are.

It’s a free market economy. It’s not right. It’s not wrong. It just is.

Yeah, and it’s proven pretty much that it works.

When you mentioned that first kind of poverty, that’s what Gone Baby Gone was about, really.

Yeah, it’s a mind set. I say that as long as the Greyhound bus is in business, this is the best place in the world to be. “I’m never going to make it anywhere else. I can’t leave this little town.” Bullshit. You can leave this little town. But what life requires in a lot of cases, and particularly in this country, is courage. Get on the bus, Gus.

As always, we digress.

Yes, we do.

Let’s talk about The Bucket List.

Here was a situation where Morgan sort of gets to call the shots. It’s happened before in movies, and it’s such a thrill. I get a call from Rob Reiner about this story, which I’d read before. It was different before, and I’d turned it down. So Rob sends it to me and I read it, called him back and I really liked it, and loved the idea of being able to work with Rob. So I said I’d do it, but that I had someone in mind to play the other part: Jack Nicholson. So he said “Okay, we’ll get Jack.” Jack said “yes.” Rob told me that when Jack was approached to do it, Jack said “I’ll do it, but only if we can get Morgan Freeman for the other part.” (laughs) Jack, you see, was on my bucket list.

Ah, so you had your own drawn up.

You always do.

How’s your list coming? How far down are you?

Way down. Way down. There are still a few things…my dreams all come true. I wish for it, it seems to happen. I learned this years ago: if you want it, you’ll get it.

I’ve prayed at the temple of Jack Nicholson since I was eleven years-old and saw Cuckoo’s Nest for the first time. He’s one of my all-time heroes. Tell me about Jack.

Yeah, I’ve been a fan since Easy Rider, but the one that really did it for me was Five Easy Pieces. Oh, what a movie! He just knocked my socks off. So then I was like you, praying at the temple of Jack ever since. Then I had a chance to ride with him on the Warner Bros. plane with Clint, it must have been during Unforgiven. We were coming back to L.A. and he was hitching a ride. I got to jawing what a fan I was, and as actors will do, he expressed how he liked my work. Then we started talking about how if we ever get the chance…Then we started talking about not a remake, but a sequel, to The Last Detail, that would show those two sailors now, taking the same guy back to prison. But that didn’t pan out.

Would you say that you and Jack have a similar process?

Yeah: hit your mark, don’t bump into the furniture. (laughs)

James Cagney school of acting.

Spencer Tracy.

Fair enough.

Spencer was one of my idols as a kid. Spence, Bogie, Cagney, Robinson, Cooper. Loved Gary Cooper.

They were all less-is-more guys.

Mm-hmm.

It looked like you and Jack were having a lot of fun together.

I was literally wallowing in a dream come true! You don’t want to bore your fellow actor by saying ‘I’m so thrilled to be here with you.’ But every day, I wanted to say ‘Jack, I am so fucking thrilled…!’ (laughs)

What are some of the other things on your bucket list that you haven’t done yet?

I have a film company, called Revelations Entertainment, and a great partner who works her brains out there. I have put on my refrigerator door, a note that reads: “Academy Award nomination or award for Best Picture.” I don’t care if I ever win Best Actor, but Best Picture…there are so many great stories out there to tell.

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Talking with Gavin Hood of Tsotsi, Rendition, and Wolverine

This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Venice Magazine. I did the interview with Gavin a week or so before he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for Tsotsi. He's currently directing X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the solo feature film spin-off of the popular X-Men character. He's a thoughtful director with an eye on character. An interesting choice to be sure. I have a good feeling about Wolverine.

by Terry Keefe

"That's me!" Filmmaker Gavin Hood recalls those words being shouted by a young audience member watching Hood's feature Tsotsi, which centers around a young thug growing up in a shantytown near Johannesburg, South Africa, at a screening which Hood had organized for some of the kids from the shantytowns. Reflecting on that young man's moment of self-recognition, Hood hypothesizes, "There's something about feeling validated, that you exist. That you're not just on the sidelines. That your story is being told." The quest for self-identity is at the heart of Tsotsi's themes as a story, but it also is part of Hood's goals as a filmmaker working to tell South African stories. Like many a future film director, Hood spent much of his childhood going to films, but rarely saw stories about his own experiences on the screen. That's because the cinemas were dominated by the American and British films, almost exclusively. South Africa is not a nation with a huge film industry, but Hood does recollect seeing a film when he was 9 years old that spoke to his own life. It was entitled e'Lollipop (released in the U.S. as Forever Young, Forever Free) and was about two young friends, one white and the other black, torn apart by Apartheid. Says Hood of that moviegoing experience, "I remember being profoundly affected because it was the first time I saw a story about someone like me. I remember feeling quite a shock that movie weren't just about us watching other people. They could be about us watching ourselves. It's hard to say the moment you decided to make movies, but I think subliminally that was [it]."

The term "tsotsi" essentially means "thug" or "gangster" in the street language of the ghetto, but it also is the name taken by the lead character of Hood's film, played by Presley Chweneyagae. Tsotsi lost his parents at an early age and has been bringing himself up, like so many other children in the ghettos. He refuses to reflect on his past or even the name he once had, choosing to live only in a very violent today. That all starts to change when he carjacks a woman's vehicle in the suburbs and discovers that her baby is in the backseat. Rather than abandoning the child, Tsotsi attempts to take care of the child himself and this provides the catalyst for a change for the better within him. The film is based on a novel by famed South African writer Athol Fugard, which Hood recalled reading in college. He wanted to make a film of it then but knew that no one would finance the endeavour with his limited experience. But the job that Hood took after film school, making educational films for the Department of Health, would eventually provide him with strong knowledge of the townships, as that is where he often shot these health films about topics such as HIV. Hood came in contact with many young men like Tsotsi, gaining great insight into their characters. Says Hood, "You find that these kids are pretty tough when they're together. But when you get them one-on-one, mostly, but not all, they're just kids like everywhere else. Trying to put up a mask in order to prevent themselves from being vulnerable. Some people say about Tsotsi, 'You have this really tough kid [in the film] who gets a heart.' And my answer is, 'He's a kid who had a heart, who became tough to survive, but the heart's always there. You've just got to strip away the survival mechanism and get back to the heart.'"

Hugh Jackman in Hood's upcoming Wolverine.

With Tsotsi receiving both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations in the Foreign Film category, Hood is being flooded by studio offers which he is strongly considering. But he's also intending to dedicate the next month at least to the promotion of Tsotsi, which Miramax is releasing in theaters all over the world. The filmmaker definitely feels the responsibility of being at the vanguard of a new South African cinema. He says, "In America, people take it so for granted, and I don't know if you realize it, but almost every aspect of your lives has been examined on film. We don't do that in South Africa. We're starting to do that, and it's really exciting, being a part of that. We need more films and then I think we'll feel a greater sense of our own national identity."

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OSCAR-WINNER Louie Psihoyos: The Hollywood Interview

Oscar-winning filmmaker Louie Psihoyos.


LOUIE PSIHOYOS KEEPS WATCH ON THE COVE
By
Alex Simon

When Louie Psihoyos’ documentary The Cove was released last July by Roadside Attractions, it had already gained major buzz after nabbing the Best Documentary award at Sundance, and went on to score the Best Doc prize in some of Hollywood’s most coveted arenas: The DGA Award, The PGA Producer of the Year Award, The National Board of Review, The L.A. Film Critics, and the BFCA’s Critics Choice Award. It also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature—not too shabby for a first-time filmmaker. The Cove was released on DVD by Lionsgate in December.



Psihoyos (rhymes with Sequoias) has been one of the world’s top nature photographers for years, cutting his teeth immediately out of college by shooting for National Geographic, where he landed an 18 year tenure. His passion for diving and underwater photography led him to create, along with Jim Clark, The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) in 2005. It also led to his acquaintance with another legendary name in the world of the aquatic, Ric O’Barry, a once-legendary animal trainer who captured, and then trained, the five dolphins who, in the 1960s, starred in the hit TV show “Flipper” as the eponymous dolphin. It was the worldwide popularity of “Flipper” that gave rise to aquatic theme parks, such as Sea World, private “swim with the dolphins” organizations, and the popularity of dolphins as pets which people kept in their backyard pools. All of these factors produced one common denominator in the minds of fishermen: dolphins were suddenly a very lucrative business. When O’Barry realized what he’d unintentionally created, and after the death of the primary “Flipper” dolphin, who literally expired in O’Barry’s arms, Ric O’Barry became a committed conservationalist, and animal rights activist, realizing that dolphins (and their first cousins, the whale), are highly-intelligent mammals and not simple fish as many still believe, and are not meant to be put in captivity, or even worse, hunted and killed. It is the latter which brought O’Barry, and Louie Psihoyos, to the small fishing village of Taiji, Japan.

Seemingly built around its love of the creatures of the sea, the dolphin in particular, Taiji also hides a horrific secret: a remote, natural cove which is ominously surrounded by barbed wire and “keep out” signs, where the fishermen of Taiji, driven by the multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry and an even more scabrous market for mercury-tainted dolphin meat, engage in an unseen (and highly-taboo) hunt for creatures that are not only among the most advanced on Earth, but also among the most toxic, with their mercury levels topping five thousand times the safety level allotted for legally-sold seafood.

Working with model-makers at George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, Psihoyos and his team of filmmakers and activists made a series of cameras and microphones, disguised to look like the rocks of the cove, hid the equipment under cover of night, and captured some truly horrific footage, and equally chilling conversations from the fishermen, damning not only the fishermen and the community of Taiji, but the highest levels of the Japanese government, as well. One of the most provocative and incendiary documentary films in many years, The Cove combines covert op suspense with ecological and scientific fact. It is a unique work.

Louie Psihoyos sat down with The Interview during a recent L.A. stopover. Here’s what transpired:

Let’s start with how your journey from photographer to filmmaker to activist happened.

Louie Psihoyos: I was a still photographer for many years, then got into filmmaking because I wanted to create awareness of ocean issues. I was trying to really be objective when I went into this film, to tell both sides of the story, because I thought that’s where the magic was. When I realized that the other side didn’t really want their side told, probably because as Ric O’Barry said in the film, if the world found out what was actually happening there, they would be shut down. So I think the dolphin hunters realized that they were in an indefensible position on a couple levels, not just in terms of the humanity and the extinction of these creatures, but the inhumanity to man. These animals are toxic and their mercury levels far exceed the minimum toxicity levels allowed for seafood in Japan, five thousand times more toxic, in fact. I asked some of the scientists about why (the fishermen) continue to do it and they said “The money.”

Former dolphin trainer-turned animal rights activist Ric O'Barry.

Economics, plain and simple. And also sociology, it sounds like, because a big part of Japanese culture involves fishing, whaling, and fish in general. So it sounds like there’s also a certain nationalistic pride involved.

Sure, you could argue that, I suppose, but the types of boats they’re using and style of hunting they’re engaging in has only been in practice since 1933. My mother is older than their tradition. So it’s disingenuous to call it a tradition, plus if your tradition is poisoning people, you have to rethink your tradition. We had a tradition back in Colorado, just down the street in Rocky Flats, where they made triggers for plutonium bombs. The argument that the workers had there for continuing to do what they did was “Well, what are we going to do for a living if we don’t make bombs?” Well, they found other ways to make a living. The sons of the dolphin hunters told us that they don’t like doing it, either, that they’d rather be hunting lobster or crabs.

Let me play devil’s advocate for a few questions, if you don’t mind.
No, not at all.

You’re dealing with this very specific subculture of fishermen in this small region of Japan. If you ask an educated, upper-middle class person what they think of dolphin hunting, odds are they’ll agree with your position, because they realize dolphins aren’t so-called “lower creatures,” but actually very sophisticated mammals. But these fishermen are tough, blue-collar guys, most of whom I'm guessing aren’t terribly educated, have been fishermen for generations, probably hundreds of generations, would they really be able to make a living doing something else? Your example of Colorado is bit different. The town of Taiji struck me almost as the Asian equivalent of Appalachia, where people also have a tough time “getting out,” so to speak, and breaking with tradition, even though that tradition might be harmful to themselves, and to others. Is this a fair question?

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. They actually speak a dialect that few Japanese people understand. When we had the covert footage of them talking around the campfire, we had to find a translator who specifically knew this very obscure dialect. So yes, that’s one argument, and a variety of countries, including the U.S., are culpable in terms of the endangerment of whales and dolphins. The bottom line is that all those countries got the word pretty early that the hunting of these creatures continued to go on way after it was sustainable.

And it became illegal to hunt whales in 1986?

As a law it was 1982, and then it was actually implemented in 1986. But the Japanese are still doing it under the aegis of the scientific permit they issued to themselves when, of course, it’s not science. It’s just an excuse to do commercial whale hunting, which is very profitable.



Let’s get back to the original question, which was if you took whaling away from the country in general, and dolphin hunting away from this community in Taiji, would they have a source of income that they could survive on?

Take income away from a couple dozen people? I have to be honest that I don’t really care.

I had the impression that it was more than a couple dozen people, that most of the town depended on the income earned from the fruits of the sea. Taiji struck me as a “company town,” so to speak, just like a lot of the Appalachian communities were literally owned by mining corporations back in the day, and their people exploited.

Well, there’s 26 people in the boats, then the other people work in the slaughterhouse, some are the middlemen, but most of the fishing there is done from other sources. Tuna fishing, for example, is huge there. It has one of the biggest tuna fishing markets in the world. There is a dwindling supply of fish in the ocean, and I know that the top level people I’ve interviewed are keenly aware of it. The Deputy Minister of Fisheries, Akiranakmai, I sat on a plane next to him for ten hours, on a flight from Dallas to Japan. We had had this footage for a couple years that I didn’t want to sit on, because I knew that more of these animals were going to be slaughtered and more children and adults poisoned. So I cut together a P.S.A. from what we’d shot, along with the scientific facts, with the idea of showing it to the Japanese delegate of the I.W.C. So I hop on this plane, one of the last people on board, and there’s this empty seat next to me, and who should sit down next to me, but this man, Akiranakamai! (laughs) I thought, if there is a God, then he has a really good sense of humor. I waited till the plane took off so it would be uncomfortable for him to try and get up to change places with someone on the plane. So I turned to him and asked ‘Do you have any idea who I am?’ He said “No.” I said “Well I know who you are, and I’d like to show you some movies.” And I did. He was furious at the fact that we’d gotten this footage. I said ‘Listen, you’re responsible for five thousand tons of toxic dolphin meat being put on the market every year, a lot of it being sold as fake whale meat. How do you feel about that? You could stop it.’ His response was “Well, I’m in charge of food security, not food safety.”

Louie Psihoyos confers with the model-makers at ILM.

You touch on a very important cultural point: Japanese culture is all based on hierarchy. One of the most telling moments that illustrates this point in your film is when you showed the footage to Akiranakamai’s subordinate, his only response was “On whose authority did you film this?” He couldn’t respond any other way, with a real opinion, and neither, obviously, could his boss. So how do you battle something so firmly rooted in a culture that’s completely different from ours?

Well, hopefully this film will cut through, to some level, to the hierarchy, where it will be shut down. There’s two ways to kill a rabbit: you destroy all the grass that it’s eating or you shoot it through the head. With this film, I think we can do both. The Minister of Health, she could shut this down. The minimum amount of mercury allowed in fish to consumed in Japan is .04 parts per million. Dolphin meat has anywhere from 5-5,000 parts per million.

You raise another alarming point in the film, that there are many other very popular types of fish that also have high amounts of toxicity in them: swordfish, tuna, and grouper. What are some of the others you mentioned?
Marlin. Shark. There are advisories for mercury in all 50 states of this country, so it’s available. On the DVD extras for The Cove, we have a 24-minute short that’s on this subject, as well.

Ric O'Barry and friend.

Another devil’s advocate question: the ultra-left wing environmentalists who, peacefully, are trying to stop the slaughter of dolphins in this film, it could be argued, are the opposite side of the coin from the extreme right wing who, sometimes violently, in this country picket and in the extreme, bomb abortion clinics or assassinate OBGYNs. In both cases, you have a small group of people trying to keep another group of people from engaging in a way of life that makes their living. I happen to think the extreme right-wingers are naïve if they think that their actions will ever help repeal Roe vs. Wade. Are the left-wingers equally naïve to think that their actions and that of a very talented filmmaker will make a difference here, or are their ideals, and strategy, progressive?

For me, personally, I think it’s progressive, as are most animal rights issues. I personally stopped eating things that walk 25 years ago, however I’m not militant about it. My wife still eats meat, as do my kids. I try to wear vegan shoes. (laughs) But if I was eating fish that was toxic with mercury, I would hope someone would tell me! Some of these fish should have poison labels on them when they reach stores. I’ll give you even more of a left wing point-of-view. At the core of this, we’re not making demons out of the dolphin hunters as much as we are the rest of society for toxifying these animals. It’s such a big issue, but the way we’re getting our energy through the burning of fossil fuels is destroying the planet through acidification. We’re going to lose all the corral reefs by the end of this century. Now do I use energy every day? Sure. When I charged all my electric devices in my hotel room, am I engaging in hypocritical behavior? You bet.

We all do, even the best-intentioned of us, just to survive.

Right, just to survive. Halfway through the making of this film, I realized that we were taking another left turn in the story, in that the film wasn’t just about dolphins and the bad guys who hunt and kill them, but that the real bad guys of the story are us. I did a carbon assessment of what it would take to make the film at that point, and came up with a figure of 646 tons of carbon that would be put into the environment to make the film. Because we were producing the film in Colorado, most of our power there is coal-derived, and coal has a lot of mercury in it. So I realized that one of the dirtiest things you can do to the environment is to make a film about it. (laughs)

A still from the covertly-filmed dolphin hunt inside the cove.

So what do you do in your daily life to combat this?

Well, that realization changed the way we used energy from then on. I’m the Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society, and we installed 120 solar panels on our roof, which generates 140% of our electric needs. The electric company gives us a check every month, as opposed to the other way around. We have two electric cars, not the hybrids, but completely electric, that can go 80 miles an hour and 120 miles per charge. The license plate reads “VUS”—Vehicle Using Sun, the opposite of an SUV. Now all our neighbors are installing solar panels on their roofs. We’re trying to do the same thing with this film, to show people what’s possible if you’re committed.

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A Talk with Alex Gibney: Director of Taxi to the Dark Side

Alex Gibney's Academy Award-nominated documentary Taxi to the Dark Side

Note: This article on documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney appeared last month in Venice Magazine. Today, he received a well-deserved Oscar nod in the Best Documentary Feature Category for Taxi to the Dark Side, his disturbing investigation into torture in American prisons during wartime, that being now. His previous directorial doc, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is also a masterwork of investigative journalism.

Taxi Driver
Alex Gibney’s new documentary on torture is a harrowing new ride you won’t want to take. But you have to.
By Terry Keefe

About six weeks before he passed away, Alex Gibney’s father, once a Naval interrogator during World War II, and later a journalist himself, unhooked his oxygen tank and asked his filmmaker son to get his video camera. Frank Gibney wished to speak about the subject of torture and how outraged he was at the revelations about the use of torture on prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan. Specifically, the elder Gibney directed his indignation at the leaders (you know them, but for the record, they include George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzalez), who he believed the buck stopped with. Frank Gibney had interrogated Japanese prisoners during the battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest, and although they were dealing with that era’s version of suicide bombers in the form of kamikaze pilots, Gibney and his fellow soldiers chose not to cross the line into brutality. When asked why not by his son, Frank Gibney replied that to do so would be to sacrifice the very values they were fighting for. Alex Gibney elaborates, “It’s not to say that there weren’t suspensions of human rights during World War II. The Japanese Internment Camps in particular come to mine. But it was so far from my father’s frame of reference that FDR would have condoned torture. One of the things that he was fighting for, particularly against the Japanese, who did torture prisoners, was for a better possibility.” Alex Gibney’s interview with his father closes his new documentary on the use of torture during the War on Terror, entitled Taxi to the Dark Side, a film which should be required viewing for every American, from the highest towers of political power to the youngest soldiers in the field. Gibney’s latest continues his examination of the force of corruption, explored via the business world previously in his documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and how it virals itself into every part of an organization, whether that be a company or a country, when immorality is left unchecked, or condoned, by the people at the top of the power structure.

The taxi cab referenced in the title was driven by an Afghan named Dilawar, who was taken prisoner as a suspected terrorist by the military and brought to the air base at Bagram, where he was tortured and eventually died. It turned out that Dilawar was innocent, a fact that was known by his interrogators towards the end of his life. But they continued to abuse him anyway, largely because Dilawar had been stuck inside an organizational culture of torture that knew few boundaries and was sanctioned at the highest levels. Says Gibney, “Structurally, the story of Dilawar allowed me to show the breath of the policy, a relentless torture mechanism that corrupts everything in its path.“ Indeed, although Dilawar himself never left Afghanistan, the passengers in his cab, also suspected terrorists, were brought to Guantanamo and tortured. And that same system of torture, when used in Guantanamo on the suspected “20th Hijacker” of 9/11, Mohamed al-Qahtani, eventually extracted statements about links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which Colin Powell later used in his now-infamous U.N. speech in the lead-up to the current Iraq War. And who knows whether the information al-Qahtani provided was true? A man who is getting waterboarded might say anything. “The one thing we know about torture is that the interrogator gets what he wants to hear,“ explains Gibney. “And I think that became appealing for the Bush administration over time. It became a mechanism, conscious or unconscious for them, which got them back the info they wanted to hear. That’s a terrifying idea. That’s the Soviet Union. That’s the gulag. You’re intentionally seeking false confessions to confirm your beliefs.” He goes on to say, “People were stating for years that this was just a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib. But it was a much more pervasive policy. It gets into the corruption of the American character.”

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