Official Silence Can’t Sabotage “Zero Days”

Filmmaker Alex Gibney explores covert operation vs. Iran nuke program.

An NSA source from ZERO DAYS, a Magnolia Pictures release.
An NSA source from ZERO DAYS, a Magnolia Pictures release.
Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Near the beginning of Zero Days, a new documentary film that plays like a thriller, a series of government officials are asked about Stuxnet, a computer worm that may have been co-developed by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. “This is classified,” one replies. “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” explains another. “Next question,” says a third. The montage is followed by a voiceover from the filmmaker: “This was beginning to piss me off.”

The filmmaker, Alex Gibney, is still pissed off about the hushed tones and averted eyes surrounding talk of the malware that reportedly destroyed up to a thousand of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

“What was so bizarre was that you had an event that actually happened,” says Gibney, “and everyone knew it happened, and it was widely known at least to certain people in the press, and yet talking to people in the administration, it was like talking to people outside the Statue of Liberty and looking up at the statue and having them say, ‘What Statue of Liberty?’… Something had so palpably happened, yet they refused to acknowledge it.”

What’s definitely happening is Zero Days, which Magnolia Pictures will release July 8 in 25 cities and on iTunes and Amazon. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. The film is the latest in a long series of intriguing and acclaimed documentaries by the 62-year-old Gibney, who lives in Summit.

Gibney remains incredulous over the official silence he confronted in making Zero Days. “Of course it was a covert operation, and while it’s going on it has to be a secret, but after the operation is blown it seems to me you have to talk about it. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it wouldn’t be appropriate for the government to say, ‘What bomb?’ At some point I felt I had to remark on the absurdity of these things.”

The cinematic sleuthing that results exposes the reality of cyberwarfare. That may sound like a snooze, but, like so many of Gibney’s films, ends up being enthralling, galling, upsetting and a general mind-blower. The jolting upshot: Though American wars once upon a time involved direct combat on land, in water or in the air, cyberspace has removed the need to physically attack a country in order to do it irreparable harm.

“We’re the most vulnerable country because we’re so interconnected, so dependent on the Internet,” says Gibney, whose film company, Jigsaw Productions, is based in New York City. “I was really staggered by what I learned, in terms of the nature of the threat. I got an unintended peek into the consequences of covert action. We’re just beginning to realize how powerful these cyberweapons are.”

Although not a household name, Gibney has dug some deep grooves in the world of film. He won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for Taxi to the Dark Side, a 2007 film about the American military’s use of torture. He appears in the movie as he tracks the unsolved murder of an innocent Afghani taxi driver who, in 2002, was taken for questioning at Bagram Force Air Base and died five days later. He also appears, briefly, in Zero Days and in The Armstrong Lie, his 2013 documentary about Lance Armstrong’s rise and fall from grace from doping.

His other films include Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, the winner of three Emmys in 2015; the Grammy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning 2015 film Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown for HBO; Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, the winner of three primetime Emmy awards in 2013; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, nominated in 2005 for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.

Abuse of power is an obvious theme tying together Gibney’s films. The subject has been much on his mind since well before he moved 18 years ago from Los Angeles to Summit.

Issues of inequality were as central to his childhood as sitcoms and comic books might have been to other kids growing up in the 1960s. “Families don’t work like vending machines, where you put in this input and out comes a predictable result,” says Gibney. “But clearly my father and my stepfather had a strong impact on me.”

Gibney grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother, Harriet, was the director of health education at Children’s Hospital in Boston. His father, Frank, was a journalist and a well-known expert on Japan who authored nearly a dozen books on the subject. They divorced when Alex was still in grade school.

In 1969, when Gibney was 15, the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut, after his mother married William Sloane Coffin Jr., a Presbyterian minister. Coffin was the chaplain at Yale and a crusader for liberal causes, including civil rights, opposition to the war in Vietnam and nuclear disarmament. The Nation called him “the clear heir to Rev. Martin Luther King.”

But all was not perfect and peaceful in the young Gibney’s orbit. According to tabloid reports in 1979, when Harriet and Coffin were divorcing, his mother suffered a hairline fracture from a blow leveled by Coffin. Gibney has acknowledged that his mother and Coffin were heavy drinkers. Coffin and Frank Gibney died within days of each other in 2006.

Like Coffin and Frank Gibney, Alex went to college at Yale. He started out studying Japanese, but decided that wasn’t the path for him. After graduation he enrolled at UCLA Film School but dropped out when he was offered a job working for the Samuel Goldwyn Company. By 1992, he was hired to write and produce The Pacific Century, a PBS miniseries based upon Frank’s work. That project was successful enough to lead him, in 1997, to producing a TV series called The Fifties, based on David Halberstam’s book of the same name. By 2003, he was named series producer for Martin Scorsese’s seven-part PBS series The Blues.

He considers The Blues a life-changer.  “I was always interested in both fiction and nonfiction. And I felt that they inform each other. I liked that. But it wasn’t until The Blues series that the light bulb about that really went off,” says Gibney. “What was cool about it was you had these very accomplished fiction filmmakers—Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin and others—and they were taking on this documentary subject with great respect for real life and the reality of it all, but nevertheless with a real personal vision that was aesthetically adventurous. I thought, Wow, that’s it.”

Turning back to Zero Days, Gibney reflects on the complications he encountered. “I had so much difficulty getting people to talk that that frustration became part of the story, like it did in The Armstrong Lie,” he says.

The frustrations may never fully disappear, but he has found a way to move on.  “You have to see it as part of a process. You learn something, you tell the world, and hopefully you engage people and have some impact,” he says. “But you can’t be frozen.”

Few would accuse him of that. In addition to the films Gibney directs and produces, Jigsaw Productions is also behind The New Yorker Presents, an Internet series that digs into the New Yorker magazine’s reporting; Death Row Stories, a CNN series executive produced by Gibney and Robert Redford that explores the U.S. capital punishment system; Edge of Eighteen, a series for Al Jazeera America about high school seniors on the brink of adulthood; and Parched, a four-part investigative docu-series about the ongoing threat of drought. The latter will air on NatGeo in 171 countries and have a limited theatrical release in 2017.

Also on the drawing board: his first narrative feature film, The Action, based on Betty Medsger’s nonfiction book The Burglary: The Discovery of J Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, about a group of concerned citizens upset with what they thought was an abuse of power. Filming could begin next year.

Gibney is also developing a TV series with Dan Futterman and Lawrence Wright called The Looming Tower, based on Wright’s book about Al-Qaeda, as well as a drama series for HBO, with Laura Dern starring and executive producing, about a court-appointed psychiatrist tasked with determining whether the death-row inmates she examines are sane enough to be killed by the state.

Compared to his career, life around Summit is rather uneventful for Gibney. His wife, Anne, teaches free yoga classes to cancer patients and survivors at Morristown Medical Center and in a studio on the couple’s property.  Two of their three children are grown; the youngest is a college student.  “I’m kinda boring,” Gibney says of his domestic life. “I play tennis, I go to movies.”

Still, he sometimes reckons with raised eyebrows about his arty profession.

“When we first got [to Summit] I was at one of those parent parties at my youngest daughter’s school, and somebody asked me what I did. When I told them they looked at me with great concern and said, Wouldn’t you be happier in Montclair?,” Gibney says, laughing at the memory. “Summit was a funny place for us to end up. It’s changing a little now. But certainly back then it was all investment bankers and corporate people.”

His persona, like his films, can be provocative.

“People at my tennis club call me ‘Hollywood,’” he says. “I’m the source of some sardonic ribbing.”

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  1. Hollywood Glee

    It’s easy to see the unseen with the dialogue that’s taking place over
    this. I saw the Gibney film, “Zero Days” at the Newseum in Washington,
    DC, followed by a conversation and Q & A here: https://hollywoodglee.com/2016
    It’s definitely a Pandora’s box! Where it goes is anybody’s guess and
    is open to even more speculation, in my opinion. For example, the DNC
    hack fits right into Zero Days.