A complicated man

Spitzer's prostitution scandal made front-page news back in 2008. (Magnolia Pictures)

Q: Why did you decide to make a doc about Eliot Spitzer?

A: I was actually offered it, and I wasn’t sure I was going to take it. Right off the bat, I thought, Well, geez, it’s a scandal, of course the press will cover it. What do I need to do? But the irony of it was so powerful. It just seemed to raise so many issues — about politics, but also about men and women, sex, infidelity.

Q: Was it hard to get Spitzer to participate?

A: It was. We were quite far down the road before he agreed to come on board. There was still a threat of federal indictment, even though I think it was fallacious, for about eight months. After that, we started to go after him, and we had a number of meetings. My colleague Peter Elkind, who wrote the book [Rough Justice: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer], met with him a few times, and then I started to meet with him. Slowly but surely, I think he got comfortable enough to talk.

Q: In Client 9, you show a magazine cover where the words “Satan or Savior” appear beneath Spitzer’s picture. Going into the project, did you have strong opinions one way or the other?

A: Well, the one thing I did feel coming in cold was, "What the hell was he thinking?" I have to be honest and say that I was sympathetic to his approach toward Wall Street, in that he seemed to be the only guy who was trying to stem the abuse of power that was going on in the financial district. But at the same time, I was gobsmacked when this happened, and kind of angry.

You can’t help but have a point of view, but my job is to come in, get Spitzer to talk, and hear what he has to say. It was somewhat disappointing, but also interesting, to find out how much difficulty he had talking about why he did what he did. I think the film does a pretty good job of showing that difficulty on his face, as he’s answering the question. It’s not always the text of the answer that’s so interesting. Whereas, if he was talking about taking down guys on Wall Street, he was just extraordinarily articulate, and that showed to me a double side to the man. It’s like, who is this guy? Is he the escort chaser, or is he the Sheriff of Wall Street? There are all these dualities that the film tries to get at. It’s like a mystery story, where you’re trying to think, Which is it? And the truth is, it’s both.

Q: Is there one thing he said during the interviews that really took you by surprise?

A: I guess I was surprised at this division between the very articulate man on public policy issues and the relatively inarticulate man on emotional issues. I had known about that to some extent, but to see it in person was interesting.

Q: Did you feel it when you were in the room with him?

A: Yeah, and it was hard. I think he was also reckoning, How much am I going to deliver? How much am I gonna give up? But he tried to kind of move on a number of times, and I had to ask the next question, and sometimes the next question after that. I have to tell you, it was uncomfortable in the room. It’s not easy asking people about that stuff.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney. (John W. Ferguson/Getty Images)

Q: At one point, you ask him if he was aware he could get caught paying for escorts, and he said he was.

A: He was, and I think probably, in some way shape or form, that was part of the thrill. That instead of having to be the goody two-shoes, he was able to be the bad boy. Instead of Paul McCartney, he was now able to be Keith Richards.

Q: I got the sense that in his childhood, he was never allowed to be that sort of person. He was a real overachiever.

A: I think there’s something to that. Spitzer’s not a real rock 'n' roll guy, but he does have one rock 'n' roll hero and that’s Bruce Springsteen. And if you ask him what his favourite Springsteen songs are, he’ll say American Land and Land of Hope and Dreams — the broad, big, political ones. But I think if you scratch a little harder, that really what he likes to listen to is probably something like Thunder Road. Because that’s the convertible, top down, the wind rolling through your hair. It’s the search for adventure, and I think he didn’t get a lot of that when he was young.

Q. Is calling attention to abuses of power a central aim for you as a documentarian?

A: It seems to be a motivator, let me just put it that way. I’m drawn to stories about power and abuses of power. The peculiar thing for me for this film is that you come out of it asking more questions than are answered, and it’s not so simple as to say thumbs up or thumbs down for Eliot Spitzer. There’s a lot of ambiguity. You can talk about Eliot Spitzer and conclude, yes, he abused his power, but then you wonder, did he abuse it as completely as the folks on Wall Street or the federal government?

Q: Do you think the public is ready to forgive him?

A: The big question is, Can he make the case to them, if he runs again, to trust him, because that was the big breach here. He didn’t suddenly do something that was corrupt, but he basically told people that he was one kind of guy, and then he turned out not to be that person. And also, for those people who he was fighting for – middle-class Americans – he let them down, because he risked everything for this. I think a lot of people feel like this is a guy who, in the right job, is a pretty powerful advocate. The question is, can we trust him? And that is a big one.