IF A TREE FALLS: A STORY OF THE EARTH LIBERATION FRONT: Marshall Curry keeps revealing new strengths as a filmmaker. His first film STREET FIGHT covered bare knuckle politics. Then RACING DREAMS captured coming of age. This time he turns to an investigation, delving into the underground environmental movement who perpetrated arson in pursuit of their ideals.

THE INTERRUPTERS: When you take director Steve James (HOOP DREAMS) and pair him with author-turned-producer Alex Kotlowitz (“There Are No Children Here”), you can expect a Chicago epic. Those expectations are fulfilled as they immerse us into an urban drama that plays like a non-fiction version of THE WIRE.

MAGIC TRIP: KEN KESEY’S SEARCH FOR A KOOL PLACE: In 1964, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drove a psychedelic-painted school bus across the country, filming on 16mm cameras. Their trip was made legendary by Tom Wolfe’s book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” but the footage was never seen by outsiders. Now Alex Gibney (CLIENT 9) and his longtime editor Alison Ellwood tap this material to tell a crucial chapter of ‘60s history.

PAGE ONE: A YEAR INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES: The New York Times, dubbed the “gray lady,” has long been an inscrutable institution, but finally a filmmaker has slipped under her skirt. Director Andrew Rossi knows how to eavesdrop, having previously documented the elite restaurant Le Cirque (A TABLE IN HEAVEN). In PAGE ONE, he takes us behind the scenes with reporters David Carr, Brian Stelter and others for the best film about the newspaper business since ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN.

PROJECT NIM: In the 1970s, a Columbia University professor set out to teach a chimpanzee how to communicate through sign language. The chimp Nim lived under a media spotlight, passed from one caretaker to another like a Dickensian orphan. Director James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE) traces the life of Nim as a bildungsroman. (Watching the film may pique your curiosity for Elizabeth Hess’s book “Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human.”) Last fall, Marsh – who’s based in Copenhagen - popped by STF, while on a shoot for this film. He was being tight-lipped about its subject matter. Now I can understand why: he was sitting on a gold mine of characters.

THE REDEMPTION OF GENERAL BUTT NAKED: The name may sound absurd, but General Butt Naked was no joke. During Liberia’s civil wars, he led a paramilitary gang responsible for killing thousands. Then he found religion. Filmmakers Daniele Anastasion and Eric Strauss follow him over several years as he seeks forgiveness from his victims and their families. He is mesmerizing character alternately evoking charm, horror, sympathy and suspicion.

WE WERE HERE: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic. Filmmaker David Weissman (THE COCKETTES) explores the years of outbreak in San Francisco through the stories of five people who lived through it. Their powerful testimony creates a vital link from past to present, between the living and the dead.

Follow thompowers on Twitter for more updates throughout the Sundance Film Festival.

STF: Start by telling us how you got drawn into this material and story.

Lemkin: I actually went to Cambodia in September 2006 with a plan to develop a film about the Khmer Rouge going to trial. So I was interested in meeting two or three of the Khmer Rouge leaders, and Thet Sambath was my fixer, he was my translator. And I realized very quickly that Brother Number Two, Nuon Chea, was the key guy to really get to know. But when Sambath and I went together to film with Nuon Chea, he told me nothing. And I realized that the two of them had a very interesting relationship, even though Nuon Chea was saying nothing. And on the way back to the capital city of Phnom Penh, in those days it was about a 10-hour drive because the road was really bad—Sambath told me all about what he was doing for the previous, at that point, seven years. So gradually we evolved a plan that we would make a film together. He hadn’t planned at that point to make a film. He was just simply trying to find out what had happened. And it was actually seven years before he picked up a camera, about a month before I met him. And he didn’t pick up a camera to make a film, he picked up a camera because I think after about five or six years he had started to record on minidisc the conversations that they had had. And he recorded about 1,000 hours of their conversations, and he was recording them because he thought at any moment this old man may die, and no one will believe what he was getting. And then just before I met him, he had started to videotape these conversations, again, with this idea that he wanted to prove that this man, this person that was so feared and reviled and mythologized in Cambodia had actually really spoken to him in this way.

STF: Can you talk about the experience of showing this film in Cambodian exile communities?

Lemkin: It’s been really exciting actually. We made the film as a sort of universal statement so that it could have some kind of appeal and meaning to anybody who wants to watch it. But when it comes to Cambodians—I suppose ideally the audience for this film would be Cambodians in Cambodia. But the film has not been given a permit to be shown in Cambodia. It’s been shown in a very limited way there. But in this country, which has a very large Cambodian diaspora—there’s about 300,000 Cambodians living here, perhaps 90% because of the killing fields. The refugee float that came in the late 70s and early 80s was all caused by the disruptions that happened in Cambodia and Indochina during that period. So all of these people are living here, and the younger people, what they call the “1.5 generation” which are the people born in Cambodia or the refugee camps in Thailand and then come to live here and grow up as Americans, and the second generation—born here in the U.S.—find a huge gap between them and their parents, who are first generation refugees who don’t really want to talk about this traumatic experience. And this film, perhaps because it’s done through the prism of a younger person—if he’d come to live in the U.S. he’d have been a 1.5 generation migrant—they can relate to that. Because in a way the film is not really about what happened in the Khmer Rouge, the film is really about how does somebody who was affected by the Khmer Rouge as a child find out and come to terms with what happened to them as a child. So people have been really, really I think energized, galvanized by it, particularly in the large [exile] communities. There are two large communities. One is in Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles. Another one is in Lowell, just outside of Boston. With the community in Long Beach we very recently did a project where survivors of the killing fields met by video conference, live, the people who are in this film. So for the first time ever, the victims of the killing field spoke to the perpetrators, and they had a three-hour dialogue. Although [the film] is about very difficult, dark, violent and horrible episodes, the people see a way forward, out of this miasma. And this process that we went through in Long Beach is leading to a lot of community activity—both in Long Beach and in Lowell.

STF: What’s it been like for Sambath to have this film out now?

Lemkin: I think he’s really excited. The film is doing well here, but it’s also having a huge impact in places like the Balkan region, where people are seeing a lot of echoes with their experience. For Sambath, I think that’s a very exciting idea—the idea that his very lonely work, that he’d done for so many years, has been able to touch people. And not touch people in some kind of passive, curious way, but actually touch people in a very kind of active and forward-looking way. So he’s very pleased and very satisfied with what has happened. But at the same time that has to be tempered with the fact that it’s still quite dangerous to deal with this story in Cambodia. It’s dangerous for him. There have been some times where he has been driving near his farm, near where his father was killed and where Nuon Chea also lived, so the location in itself is quite symbolic. But it’s very far away from where he and his family live in Phnom Penh. So he’s quite often driving in rural areas, and there’s been a few times this year when he’s been run off the road in his car by people unknown. And also—I just mentioned the Long Beach project we did a couple of months ago—the people who were in that, Khoun and Suon and another person who was not included in the final cut of the film, the three of them crossed back into Cambodia from Thailand and were tracked by police and people. And they have received visits from, shall we say men with guns in the last few weeks. So the whole thing is very much on a knife’s edge. I don’t think the film can be, in the immediate future, shown in Cambodia around communities and villages because it’s still quite a dangerous story to tell.

Audience: What did you learn about mass murder through this film?

Lemkin: In a very simple nutshell, it’s done by ordinary people. And no matter how we might think that we could not do it, I think all of us could be involved in it if the situation is such that that kind of thing happens. Because I think the two people that we really focus on in this film, Khoun and Suon, are not people who have ever done any kind of criminal, violent, evil—if you want to put it that way—behavior since. And in that three year period, from 1975 to the beginning of 1979, they were responsible for killing, I mean Suon killed about 300 people. Khoun killed over 3,000 people, but I don’t think they’re different from us. I learned a lot of things, but I think that would be at the top.

Audience: Have any of Sambeth’s tapes been used in the prosecution of Nuon Chea?

Lemkin: So Nuon Chea was arrested in September 2007. The process of the United Nations trial is that he was investigated for, it turned out, three years for an indictment which they then served in September 2010. It’s 750 pages long and he’s charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The investigating judges asked for us to provide the film to them as part of their dossier of evidence against Nuon Shea when the film was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival of January last year. We declined to provide it to them, not because we want to impede the trial or the tribunal process or the justice process, but because the context in which this film was made and in which these interviews and accounts were obtained were such that—principally Sambath—but Sambath and myself had presented ourselves as not being agents of the court. We were not working for the court, we said to these people—Nuon Chea and everybody else we filmed and asked please tell us what you did, what you know happened 30 years ago—we are not officers of the court. We are interested in getting this information into the public domain. So for the first four months of 2010 the court attempted to subpoena material. I live in Oxford, England, and someone came to my house from the court to try and take the film. And we declined, we resisted that for the reasons I have given. And it has been very controversial, we’ve come under criticism for it. But we’ve stuck by that. The trial itself of Nuon Chea will start as early as March or April of this year, so possibly in two or three months, but more likely in June. It will last two years minimum, possibly three years. He’s on trial with four other people. And when the court issued their order in which they kind of desisted from their subpoena operation—they said they would no longer pursue us through the courts—they said they would actually use the film. The film will be shown on PBS in June or July and they’ll get a copy then. So we have no problem with the film being used in the court, but there is a problem with actually handing it over directly because that is not the context in which the testimony was granted or obtained.

Audience: After you decided to make the documentary with Sambath how did you convince Nuon Chea to let you film him?

Lemkin: Basically, Nuon Chea had been working with Sambath for seven years—well maybe about five years sort of in depth at that point. Sambath and I made the film together, we own the film together, we are joint partners, it was a joint English-Cambodian venture. So Nuon Chea was very happy to be filmed by me, working with Sambath. What he wasn’t happy to do, however, was to answer very secret and difficult questions about what he and Pol Pot had gotten up to and what they had decided in various meetings. So when you see in this film the very kind of internal, the most secret admissions that he makes, I was not there. I couldn’t be there for him to say that kind of thing. He was very happy for it to be used in the film, but he wasn’t comfortable to speak like that in the presence of a foreigner. So the way that we worked was that some of the material that you see in the film when Nuon Chea is talking precedes my involvement with Sambath. So it’s from August 2006. And then we had about a year of filming where I wasn’t there by any means, all of the time, but Sambath was going and interviewing him and we were working on what questions and what kind of things needed to be done.

Audience: Do you think that there’s somebody responsible for these killings, and if a finger is pointed at somebody, shouldn’t it be a leader?

Lemkin: To be honest, I don’t really think that when you get 1.7 million people killed like this, that you can pin it down to one person. We’re making a second film from the material that we have, and in that film you’ll see that Nuon Chea’s own family was completely devastated by the killing fields. He lost 40 of his own relatives—even his uncle was killed. And when his uncle was killed and he learned about it at the secret central committee meeting in late 1975, he was actually too scared to raise any objection. And I think that gives you an idea of when you get into this world of mass killing, you are dealing with things that are much, much greater than individual people. Forces that are more elemental, more scary, more structural, more profound are at work. And I don’t think that blaming one person or another person, or even five people or ten people gets you to a point where you really understand what’s happened.

Audience: Initially we were led to believe that they were political killings, but later it seems to be more ethnic. Could you comment on that, and what does Sambath think about that?

Lemkin: Essentially, what had happened—and this will come out in our second film which will be on the DVD when we release it—what happened the Khmer Rouge is that you have two sides of a very secret communist party that had grown up underground and was very secretive in the way it operated. Suddenly it captured state power in 1975 and ran the country. But in coming to state power it was not a unified, controlled organism. It was actually a party in which there were two parts who were in very deep conflict with each other. The Communist Party of Kampuchea [Khmer Rouge] had been set up by Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Indochinese communist party, in 1930. And all of that goes back to the struggle against French colonialism. So the problem inside the Khmer Rouge was that Pol Pot and Nuon Chea came to power within the Communist Party as people who said, “We are true Cambodians.” As [Nuon Chea] says, “I fight for the nation, I don’t care about individuals, the nation is more important.” What he means by that is, “We are the true representatives of the Khmer people. We are the true representatives of the Cambodian spirit that goes back to Angkor Wat,” and that great civilization that had been in place 1,000 years earlier. The other people who were in the Khmer Rouge were much more happy—this is simplifying it hugely—to deal with the Vietnamese big brother that was next door, and which regarded the Cambodian communist party as basically an adjunct. That thereby became an ethnic conflict, because people who were seen as being ethnically connected to Vietnam were [considered to be] in a suspect community. So when the ethnic minorities were being targeted, as you see in the film, these people were not being targeted because they were ethnic minorities. They were being targeted because that ethnic minority was determined as being a group that might have sympathies with Vietnam. And the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia within the communist party, within the Khmer Rouge was the primary problem. And this kind of nationalism—which became a very racist, supremacist chauvinism, which is what Nuon Chea and Pol Pot really advocated to separate themselves from Vietnam—is really at the heart of why this violence became so extreme, and had such resonance in the country. And it has huge resonance even now. The reason why the story is still scary is that the government is quite worried that if the government puts Nuon Chea in the witness box in say, June of this year, and he starts making statements about, “I am the true spirit of Cambodia”—actually there are many people in Cambodia who believe that. There are many Cambodian people here, in America, who believe that there is a real pure nationalism about the Khmer Rouge that should be celebrated. Because they still now see Vietnam—Vietnam came in in about 1979 and actually militarily occupied the country for nearly 10 years until the demise of the Soviet Union, which was its backer—even now, many people see the current government as being a Vietnamese stooge. So you still have a huge problem of nationalism and ethnic identity in Cambodia. And, forgetting communism—because I think communism maybe has nothing to do with it, nearly—the appeal of Nuon Chea going on television every night and saying, “I am the true Khmer. We were fighting for the sovereignty of the country, we were defending the country,” will still have a huge resonance in Cambodia, even today. I mean, it seems unbelievable, but it is the truth.

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

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]