I’ve been fortunate over the last 10 years or so to interview documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney several times, as he’s worked his way through films about all manner of liars, public figures, and everything in between.
Over the years, Gibney has analyzed liars in big business (ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM), the military (TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE, which won the Best Documentary Oscar), the government (CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES OF MONEY), politicians (CLIENT 9: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIOT SPITZER), and the church (MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD). He's also dabbled in sports docs (CATCHING HELL for ESPN) and personality profiles of uncooperative subjects, such as Julian Assange in WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS, as well as slightly more willing subjects like Lance Armstrong in last year’s THE ARMSTRONG LIE.
In recent years, Gibney has been on a bit of a music kick, beginning with the joyous FINDING FELA. from earlier this year (about Fela Kuti), through to the two-part, four-hour Frank Sinatra doc he’s directing and currently assembling for HBO (likely for airing in 2015). And premiering tonight on HBO, Gibney has made a music-packed biography of the Godfather of Soul called MR. DYNAMITE: THE RISE OF JAMES BROWN. The title is quite deliberate, as the film focuses quite squarely on the elements in Brown’s life that impacted and fed his most successful music, while steering mostly clear of his drug years and stories of domestic abuse.
This is not to say MR. DYNAMITE paints a glossy image of Brown—quite the contrary. Much as the biopic GET ON UP did earlier this year (the two films cover much of the same period in Brown’s life), the doc shows Brown as a tyrant of a bandleader, a cheapskate when it came to business, and a hellraiser anytime he thought he or black people were being insulting by the media, government or anybody. His role in the Civil Rights movement is well documented, but so is his odd affiliation with Richard Nixon, which resulted in many calling him a sellout to his people. The film portrays Brown as a many of many contradictions, but one who was one of the single most popular and revered musicians of his or any other time. There’s a bevy of never-before-seen concert footage that will simply take your breath away, and for that reason alone, the film is worth a look.
I spoke with Gibney last week about MR. DYNAMITE, and his approach to documentaries about musicians, especially those he knows little about going into the project. Please enjoy my talk with the great Alex Gibney…
Capone: Hi, Alex. How are you?
Alex Gibney: Good, man. How are you?
Capone: Good. I wouldn’t expect you to necessarily remember it, but we met just last year when you were in Chicago for THE ARMSTRONG LIE. I feel like that film actually took a personal toll on you.
AG: It probably did. [pause] It definitely did.
Capone: I remember that part of the conversation we had was about having a personal connection to the subject or the subject matter, and I’ve noticed that the music documentaries that you’ve done since THE ARMSTRONG LIE are all about people who are dead. So that’s one way of not forming a personal connection.
AG: [laughs] Well you can form a personal connection to the music, but for me the music ones are really a way of exploring. And frankly, that’s how the ARMSTRONG thing started, too. I was exploring a world that I didn’t know anything about. I knew something about James Brown, of course, but I had never gone deep. So that was the fun of this one.
Capone: Would it be fair to call you a casual fan of James Brown before you started working on this?
AG: I was a casual fan. I was not an expert in any way, shape, or form.
Capone: How do you begin that process about digging into the life of someone you don’t have that intimate knowledge of beforehand?
AG: We surrounded ourselves with a bunch of people who either had spent their lives steeping themselves from this. Christian McBride would have been one of those people. Also Questlove in that regard. But it was really just me immersing myself in the world by talking to people that were there. You start going on that journey, and that’s where it really gets interesting. We went all over the country talking to people that were there, particularly his band members, because I got really interested in the music and how the music evolved and how the music changed musical culture, really. He’s the one guy who takes music from the big-band era of jazz to hip-hop. And there’s not many people you could say that about. In fact, I’d say there’s just the one.
So you go and start immersing yourself and talking to people. In some cases, I would circle back with people and actually interview them a second time, because I’d learned more by that time and was able to probe a little bit deeper.
Capone: And you’re not attempting to cover his entire life.
AG: And that was very much my intent from the beginning. I didn’t exactly know where we were going to go when we started the project, but I knew I didn’t want to do a cradle-to-grave biography, because that’s usually an exercise in stone-skipping. It’s all surface, because you can’t dig in deep on anything in particular.
Capone: The title of the film reveals that—THE RISE OF JAMES BROWN. It’s about that particular time in his career where he was ascending. If I’m not mistaken, you had the cooperation of his estate. When you do have that level of cooperation, is there the risk of not being able to cover certain things about him?
AG: No, I don’t think so. I think I know where you’re going with that question, but that’s not the reason we shied away from some of the later period, when he got into a lot of trouble with drugs and domestic abuse or violence against women. We touch on some of that—not the drugs, but some of the violence. But that’s not why we avoided it. It had nothing to do with the estate. It had to do with where we were putting our focus. When we were looking for a way of getting at this subject, it seemed to me that what was interesting about it were two things simultaneously. One was music and how it evolved, and the other was his involvement in the Civil Rights movement. If you put it together, that seems to be an opportunity to talk about how he changed the culture, and that in a way is what the film became about.
Capone: I think those are where the biggest surprises are going to be for a lot of people, just how he was at the epicenter of so many important Civil Rights and Black Power moments.
AG: He was the main line from the Civil Rights movement to popular culture. The Civil Rights movement, particularly in the ’50s and early ’60s, there was a vibe about using the spirituals and “We Shall Overcome” and all that. James Brown had become a riveting entertainer by the late ’60s, and now he was the guy who was at the heart of the musical culture. And a connection between him and the idea of black empowerment and what was going on, that was a really important link that we wanted to look at.
Capone: In terms of your investigating his life and immersing yourself, were those parts of his life where the biggest surprises were for you?
AG: They were, and sometimes they were pointed out to us. We had a guy on board who was helping us out as a consultant, a writer named Christopher John Farley. He was the one who flagged early on the importance of Brown’s appearance at the March Against Fear. We started to dig into that, and at the beginning there was precious little footage, but we were able to piece together from a bunch of different sources a sense of his presence at that event. It was terribly important. And we talked to Cleveland Sellers, and there’s that great quote from him where he says, “Martin Luther King was in the middle of all these bitter squabbles, and they were planning strategy, and it was taking a long time. Finally, Martin Luther King said, ‘You guys can sit here and squabble all you want to. I’m going to go see James Brown.’” That was the draw. That testified also to how his electrifying presence galvanized everybody and brought a sense that people would watch James Brown, which meant they would now watch what was going on in Mississippi. This was the time before 24/7 news. So his appearance there, along with some other celebrities, was really important.
Capone: Speaking of rare footage, the film is just wall-to-wall music. Even when people are talking, there’s music behind them. But the live footage is incredible, and I’m a little bit more than a casual fan, and I haven’t seen a lot of the performance film. And I’ve always said if I ever become a filmmaker, I’m going to make nothing but music documentaries because I want to have access to that kind of footage just to watch it as a fan.
AG: You never know when you’re going to get it, but the big breakthrough were these three concerts at the Olympia—’66, ’67, and ’71, I believe. And then we also found a reel that had been missing from the famous Boston concert in ’68, so that was a treasure trove. It really gives you an insight. He was such an electrifying live performer. So much of what I knew about his performances all had to do with the records, like the Live at the Apollo records, but that was a real eye opener for me, digging into that footage that existed. That’s when we knew we had a movie.
Capone: Was there any restoration done to that footage?
AG: There was definitely some, and there is probably more to be done. One of the masters, we weren’t able to properly restore in time. I’m hoping to follow up on that and make sure that that happens, so that it gets the restoration that it is due.
Capone: I noticed that there were a few of the same producers as the feature GET ON UP that came out earlier this year, including Mick Jagger. Was the intention always to have the two films be like companion pieces to come out at around the same time?
AG: I think the intent was always to do two. I think the idea was they would do a fiction film and a non-fiction film, but they were not necessarily designed as companion pieces. Each was to have its own identity, and frankly, Mick was very good about that. He approached me about doing the documentary, and I was delighted and thrilled and honored. He was also very good in not saying, “This is exactly how it should be.” What the documentary became was a process of discovery, which is how it has to work in documentaries, because you wanna sculpt the story according to your very best material, not according to some random idea of what you think it might be.
Capone: I think some of the more interesting moments in the film have to do with what would seem to be contradictory things in James Brown’s life. There’s a lot of talk about his economic conservatism, but then of course there’s the very funny line that he says more than once in the film “I pay my taxes.” It’s not a glossy version of his life story. Then the other side is the well-documented way that he ran his band.
AG: No, not at all. Melvin Parker tells a pretty astounding story about how James Brown takes a swing, a left hook at his brother [Maceo] and crushed his jaw. Maceo Parker was one of the great saxophone players. He was going to attack his livelihood, and Melvin Parker was there ready, willing, and able to pull out his gun and put it right in James Brown’s nose. He was apparently talking to Fred Wesley today and said, “Yeah, man. If he had kept swinging, I would have pulled the trigger, too.” It was a rough and tumble world, there’s no doubt about it.
Capone: It seems like his affiliation as loose as it was with Richard Nixon was a huge blight on the way people looked at him at that time. What do you think was going on in his head that made him think that was a wise decision?
AG: This is me talking just from my gut, I think Al Sharpton has a view that I think is well formed because he spent a lot of time with him, and Al Sharpton was no fan of Richard Nixon. But my view was there were two things. One is, he gravitated toward power wherever it was; Nixon was in power, so that’s where he went. But also he was susceptible to I think this rather bogus line that Nixon was feeding about pull yourself up by your own boot straps—self sufficiency. You don’t need government hand outs. You don’t need welfare. Just do it on your own. And then James Brown wrote that song, "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself)" So he was susceptible to this idea of boot strap economics, and so long as he removed the barriers, then people could do it on their own.
But I think what he missed, obviously, is he was a phenomenally driven person. Obviously, the pain and anguish early in his life made him just driven. And the band members all talked about it. He never stopped. And he was also ruthless. But everybody isn’t like that, and what happens to those people who aren’t utterly ruthless in order to get ahead? So that’s the part that I don’t think he properly reckoned with, and he didn’t properly reckon with the idea that you needed to address all these years of racism that kept a whole group of people down.
So I think he got tricked by Nixon. I think he got played in a way that he didn’t really get, but in the film you can hear it. You can hear Nixon saying, “No more black stuff. No more black stuff.” He’s utterly dismissive. Then he’s like, “What am I going to have to say to this guy?” Just pure political bullshit. But unfortunately, Mr. Brown fell for it.
Capone: What’s interesting about that little clip of Nixon talking on the tapes is, he says, “No more. I’m not doing anything having to do with blacks anymore.” And then his advisor says, “Well, what about James Brown?” And then he relents and says, “Well, yeah. We can’t ignore James Brown.”
AG: “We can’t ignore James Brown.” Then he says, “What do I have to say to him?” And the deal was, James Brown was coming to him to help to get Martin Luther King Day declared, and Nixon just bull-shitted him. He said, “Well, we’re thinking about that.” He wasn’t thinking about that at all. That would have greatly upset his racist supporters. But at the same time, like every good politician, they know they have to use entertainers to further their political reach.
Capone: As you have now entered the music documentary field, is there a difference for you in terms of how you put them together compared to some of your more news-oriented documentaries?
AG: I wouldn’t call them necessarily news oriented, but I don’t know. It just depends. I’m a big believer in the idea that form follows function, and in a subject you find a form that seems appropriate. In this case, we felt the film should be structured as a musical, because a lot of the music actually drives the action and even sometimes some of the lyrics. When James Brown sings “Georgia,” that’s driving the action. And also, I wanted Brown to speak a lot. He speaks a lot to his music. So that was one idea. It’s similar to what I do in the others, but it’s more of a break for me, because it just celebrates a different part of humanity, and I enjoy that.
In a way, I got my start doing feature docs by being a producer on a series of feature docs that was all about music called “The Blues,” which was executive produced by Martin Scorsese. I was the series producer. And actually, that changed my career, because I had a front-row seat watching all these feature film makers like Scorsese, and Clint Eastwood and Wim Wenders and Mike Figgis, and Antoine Fuqua, all coming up with very different personal approaches to the subject matter and revering the subject and the music itself, but at the same time putting their own hop on the ball. I always liked that.
Capone: I wanted to ask you about this Frank Sinatra doc you’re doing for HBO; it sounds like you’re getting room to breathe with this one in terms of the length, which seems appropriate, because Frank Sinatra was more than just a singer. What is sort of the approach you’re taking with that?
AG: Let me get back to you on that when we’re done. [laughs]
Capone: Where are you in the process? Maybe that’s the better question.
AG: We’re deep in the cutting room, and we’re getting there. We’re getting there. We’re finding our way.
Capone: Again, in terms of your getting the cooperation of the estate on that one, what materials are you being given access that that have been sort of eye opening for you?
AG: Frank Sinatra’s voice, and when I say voice, I don’t just mean wonderful masters that people haven't heard before of him singing, but also him talking about his own life, and that part I think was vital, absolutely vital. So he becomes the undependable narrator of his own life.
Capone: So there’s no air date for that, right?
AG: No, not yet.
Capone: Alright, Alex. Best of luck with this. It was a real eye-opener for me. Thanks so much.
AG: Awesome. I’m really glad to hear that. Take care.
