Oscar Winner Alex Gibney Talks Learning to Lean In, Paul Simon and How to Reengage With Viewers

variety.com:

Annika Pham In a keynote conversation Tuesday at Copenhagen’s leading international documentary festival CPH:DOX, Academy Award winning filmmaker and producer Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) talked honestly about the winding road of making it in the documentary world, the creative process, and the lessons of life, partly learned from singer-songwriter Paul Simon.

The inspirational talk at the baroque Kunsthal Charlottenborg exhibition space, with moderator Thom Powers, Toronto Film Festival programmer, was a prelude to the festival’s screening of Gibney’s two-part doc “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” which debuted on MGM+ March 17. “What I learned from Paul was that when he wrote ‘The Sound of Silence,’ he sat alone and words came to him; creativity started to flow, and just like Bob Dylan with ‘Mr.

Tambourine Man,’ [the song] suddenly fit and he felt like a conduit.” Gibney said letting free associations take over, having an unguarded curiosity and generosity were some of the wise lessons that the 83 year-old Simon passed on to him, although he himself had long mastered the art of documentary filmmaking, where the film emerges only in the cutting room, sometimes moving away from the original idea.

In the case of “In Reckless Dreams,” Gibney said the final two-part doc was a far cry from the initial panoramic look of Simon’s career, suggested by the iconic American singer/songwriter after he’d watched Gibney’s 2015 miniseries “Sinatra – All or Nothing at All.” “Although I’m a big fan of Paul, as a filmmaker, doing that kind of biopic wasn’t much of a turn on,” admitted Gibney. “It’s not until I went to watch him create his latest album ‘Seven Psalms,’ and found.