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As long as there are people willing to abuse power and authority, there will be no shortage of work for documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney.
In 2005, he turned his lens on a story of spectacular corruption: With 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room', Alex showed how a handful of executives could bankrupt a company and still walk away with millions ('Enron' was nominated for an Academy Award, but lost out to some marching penguins). Alex would win his Oscar two years later with 'Taxi to the Dark Side', a powerful film that exposed the Bush administration's role in the torture of U.S. military detainees. He then told the story of the rise and fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, and explored the part Spitzer's powerful Wall Street enemies may have played in the sex scandal that brought about his downfall.
Alex says his gifts as a filmmaker stem from his childhood: His dad was a journalist, his mom, a writer, and his step-dad a political activist. They all encouraged him to be curious and never to kneel before authority.
Alex's latest, 'The Last Gladiators', is a very different kind of story: it focuses on former hockey enforcer Chris 'Knuckles' Nilan and it poses a question for all hockey tough guys: When your career is over, how do you stop being an enforcer and get back to a normal life?
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