Alex Gibney Quotes

Steve Jobs was one of the first people to understand that the computer wasn't just a tool, but that it could be an extension of ourselves, and he positioned Apple that way. The iPod was this revolutionary device with the idea of 1,000 songs in your pocket, and then that machine represents who you are.

In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission.

It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard.

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.

Jobs would have ever have asserted that Bill Gates was not serious about technology. He was a huge pioneer in that world, albeit doing something quite different in approach from what Steve did. He was dismissive of Gates' foundation work as something he did to make himself feel better.

If people are portrayed as monsters, we become disconnected from them, and to me that is not remotely interesting.

The internet connects us all and provides this fabulous fact-checking mechanism, and yet at the same time, the power of lies is conveyed much more efficiently now because they're accepted so fast.

I'm still an Apple person, but let's just say the magic aura is gone. In a way that was a sad thing to lose, but I feel better for it. It's just a machine now, not linked with any greater mission or mystique.

As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention.

Steve Jobs did not start started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed. He believed in making people comfortable with these machines, which is why he spent so much time thinking about how to design them a certain way, how to make them so user-friendly and interactive, and why he spent so much time studying the Zeitgeist.

Long ago I had a professor who told me, 'Embrace the contradictions.' I think that is what is most interesting about people like Jobs.

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is the result of what police call "noble cause corruption," the belief that because you are dedicated to doing good, you can do no wrong.

What made so many people so upset when Steve Jobs died was that he was a kind of combination of daddy - in this relationship between the machine and ourselves - and also he was our guide. He was the one who led us to look into the mirror. He created these devices that became extensions of ourselves. Suddenly, he wasn't going to hold our hand as we went from product to product, which became increasingly about who we were.

Bill Gates, who is the classic computer nerd, as opposed to Steve who is, like the coolest guy in the world. And who is really doing things to make the world a better place?

In the case of the Catholic Church, it's hard to understand how they so willfully sacrifice the children.

I don't think Steve [Jobs] started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed.

Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.

Suicides aren't heroic in my opinion. And I don't think anybody ever really knows why somebody commits suicide.

I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds.

In a busy world, even as information is moving so rapidly, we have to learn who to trust in that regard even as we ourselves have to become more critical of the people who we want to trust. It's a weird situation.

What's great about the Sundance Film Festival is the festival takes over that town as it's intended to do. But, it's very focused on a lot of other filmmakers and distributors so it almost feels like, while they're a lot of so-called civilians there, it's an opportunity that you have to see, to show your stuff to the other folks, your peers really, and to get that reaction.

As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention. Steve Jobs was saying, "Don't pay attention to all that stuff. Pay attention to the product you've got in your hand."

Many people, including myself, thought of Jobs as an inventor, an Edison-like figure, but he wasn't. I did a documentary on James Brown recently; and, oddly, I found a lot in common between Jobs and Brown. Jobs was also a fantastic performer, put on an extraordinary live show at his product launches, but he could also be ruthless, cruel and totally self-aggrandizing. And just as Brown surrounded himself with the very best musicians, Jobs understood the importance of hiring the absolutely most talented people and knew how crucial they were to the success of what he was trying to do.

You see the natural progression of what happens when the executive gets power and then a new executive comes in. The new executive doesn't say, "Oh, man. The president has just got too much power. We're going to dial that back." No, they expand the power. It's like, "He didn't use it well, so I'm going to take more power and use it better because I'm a better guy and my values are better." Then you suddenly realize that the very people who were attacking Guantánamo prior to getting into office are now the people expanding an assassination program overseas.

Fundamental problem in American democracy is that we are allowing congressmen and senators to be bought and sold like sneakers.

The Church must be all-powerful. You discover these horrors within institutions because predators find ways of hiding in plain sight.

The Barack Obama Administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. That's a staggering record. And it comes from a president who said that he's going to have one of the most transparent administrations ever.

I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.

No one likes documentaries.

Whether or not he came to believe it - so many people, when they have a mission, come to believe something in a way that may have started out as a slogan. You know, L. Ron Hubbard, not to make a random comparison, started Scientology as a scam.

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.

The funny thing about being Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, is that you identify with the Church, just as part of your character. Nevermind what you believe, it's just who you are.

You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.

I think one of things that Steve Jobs, in his own funny way, encouraged us to remember with those "Think different" posters of Gandhi and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King was, "How do you make the world a better place?"

With every project I start out on, there's no footage. It's always a big slog to find the footage.