Top 30 Alex Gibney Quotes

I thought it was a classic David and Goliath story, and I was fully onboard Team WikiLeaks. I was very pro the leaks, barring the redaction issue. But I see WikiLeaks as a publisher.

It’s difficult for one filmmaker to criticize another. That’s a job best left to critics.

‘Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream’ is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan’s Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

’24’ glamorizes torture. I don’t think there’s any other way of putting it.

When it comes to governments and corporations, we should demand that less is secret. That’s where corruption flowers.

Dialogue between people of differing views is critical for fostering understanding in a democracy.

Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can’t.

The whole macho thing has to be reexamined. Because in my view, the Bush administration was weak, not strong. To engage in a policy of torture is a weak policy. Because ultimately, it encourages the terrorists. It undermines our own values. It corrupts our system. And it doesn’t get good intelligence.

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission. And so, the transparency radical became a secret-keeper instead of a secret-leaker. And that, I think, is a big problem.

In the U.S., hospitals are rewarded for keeping hospital beds full. That’s the market at work. The question is: should we work for the market, or should the market work for us?

Even with a villain, you don’t want him just to be some pockmarked punchbag.

It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in ‘Mea Maxima Culpa.’

There are many people, including me, who admire the original mission of WikiLeaks.

Oscar always opens up doors, especially the night of the Oscars. On that night, you hold that gold man, and it’s like having Gandalf’s staff. You can go anywhere and do anything. It’s a talisman of such power.

The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.

I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother – they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.

There are all sorts of inventive ways to get your film out there: sometimes via the Internet, sometimes via viral screenings in people’s living rooms across the country.

Insurance companies pay big bucks for procedures but next to nothing for patient consultations and preventive medicine, which is what most medicine is.

I would tell filmmakers: ‘Don’t just be seduced by the same old, same old. There are interesting things you can explore that may get your film out there to audiences better than the traditional distribution mechanisms.’

Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the U.S. Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren’t guilty of anything. Whoops!

In the case of ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, an issue that is central to the film – torture – is so important that I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible and inaccurate in the way they have treated this issue in their film.

Here’s where the insurance companies really fail us. They over-pay hospitals, specialists and drug companies and then raise premiums to cover the costs. Further, when they pay hospitals 115% of what it should cost to care for a patient, they are paying for inefficiency that can be dangerous.

You have to assume once you go online, anything you put there can be made public. Yet while you’re online, you feel like it’s a private, sacred space. But you’re really broadcasting to the world.

Why do we even need WikiLeaks? They’re not the only organization that publishes leaks. And they don’t have some special technology that allows them to post on the Internet with mirrored sites. The idea of WikiLeaks lives on, but as an organization, it’s become increasingly irrelevant.

I am furious at the way that we have allowed money to subvert our democracy. I am appalled at the way that the U.S., a very wealthy nation, permits and even encourages a level of poverty that other wealthy nations would not even consider.

I don’t consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.

For years, the Bush Administration eviscerated all the military and legal structures that were designed to separate the innocent from the guilty in the ‘Global War on Terror.’

I think the future of journalism is going to be a battle between caution and recklessness. And I think a little bit of recklessness is a good thing, as some of the WikiLeaks cables proved.

Jesus Christ never preached there should be celibate priests. The only reason the church has this is because it’s a mechanism of power and control. You can control priests who are celibate.

Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there’s a certain expectation of documentaries that they’re supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether – well, perhaps.