WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking from the balcony of Ecuador’s embassy in London on August 19, 2012.
LOS ANGELES: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may claim to be a champion of transparency, but when an Oscar-winning filmmaker wanted to shine a light on his rise to fame after publishing secret US diplomatic cables on his website, Assange was none too pleased.
Alex Gibney set out to uncover the story behind Assange, 41, and the website he founded in 2006 to leak classified information submitted by anonymous sources, but received little cooperation from the former computer hacker.
In theatres yeserday, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks explores how WikiLeaks, at its height, facilitated the publication of thousands of classified US government documents, including diplomatic cables and US Army logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To tell the story of WikiLeaks, Gibney sought to interview Assange but found the elusive Australian difficult to persuade, eventually deciding to film without him.
But the filmmaker spoke to Assange several times off camera, and said he came to form a picture of a complex character.
“If you catch him in unguarded moments, he can be terribly charming, self-deprecating and a really engaging human being,” Gibney said.
However, whenever Assange felt the conversation was becoming an official interview, Gibney said he became unwilling to “give me the kind of honest reflections that would have been so important (to the film),” likening him to a “human soap box.”
When Gibney decided to film the documentary without Assange’s participation, he said the WikiLeaks founder did not take the news well.
“He likens himself as the puppet master, the one who’s pulling the strings on the media. I think he took some offense at the idea that I was independent,” Gibney said, adding that Assange had, at one point, asked to be paid for participating.
“He mentioned that the market rate for an interview with him was a million dollars. I didn’t inquire what market that was,” Gibney said with a laugh.
Gibney said Assange had asked him to report what other interview subjects in the documentary were saying about him, something he found to be “highly ironic.”
“(WikiLeaks) was supposed to be a transparency organisation, and he was asking me to engage with him as if we’re now some kind of espionage outfit,” he said.
Gibney, 59, has become a prolific documentarian over the past decade, garnering critical praise for his timely films such as 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and 2007’s Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side.
The filmmaker was drawn to WikiLeaks initially with the idea of it being a “David and Goliath story, with Julian Assange being David,” but over the course of filming for two years, Gibney found the story of WikiLeaks to be as complex as its founder.
The timing of the film’s release couldn’t be more poignant, with US Army private, Bradley Manning, 25, who is accused of leaking classified data to the WikiLeaks website, due to stand trial on June 3. He could face life imprisonment.
Reuters
