Spitzer’s popularity, at its source, was based on the moral authority earned by a man once lionized as the Sheriff of Wall Street. He ably transmuted his status as a government outsider and reformist into enough political capital to win the governorship. But, as shown in Client 9, the confrontational, and somewhat autocratic style that had served him so well as attorney general clashed horribly with the Byzantine politics of the state capital. And regardless of how one might feel about the practice, the fact that Spitzer paid for sex ineluctably undercuts any moral legitimacy he might have had, and—in turn—decimates his political credibility. His continued reluctance to publicly address the reasons behind his infidelity in Client 9 perhaps leaves Spitzer reduced to a tragic hero, but still a man for whom it is hard to feel any empathy. Following the screening STF Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with Gibney.

STF: Talk to me about getting Eliot Spitzer’s cooperation for this film. What did that take?

Gibney: Honestly, time. There was no deal made, there was no quid pro quo. But Peter Elkind and I—Peter is the guy who wrote the book [Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer], and he also appears in the film—he had known Eliot from before. He had done profiles on him and known him actually at Princeton. And we approached him rather early, and there was a period of time I think for about eight months he was under the cloud of the federal prosecution, so he wasn’t going to talk to anybody. The day after the election, miraculously, the Department of Justice said they weren’t going to prosecute. And we had a number of informal meetings and said, look, in order to move forward you’re going to have to reckon with the past. And we’re going to do this film and this book whether you cooperate or not, but I think you’re going to want to have your say, and ultimately I think he just agreed with that. So we had a number of informal conversations before he agreed to participate on the record, but ultimately that was the argument.

STF: In the informal conversations, was he quizzing you?

Gibney: Yeah, honestly, I think he wanted to know that we would be fair, and I think he was also intrigued by the idea that it wasn’t just about the scandal, that it was a rise and fall story. So for him it was a way to have his say. The only deal we made—and I guess there is kind of a deal, but it’s the kind of deal that any journalist would make as a matter of course in terms of fact-checking—was that he said if you discover anything that hasn’t been publicly known please share it with me so that I can comment. He had no control over it, but I thought that was perfectly fair.

STF: Did that happen, did you come across anything that you had to go to him with?

Gibney: Well, Angelina would be one. I think everybody thought that Ashley Dupre was the key person, the central player. It turns out that she was really a bit player, and Angelina was really much more the center. And the center in a way that was, I think, relevant to Spitzer’s character, but also to evidence about the way that the investigation that took him out was conducted. So she turned out to be a very central character, but one that I think Elliott probably would have preferred that we didn’t discover.

STF: How did you get to her when all these other journalists that covered this story didn’t?

Gibney: Well that’s a good question. I think in part because, and this is something that’s interesting about scandal—I think that Ashley, as Angelina said, fit the bill. In other words everybody had the hooker. See, she’s the hooker, she’s the hooker in the story, we’ve got her. She likes to have her picture taken, she’s got big breasts, it’s all good—it’s perfect. So they weren’t motivated in some way shape or form to look past that. Now, we had access to a lot of records, and a lot of informal stuff—both websites that we were able to discover, and then ultimately, a cell phone of one of the bookers at the Emperors Club. And also, we talked to a number of people who gave us clues that there was this other person that was a regular. That made us want to dig a little bit further. I managed to find out what this person’s name was—her real name—through Facebook. Through Facebook I was able to find friends that we had in common. And I reached out to one of them, they made an introduction, we sat down and I said,I know who you are, would you talk to me? And she said that she would be willing, provided I keep her identity a secret, which is why we did what we did in terms of the device [an actor plays Angelina in the film]. I think the reason I found her, and I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest investigative journalist—I was motivated to find her. In part because Ashley Dupre didn’t want to talk, and I pursued her for a long time. But it left a hole in the film because I was convinced that she was very central. And it motivated us, but it was interesting to me that no one else was similarly motivated. As Angelina herself said, her number was clearly leaked to people, but she never answered the calls. So whether it was through perseverance or luck or whatever, we managed to find out who she was and managed to get her to—well not to appear—but at least get her testimony.

STF: Has the film’s release shaken loose any other bits of the story? What have been people’s reaction to the film who are caught up in the story?

Gibney: Ken Langone has been talking it up. He likes the film. And the other thing that’s interesting is that there have been some materials released. There was—in between the moment when we showed the film as a work in progress at the Tribeca Film Festival—mysteriously the suspicious activity report of Eliot Spitzer was leaked to the newspapers. It’s funny how that happens. And we’ve since also submitted a [Freedom of Information Act request], so we’re hoping to find out a little more about the federal investigation. But by and large I think the reaction to the film has been pretty good in the sense that I don’t think we got too much wrong. No one’s really come out and said you really goofed on this one.

Audience: Was the actress’s portrayal based on the actual interview, or just a written transcript. Did she have an opportunity to hear or see the woman herself?

Gibney: She didn’t for reasons of security, that is to say the promise I made to the real Angelina, I couldn’t share [recorded material] with the actress. I didn’t videotape the interview with the real Angelina. I did audiotape it, but her voice is distinctive, so I couldn’t share that with the actress. So it was purely from a transcript. I did two very long interviews with Angelina. We transcribed them, cut them down and then asked [actor] Wrenn Schmidt to perform. When we’d get to certain parts in the text I would say,Angelina found this funny. She was dismissive here. And so I would direct her so that she would have the same kind of affect as the real Angelina.

Audience: Did you make an effort to interview Eliot Spitzer’s wife?

Gibney: I did. I reached out to her directly, and she declined.

Audience: Were you interested in further exploring why people do things like this to seek comfort?

Gibney: To the extent that it was relevant to Eliot as a public figure. In other words, here was a guy who had a lot to lose by doing what he did. And why did he do what he did? So I pursued that avenue. Ultimately, and obviously I flicked at it to some extent and I’m interested in it and part of what this film is about is fidelity, infidelity, marriage, men and women. That’s part of what the film is about. At the same time, I felt that I was somewhat constrained in terms of going too far, because there are some aspects that I think are private. So I tried to walk that fine line between investigating what is private, but relevant to the public sphere, and that which is purely private. I felt I took it about as far as I could, or should.

Audience: Before you screened the film initially in public, I’m assuming that you screened it for Eliot, and what was his feedback?

Gibney: I did not screen it for Eliot, I did not screen it for any of the participants before we showed it in public. We showed it once at the Tribeca Film Festival as a work in progress. It was a bit longer than this. It contained some other details, but by and large, it was more or less the same film. And I felt it was unfair for me to screen it for anybody who was involved prior to the first public screening. Once that happened—I invited Eliot to that screening but he didn’t come—then I did show it to Eliot. Eliot’s view was he felt that it was fair. Not to say between fair and good, but fair and balanced. And his only remark was that he wished I had changed the ending, but that was a joke.

Audience: What influenced your decision to include [performance artist] Karen Finley in the film?

Gibney: I was somewhat criticized for including Karen Finley, and I think unfairly criticized. People were saying, well what is Karen Finley doing here? I like Karen, and she did a really interesting play about this called The Impulse to Suck. But it is an interesting play and there was an earlier cut of the film where I included a great deal more of the play in the rough cut because she mused about these issues that the gentleman back there was asking about. Why do we do these things? What about prostitution? Is prostitution a good thing or a bad thing? What about men and women and their relationships and infidelity and all of that. The other thing that I found interesting about Karen was that she was one of the few people who was frank, open and honest about sex. It’s difficult to talk about sex for many people, and she was one who I found very candid about it. Even the remark that she makes in the film, this idea of the whole sex scandal and of course we’re all intrigued by a sex scandal when you have a public figure, and particularly when details start to come out. Whether they’re true details or false details like the black socks. And the perniciousness and the seductiveness of them is that we see someone’s face and then we imagine in our mind’s eye, some salacious act. And it becomes part of this very intriguing dance that we all do in our imaginations, and Karen was one to point that out. And then at the very end of the film she has that wonderful statement about how we want our politicians to be like gods. So I found what she had to say to be very smart. And smart about a subject that a lot of people don’t normally like to talk about. And I thought it was important. I put her in that section of the film finally because it seemed to be about the culture of the whole scandal and that seemed to be where she fit. I think she’s an important component of the film.

Audience: Was a set used to interview Spitzer?

Gibney: I interviewed Spitzer five times, but I asked him to wear the same tie each time so that it would have the appearance of the same interview. It was the apartment of one of my producers. So we had access to it, and it was near his home, so it was easy for him to get there. So it wasn’t a film set, it was a real apartment, but it was one to which we had ongoing access, which was important because I felt that we might interview him a number of times.

Audience: Was Angelina supportive or defensive of the industry that she worked in? And can you shed any light on her becoming a commodities trader?

Gibney: Angelina was very proud of what she did, she felt it was a calling. And so she was very unapologetic about it, even though she was concerned about revealing her identity because there were members of her family who probably wouldn’t share the same view. As far as her becoming a commodities trader, it won’t surprise you to learn that she had a number of high-net worth clients, and they taught her very much about the financial industry. And so that ended up becoming one of the things that she then used to make a lot of money as a kind of sideline.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

Stranger Than Fiction: Winter 2011 Season    

JAN 10: Pre-season Mon. special - CLIENT 9: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIOT SPITZER (2010, Q&A w/ dir Alex Gibney)

JAN 11: Opening Night - ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE (2010, Q&A w/ co-dir Rob Lemkin)

JAN 19: Wed Night Special - GREY GARDENS (1976, Q&A w/ filmmakers Albert Maysles & Muffie Myers)

JAN 25: SCHMATTA: FROM RAGS TO RICHES TO RAGS (2009, Q&A w/ dir Marc Levin)

FEB 1: POSTER GIRL (2010, Q&A w/ dir Sara Nesson)

FEB 8: NOBODY’S BUSINESS (1996, Q&A w/ dir Alan Berliner)

FEB 15: FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL (1997, Q&A w/ friends of the late Karen Schmeer)

FEB 22: ROCK SCHOOL (2005, Q&A w/ dir Don Argott)

MAR 1: LOVE ON DELIVERY (2007, Q&A w/ dir Janus Metz & collaborator Sine Plambech)

MAR 8: THEATER OF WAR (2008, Q&A w/ dir John Walter)

MAR 15:  Closing Night - HARLAN COUNTY USA (1976, Q&A w/ dir Barbara Kopple)

Q: When you were going through all of the material to tell Pat Tillman’s story, did you realize that the story already on the table from Dannie’s [Tillman’s mother] research, or were you going and digging up more in the process of making this film?

A: We did benefit greatly from Dannie. What we found on our own was a lot of the archival material [of Tillman] that had obviously been seen before. But putting something in this totally different context was almost like finding things anew. It’s an interesting question because the answer is yes and no. It wasn’t new but it felt new. And similarly with [Dannie’s military research] documents, with that box of documents, you could actually download from a military site a pdf of all 3,500 pages. It was still redacted, but even the stuff that you could find in there was actually shocking to read that nobody had reported on, that anyone could have downloaded. That was a funny feeling of, “Why isn’t anyone doing any real journalism about this?”

Q: Was there any one person that you wanted to talk to that you couldn’t?

A: Sure, we would have loved to have spoken with the [Army rangers who shot and killed Tillman], but for obvious reasons they didn’t want to speak to us. We got one or two of them on the phone and I think they literally laughed at us. It is known who they are and what their names are and we made a decision not to put their faces and their name in the film because we felt like it would have been gratuitous. You, as an audience member, might have felt like you wanted to know that. But just as a scene, given that they wouldn’t consent to an interview, it just felt kind of underhanded and like it diverted attention away from what we felt like the film was really about. I would have loved to have them, but not in that way.

Q: Did you have any experiences with people you expected to have a different reaction to the film?

A: Molly and I went up to West Point and had a really good screening. And then a guy came up to me afterwards and was like, “You know I’m kind of involved in this story in a way. I worked for Pete Geren at the time”—that’s the secretary of the army.  And then he offered me a compliment. He said, “I thought you did a wonderful job getting the family’s perspective.” We were driving home and I said to Molly, “Well that was nice, that guy who worked for Pete Geren who felt the film was valid.” And she said no, that was an underhanded compliment. She realized that he was actually insulting the film and insulting me, and that went right over my head. He basically said I think you did a great job of making the family feel better about their perspective, or something like that. And I thought, great, that’s what we set out to do. But he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Q:  So much of this film is dependent on people telling stories in an interview setting. I was wondering if you can tell me on a filmmaking level, what was that like?

A: In terms of sitting with [Tillman’s family], the main thing there was we kind of jumped up at the opportunity to not engage in the hagiography that had been a part of the telling of Pat Tillman’s life since when he enlisted. Some of our early conversations with them involved us saying things like, “Pat was such a humble guy he would probably hate all of this attention.” And Marie [Tillman’s wife] would tell us, he would love this attention. They really wanted us to bring him back down to earth, and they wanted us to portray him as a complex guy with contradictions. And it took us a little bit of time to figure out, ok that’s great. Complex storytelling and not putting him up on such a high pedestal that he’s out of reach and he’s not human. So once we realized that that’s what they wanted us to do and they realized that we were comfortable doing that then it became a pretty interesting conversation. And the only other thing I can say about the craft of it is that they are deeply private. You expect that a family who has had tragedy like this is going to have a hard time talking about the tragic part of it. but they also had a hard time talking about their positive feelings about Pat, because they had seen it cheapened so many times. The reason Kevin [Tillman’s brother] didn’t want to talk to us was he said, “What am I going to do, just sit there and talk about how much I fucking love my brother?” It cheapens it, he didn’t want to have it spoonfed back to him as a sound bite.

Audience: I’m curious, after you lived with this subject for so long, why do you think they shot Pat?

A: This is not a satisfying answer. The best answer that anyone can come up with is [the shooters’] own words, which are “I wanted to stay in the firefight, I was excited.” I think that people are conflicted. Many that go into combat don’t want their life to be in danger—nobody does. But at the same time very few soldiers want to come home and tell their great grandkids that they didn’t see any action back in Afghanistan in 2004. So you have these conflicting tendencies as a soldier. When you think that there’s an ambush happening, on one hand you’re scared and confused, and on the other hand you’re psyched because you finally get to do what you’ve been trained to do. And it makes for a great adventure story. Which is part of the reason why people go off to war. I mean it’s complicated. But that’s why I think they shot at him for that long. It doesn’t totally answer the question of how you shoot at somebody for a minute at 40 meters. But the reality is just that there is no proof that the soldiers had it in for him, or that there was anything deliberate about it.

Audience: What did the family think of the movie?

A: We were holding our breath when we showed it to them. I can tell you we sent them dvds and pat’s youngest brother—Richard—who was not in the movie in our first cut, which was meant to be our final cut. He made the mistake of saying, boy you guys did a good job and I wish I had said yes to you. And I said, can you get on a redeye, and we put him on a redeye and opened up the cut and put him in there. So there was originally a cut without him, as crazy as it seems, considering what a great asset he is to the film. We were very nervous, but the reality is that we worked really closely with them. We went native, we do buy into their position. I’d love to see the documentary that supports the government’s position on this, but we didn’t feel the need to bean count on both sides. So they were happy with that.

Audience: What are some of the myths about Tillman’s death coming from the right?

A: The one that interests me the most is that Pat is this paragon of moral certitude. The thing is, Pat was a guy who had really strong beliefs, but his best quality—according to the people who loved him and knew him—was that he could change his mind. That he would constantly think about things from different people’s perspectives, and try and see the other side of his beliefs—culturally, intellectually. And that’s what the right calls flip flopping. When 9/11 happened the right basically decreed that we had shook the Vietnam syndrome and had returned to a time of moral certitude and collective purpose like the halcyon days of World War II. And Pat Tillman was seen as the poster boy for that. A guy who dropped everything right away because he had his patriotism and everything else was secondary. And that’s a very facile way of looking at what he did, and a really wrongheaded way of looking at his personality.
[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

In the film, Jutta Cords narrates her own story of being a teenager labeled half-Jewish by the government, and stripped of her rights to attend university or get married. Wasson draws on a trove of 8mm footage shot by her boyfriend (and future husband) Helmuth Cords that documents the couples’ struggle to survive Nazi Germany. The story is made all the more rare by the fact that the pair were able to survive the war and emigrate to the U.S., despite their detention by the Gestapo following Helmuth’s participation in Operation Valkyrie, a botched assassination attempt against Hilter by the German Resistance. Following the screening, STF Artistic Director Thom Powers talked with Jutta Cords and Wasson.

STF: What is it like to hear your story told this way?

Cords: It’s a big surprise, and I feel happy for my children to see memories in color, if you will. I think it is something that can be of interest to all young people and, having been a teacher myself, I think that that is an important and helpful thing.

STF: John-Keith can you tell me how you came to this story?

Wasson: Jutta is actually a friend of the family, although I’d never met her before. And so I was working on a different project, and I heard Jutta has this amazing story. So I grabbed the camera and drove up for a few hours. Within about a half hour I realized this is quite a great story. Once we found the footage and letters and everything we figured, “Hey we might actually be able to make a movie out of this.”

STF: Talk to me about the footage. What was the state of the footage—what was it like working with that?

Wasson: Well, Jutta and Helmuth—they’re German of course—and so they had meticulously organized these 8mm films and I guess the miraculous part is how the films survive because the majority of everything Jutta had was destroyed by various people. And yet these films were hidden in Helmuth’s mother’s apartment, which hadn’t actually been broken into throughout the entire war. It’s one of those things, it’s like a box of presents, and you don’t know what you’re getting really. So you start with the first reel, and you see a few dogs running around and somebody waving to the camera and you’re thinking, “Okay, well this is really home footage.” But then by the third or the fourth reel, you realize that Helmuth himself was an amazing filmmaker and he had a story. So I guess I kind of took up the reins and maybe shaped it out a little bit more.

STF: Jutta had you revisited that footage much since it was taken, or was its recovery for this film new to you?

Cords: No. I had thought about it quite a bit and I was thrilled when there was an interest to look at it because I felt it was important to see that not all Germans were ghastly creatures, and that there were people who did things to make it a better place when Hitler came into power.

[Q & A has been condensed and edited for clarity]