Interview: Director Alex Gibney Reveals ‘The Armstrong Lie’

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CHICAGO – The long goodbye of tainted cycling athlete Lance Armstrong continues – after all the victories, “Live Strong,” the multiple denials of cheating and finally the confession that he lied. Oscar winning documentary maker Alex Gibney is the latest to take on this legacy of dishonesty, in “The Armstrong Lie.”

The new film dissects the history of Lance Armstrong as he kept denying his use of performance enhancing drugs and methods, on his way to seven straight Tour de France bike race titles (which have since been revoked). In meticulous detail, Gibney – who began the documentary as a chronicle of Armstrong’s 2009 comeback – strips back the veneer of public relations and peer protection of Armstrong. The director even talked to Armstrong himself, after his infamous confession to Oprah Winfrey that he had use performance enhancement techniques to cheat his way to those race victories.

Director Alex Gibney (center) Puts the Spotlight on Lance Armstrong in ‘The Armstrong Lie’ Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics

Alex Gibney is one of the most prolific documentary producer/directors working today. He has directed 16 docs since 2007, when he won Best Documentary at the 2008 Academy Awards ceremony for “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Gibney focuses on the corruption of power as a thread through his filmed documents – including the 2011 film “Catching Hell,” the story of the odd injustice of Steve Bartman, a Chicago Cubs baseball fan who happened to try and catch a foul ball, and ended up a scapegoat for the Cubs’ failure to reach the World Series in 2003.

HollywoodChicago.com talked to Gibney on November 11th, the Monday before the Friday that “The Armstrong Lie” is released to theaters.

HollywoodChicago.com: What was personal about your quest to completely expose Lance Armstrong? What lessons did you learn about dissecting his deception?

Alex Gibney: I wouldn’t say it was a personal quest to expose him, because after all I started out to make a film that was completely different.

HollywoodChicago.com: But didn’t you feel betrayal in that context?

Gibney: I did. And I think I was particularly upset that I allowed myself to become part of Armstrong’s PR machinery. That was the bigger part. I wasn’t one of those people who didn’t have suspicions about doping during the tour wins. When I began the film I talked to the producers and told them I wanted to make sure I had license to explore that angle, and they were absolutely behind it.

The part that pissed me off is that when anybody lies to your face, when it seems like they are so confident that they have you wired in – as if you have become part of that PR apparatus, and you’re supposed to believe everything they say, and become a cog in that apparatus.

HollywoodChicago.com: Since you have completely delved into the mind and motivations of Lance Armstrong, what section of his life should be more closely investigated to understand who he is and what does motivate him?

Gibney: I like to say that Lance Armstrong is simple and complicated all at the same time. The simple part came early, as a young kid growing up relatively poor with a single Mom. His father was absent – Armstrong refers to him as the ‘sperm donor’ – and that made him angry.

He had a sense that he had to go out and make money in whatever fashion he needed to, and that’s why I included a couple of clips of him as a young man, talking about needing money. In one clip he says he likes ‘beating people’ – not winning, but beating people – which gives pretty good insight to him early on. To lose was to be back where he started from, which to him was nothing.

HollywoodChicago.com: One of the great life’s great lessons, especially in the society we live in, is the simple phrase ‘follow the money.” How does that phrase apple to ‘The Armstrong Lie’?

Gibney: When you’re going to market, you need a good product, and Lance Armstrong presented maybe one of most marketable sports products of all time. What they had to sell was the story – which was highly marketable – of a guy coming back from death’s door, not only to survive, but to become better than he was. That gave tremendous hope to so many people around the world, inside and outside of sports. Suddenly, for a sport like cycling looking to revive itself, you had this kid who somehow picked himself off the mat and is now winning the most grueling event in all of sports. What sponsor wouldn’t want that? Which sports organization wouldn’t want that?

That begins the recipe for deception. Everybody wants to keep that story going. If you want to ‘follow the money,’ you want to follow the money that was making money off of his story. That is how the lie evolves – the bigger the lie, the better the story, and the bigger the money.

HollywoodChicago.com: The credibility issue involving all sports and performance enhancing drugs [PEDs] is a constant balancing act. How much do you think the public really cares about this? In your opinion, were there little boys weeping or fans betrayed when they found out – for example – that Mark McGwire used PEDs to get the home run record?

Gibney: I believe people were cynical about that – I remember a home run derby at the All-Star game during the 1990s, in which McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds were hitting them out of the park with abandon. People were asking sarcastically, ‘oh, is the ball juiced?’ There was some cynicism about that – the full story there still hasn’t been told. But the main difference between Armstrong and the baseball situation was that Armstrong was telling an alternative story – how he was different, he was the one clean guy in cycling.

The Cyclist Trains for His Comeback in ‘The Armstrong Lie’ Photo credit: Sony Pictures Classics

HollywoodChicago.com: I just don’t believe the stuff about the ‘kids,’ that they care one way or another about a circumstance like PEDs in sports…

Gibney: I think we are just going to have to live within this era, which is a state of permanent doubt. We have to reckon with that, as a fan you don’t want to root for [PED] Erythropoletin – ‘Go EPO!’ – you want to believe you’re rooting for an athlete doing something extraordinary. Some folks say, let them all do PEDs if they want, but I don’t think we want all sports to become like World Wide Wrestling. Also, sports without rules would be terrible to experience – equivalent to a wealthy baseball franchise paying off the umpire.

HollywoodChicago.com: You’ve done a couple of documentaries about the lengths that people will go to to obtain money and the power associated with it. In your observation, after all this close scrutiny, what is the fatal flaw for a person’s humanity in the pursuit of wealth?

Gibney: It’s something that I call ‘noble cause corruption.’ I think people find a way to put a gloss of good intentions around their deeds. It’s important to succeed, it’s important to have a system where you succeed, and if you crush someone along the way, that’s okay. Because you’re pursuing a ‘pure good.’ Many people fool themselves into believing that even when they’re doing something ugly, they are actually doing something pure.

That was the case of the Enron guys [Gibney’s 2005 film was ‘Enron, the Smartest Guys in the Room’]. They convinced themselves and the rest of the country that they were on a mission to show that by practicing pure, unregulated capitalism that everything and everybody would be better off.

HollywoodChicago.com: Again, since your scrutinized the subject, what kind of karma do you think the Chicago Cubs and their fans have in regard to the treatment of Steve Bartman, and how close did you get to the man himself in pursuing the story?

Gibney: [Laughs] I tried everything to get to Steve, but the interesting thing is that he has a number of loyal friends that will not give him up, they honor his desire to remain anonymous – his lawyer is also an adamant defender of his right. This is the one guy in our celebrity obsessed culture who doesn’t want to be one.

Is there a karma? Well, if you believe in karma there has to be in this situation. If you look at what happened that night, there was a lot of people reaching for that ball. And yet, Bartman was stigmatized. Everybody needs a scapegoat, and he became a convenient scapegoat. It seems to me that if the Cubs and their fans want to escape their karmic prison, they should host a Steve Bartman Day – whether he would come to Wrigley Field or not – that would say something powerful. And everybody should wear headphones, Cub caps and green sweatshirts. [laughs]

HollywoodChicago.com: In your Oscar winning documentary, ‘Taxi to the Dark Side,’ you explored the post-9/11 sensibility in our government and country. In your opinion, what psychosis has developed in our now post Twin Tower world, and where will that sociopathic behavior lead us?

Gibney: That’s a pretty loaded question. [laughs] But I would say that we do have a problem in the post 9/11 world. The Bush administration took us down a path after 9/11, and we continue to go down that path. We were attacked, people died, and suddenly the gloves came off. That means we can and should do anything to get back at who did it, and meant embarking on a permanent global war on terror. The perfect thing about that type of war is that it never ends, because terror never ends.

This war is both abroad and here, so that has allowed us to transgress our own former values. Instead of the country that implemented the Marshall Plan, we’re now the country of the drone strike. The idea that we’re the aggrieved party permits us permanently to do whatever we need to do – spy on ourselves, spy on others and not observe the rule of law. The fundamental moral problem is about winning at all costs. We like to think we’re the country of fairness and the underdog, I’m afraid we’re becoming the country of the bully. And that’s not a good thing, not mattering how you play the game, just that there is a winner and a loser.

HollywoodChicago.com: How does that translate to our moral compass?

Alex Gibney in Chicago, November 11th, 2013 Photo credit: Patrick McDonald for HollywoodChicago.com

Gibney: It becomes about the bottom line, a phrase that sadly has become an admirable thing. In business, you must care about the bottom line, but if you care more about the bottom line than building a better business or diplomatic path, then the ‘bottom line’ isn’t just an inescapable truth, it becomes something to be manipulated.

HollywoodChicago.com: As a recovering Catholic, I’m particularly interested in your exploration of the church in ‘Silence in the House of God’ [2012]. Given their latest PR coup with the new Pope, what do they still need to do to make up for that black hole of horror that is the pedophilia scandal?

Gibney: Two things. They need to take responsibility, as an institution the church has never taken responsibility. Pope Francis is impressive, but he still has to stand up and say as an institution we were at fault. And second, they have to open up all their archives – properly redacted and probably through a human rights organization – and acknowledge they’re a church, not a business trying to protect themselves from civil liability. They need to show that their service is to the higher ideal. They need to show how they covered it up. As an organization dedicated to religious values, why wouldn’t they do that?

HollywoodChicago.com: he institutions you’ve taken on in your documentaries are fairly substantial. For example, what type of threats have you received to your person, either legally or physically, from these institutions, desiring to stop you?

Gibney: I’ve certainly been threatened and served with lawsuits, but we’ve always prevailed. There are hostile voices through the anonymity of the internet, and certainly through the Catholic League in what we talked about. At the end of the day, the best way forward is to be open and forthright, and that becomes the best defense.

HollywoodChicago.com: Finally, how do you think the millions of people who contributed to, and wore the yellow wrist bands of ‘Live Strong,’ can do to forgive both Lance Armstrong and themselves?

Gibney: I think ultimately forgiveness will come. I’m not sure that people think that Armstrong has given the fullest account, and I would argue not because of PEDs, but because of ‘The Big Lie,’ the one that implicates all cancer survivors all over the world within the lie, the one that made him all that money. And also the way he went after people who were trying to tell the truth. Those are the two things that people are angry about. Lance still wants to be reckoned as a great athlete. I don’t think people will give him that, unless he addresses the other stuff. That’s not pure justice, but it is rough justice.

There is a larger issue for all of us that followed Armstrong’s story and believed in it. Sadly, we have to live in a world that admits there is no Santa Claus, as Floyd Landis said in the film. We have to accept that world of doubt. Sometimes if a story is too good to be true, it probably is. We can reign hell on Lance Armstrong for being the one bad guy, but all of us are culpable, in having looked the other way and allowing him to burnish his myth. Because we wanted to believe the myth, and Lance Armstrong was feeding to us.

By PATRICK McDONALD Senior Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com pat@hollywoodchicago.com