By Ariel Vered

The Abu Ghraib torture and prison scandal dominated headlines in 2004 when photos were leaked that depicted the brutal and humiliating abuse of suspected terrorists by American military soldiers. Taxi to the Dark Side, the latest film from whistleblower Alex Gibney, director of the Oscar-nominated film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, demonstrates that Abu Ghraib torture was not an aberration, as the U.S. government would have Americans believe, but evidence of a more widespread problem. This, Gibney maintains, was not the exception, but the rule itself.

Taxi to the Dark Side is the story of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver who was taken to Bagram prison on December 5, 2002 on suspicion of involvement in a rocket attack and died five days later. More importantly, it's a mystery that takes the viewer from Bagram to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay as it investigates the military culture that enabled these injustices to take place. This is no simple "issues" film. In Taxi, which has been shortlisted for this year's Academy Awards, the narrative and images combine to depict a brutal—and altogether inconvenient—truth.

Gibney hasn't had a minute to himself for the past five days as he juggled talking to reporters about his latest film, while simultaneously preparing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson for its Sundance debut. But for a man who maneuvered through a cast of over 28 interview subjects and managed to create a visceral and intelligent portrait of the injustices of torture, it's all in a day's work.

BLACKBOOK: How do you feel about the controversy surrounding the film’s poster?

ALEX GIBNEY: What I found to be ironic and interesting about the whole thing was that it was an image that the U.S. military had already tried to ban. The photographer who took that image had his camera confiscated and his memory card wiped out. But he was able to get a pal of his to restore the hard drive in his camera and it was still there. So, it’s survived once, but then the MPAA called it offensive. I agree, but it’s also a real image. Ultimately it’s staying in, but it also testifies—in a time when we’re learning about the C.I.A.’s destruction of those interrogation videotapes—to the power of images, and how I think the Bush administration and others know that if you keep offensive images out of public view then people don’t get upset. We don’t want to show images of dead bodies, right? Because that would imply that there’s a war going on.

BB: Are you trying to reach the general public, or is this meant for the current administration?

AG: I’m not sure that the current administration can hear this message. I think they’re tone deaf. It’s for the American people. It’s for us—I certainly don’t put myself above the fray. This is our country. Look at what’s being done to our country. Let’s wake up. Let’s take it back.

BB: War is a popular theme in this year’s films, but they weren’t especially well attended. What do you think that says about the situation in Iraq?

AG: People want the war to go away. The Iraq films didn’t do well with the exception of [Charles Ferguson's] No End In Sight. But that took a perspective on war that most people hadn’t seen before. [The director] took us inside the administration, where you could see, horrifically, how these decisions were being made. There are lots of images of the war on television, and I think that’s led to a bit of war fatigue. Taxi isn’t really an Iraq film; rather, it’s kind of like an X-ray of the corruption of the American character. But it’s also a mystery story that starts over there and comes right back home, a story that makes palpable some big problems that all of us have to reckon with. How do we live in an era of fear and hold our heads high?

BB: Most of the film takes place in Afghanistan, so I’m not sure why people keep referring to it as an Iraq film.

AG: That makes me upset too. People have written about it like, "Here’s another film—they’ve all done pitifully at the box office—so I guess this one’s going to do badly too." Every film has to be judged on its own merit. Sometimes it has less to do with the subject, and more to do with how the story is told. Sometimes the real subject lies hidden beneath the original subject. "Is it about the dead body in that room, or is it about the mystery that lies beneath that murder?"

BB: Do you think that documentaries can better deal with these issues?

AG: I can understand why a film like Rendition, for example, would have failed. It’s a very high-minded attempt to reckon with an important subject, but in some fundamental way, these issues are so real, their contours so complicated, that a drama almost trivializes them.

BB: I love the title of this film, because it bridges together the macro and the micro. Did you consider any others?

AG: We did, earlier, yes. But I tended to like this one, and stuck with it—despite, sometimes, great objections. Some people wanted me to come up with a grander title, like Rendition or Torture. But there’s something about Taxi to The Dark Side that implies a journey, a story. Also, it implies to me where we’re headed, where this administration is taking us.

BB: How did the idea of mystery influence the structure of the film?

AG: I always liked mysteries like Chinatown or The Parallax View, or Three Days of the Condor, where you start off with a dead body in the corner of the room, and you try to solve the mystery of that murder, realizing that you’ve opened up a mystery that’s much bigger than that. My film is also about a bigger crime that’s being committed. From a movie-making perspective, that’s something that the viewer can follow along with, the steps of the detective. Also, with mysteries, you’re given the chance to ask a lot of questions along the way, which, step by step, get you to a higher understanding of what the real questions are.

BB: Did you get any sense of remorse from the soldiers you interviewed?

AG: I think they’re beginning to feel that more and more now. They have all sorts of conflicting feelings about having served, but I think in some fundamental way, they felt that they were misled, in the deepest sense of the term. They were asked to do things they shouldn’t have had to do, and they’re reckoning with that now.

BB: Did you have the opportunity to interview everyone you wanted to?

AG: No, I really wanted to speak with Captain Carolyn Wood, the head of military services at Bagram, who then also travels with the 519th to Abu Ghraib. She seems to me a key figure, because she’s a middle person between the real higher-ups, and the men on the ground. I think she could have told us a lot, but I also think she’s being protected and she doesn’t want to tell us anything.

BB: Was anybody hesitant to speak with you for fear of the repercussions?

AG: Most of the people who I spoke with were out of the service or were not on active duty, so I don’t think they were worried about getting in trouble. In fact, I think many of them had an ax to grind, which is probably why they spoke to me in the first place.

BB: Hearing their stories made the film feel quite visceral.

AG: Without them, there is no movie. They are the beating heart of this movie, because you feel the interrogation room and the prison in their hearts and in their eyes. They’re the movie.

BB: What has their response to the movie been like?

AG: So far, so good. In fact, the big, hulking guy with the shaved head, Damien Corsetti [former member of the 519th, and charged for his involvement at Bagram], has spoken at a number of screenings, and likes the film very much. He’s somewhat of a lost soul, Damien. He’s a very smart guy, but he’s haunted by what he’s seen, and he’s trying to get his life back together. People are very affected by him in person.

BB: Do the awards that you’ve garnered for this film, not to mention your previous work, mean anything to you?

AG: Sure, it’s nice to get awards, but what’s really nice—and the reason I make films—is to have them seen by lots of people, so that certain moments in those films become visceral points of reference that audiences take with them for the rest of their lives. That’s what I do it for. I hope that people will respond that way to something in Taxi.

BB: What drew you to documentary film as opposed to, say, drama?

AG: Truth be told, I’ve always been drawn to both. In college, a lot of my favorite filmmakers were fiction filmmakers, but I’ve always loved documentarians too. I actually started out as a fiction film editor, and then I veered off into documentary work in film school. One of the things I like about documentary is that you have more control—not more power, but more control. In a funny way, you have more and less. Hitchcock has a famous line where he says, “In feature films the director is God. In documentaries God is the director.” You have more control because there are fewer people to mess with the process. But, at the same time, you have no control, because you’re at the mercy of events, the people who will and won’t talk to you. You’ve got to keep restructuring the film to take into account the messy reality that you’re exposed to. That’s the blessing and the curse of documentary filmmaking.

BB: You went from torture in this film to drugs with Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. How did that happen?

AG: [Laughs.] I started dropping a lot of acid. No, I was actually asked to work on that one. It was a bear of a project to work on. I was mixing yesterday, and I’ll be mixing tomorrow. The thing I found so interesting about Hunter S. Thompson is that, in a time when the press was being so beaten down by the administration, Hunter showed—in an anarchic and humorous way—that you could break all the rules and tell a more powerful truth sometimes. It was a—what do they say about Hunter? Buy the ticket, take the ride.