With ‘Six Billion Dollar Man' Doc, Eugene Jarecki Wants Julian Assange to Be Seen ‘As a Full Person'
Julian Assange returned to the international stage at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, first standing before the global press wearing a T-shirt with the names of children killed in Gaza before donning a tuxedo to walk the red carpet with the team behind 'The Six Billion Dollar Man.'
Directed by Eugene Jarecki, the firebrand doc shares rarely-seen footage from inside the Ecuadorian embassy while building on eyebrow-raising revelations connecting Assange's embassy surveillance to the late-billionaire and profligate Trump donor Sheldon Adelson. At the same time, the doc also shares a more up-close-and-personal – if not quite cuddly – side to a man Jarecki likens to 'a sphinx.'
'There's a Cheshire Cat quality to Julian,' Jarecki told TheWrap. 'He's always kept people guessing, and a lot of that was strategic. He had to, especially when taking on the U.S. government. So, if you're going to make a film about him, you can't avoid reintroducing some gray areas of his humanity. He doesn't come off as especially likable in the film, but he comes across as a full person. He deserves that.'
Indeed, with 'The Six Billion Dollar Man,' Jarecki hopes to recalibrate Assange's public image, painting a more fulsome picture of the Wikileaks founder.
'I'm not here to do counter-propaganda,' Jarecki explained. 'I'm here to speak truth to power, especially after being subjected to a decade-plus of deeply choreographed state propaganda. It's been very convenient for the U.S. to cast him as Dr. Evil. Bill Hader even parodied him on 'SNL' as this cartoon villain. That helped distract from the actual crimes he exposed.'
'We do that to anyone we find inconvenient,' he continued. 'We target the person. With Julian, it became about whether he's a nice guy, how he treated his cat at the embassy, whether he has Asperger's, whether he's guilty of a crime in Sweden, even though he wasn't even formally charged there. It's classic propaganda, and can be very effective.'
The doc moves chronologically, following Assange from the earliest Wikileaks bombshells through his 12 years spent between the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and the UK's Belmarsh prison. And after emerging as an Obama-era champion of free speech, Assange's liberal goodwill took a decisive nose-dive once pulled into the vortex of the 2016 presidential election.
Jarecki hopes to recalibrate that conception as well.
'In 2016, he proved he belonged to no party,' the filmmaker said. 'That terrified people. He didn't play the partisan game. And those who once praised him had to renounce him, because he disrupted their political narratives. But maybe that's what made him most dangerous of all. He wasn't playing for either team.'
'At the time, many thought Hillary Clinton was hurt by something linked to Wikileaks,' he continued. 'Only what Wikileaks actually revealed was the DNC's bias against Bernie Sanders, which led to resignations and exposed real election rigging. Assange later pointed out that if he were trying to gain favor with the powerful, leaking damaging info about the likely next president wouldn't have helped him!'
While celebrating Assange's release from prison and subsequent reunion with his wife and children, 'The Six Billion Dollar Man' shares many testimonies from associates more pessimistic about the recent crack-downs on press freedoms – among myriad other concerns leading one interviewee to look into the camera offering this succinct analysis: 'We're f–ed.'
Does Jarecki believe that as well?
'If I believed that, I'd be in a bunker somewhere,' he laughed. 'Yes, self-censorship is real. But so is resistance. Fires are burning around the world, with every day bringing more protests, uprisings and acts of solidarity. History shows you can't silence people forever. People are waking up to the fact that injustice in one place affects everyone.'
'Whether you like him or not, Assange brought light, helping us see what was being hidden,' Jarecki said. 'In a time when powerful tech and governments want to control the digital narrative, he flipped the script. And as Victor Hugo said, 'Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.''
The post With 'Six Billion Dollar Man' Doc, Eugene Jarecki Wants Julian Assange to Be Seen 'As a Full Person' appeared first on TheWrap.
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'Spackled together from all the gray paint and seriocomic grotesquerie that he couldn't find a use for in his previous work, the 'Asteroid City' auteur's hectic father-daughter story takes pains to clarify a certain ethos at the root of his art, even if it does frustratingly little to flesh that ethos out any further.' 'More linear than 'Asteroid City' or 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' and yet significantly harder to follow than either of them, 'The Phoenician Scheme' is the busiest of Anderson's films, and also — at least on first viewing — the least rewarding. The scale of its story is immense, in that Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro) and the gang span an entire nation in search of the money he needs to complete his deal, but the stops on their tour often feel like isolated vignettes, more focused on milking a few dry chortles out of their celebrity cameos than they are in deepening the father-daughter bond that inspired the billionaire's cockamamy plan. 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Everybody, check for swamp leeches, and pull them off… Nobody else got hit? I'm the only one? What's the deal?' It's amazing, just when he was on the verge of becoming a household name, Wes Anderson made a dry nautical epic about Jacques Cousteau being a shitty father. I mean, I'd appreciate this movie being made under any circumstances, but 'The Life Aquatic' is the only Wes Anderson film that feels as though it exists for the simple reason that someone was willing to fund it. As exhaustingly dense as 'The Royal Tenenbaums,' as spirited as 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' and as anarchic as 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' this expansive adventure is even better than the Adidas sneakers it inspired. Yeah, it sits uncomfortably in the middle of Anderson's career and sometimes play like a watered down version of his previous work, but it also features Bill Murray as a vengeful shark hunter, Seu Jorge covering David Bowie, Cate Blanchett radiating right off the screen, Willem Dafoe as an over-sensitive German sailor, and Bud Cort giving us the closer that 'Harold and Maude' never did. —DE If the two decades that brought us 'Rushmore,' 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' and 'Moonrise Kingdom,' felt like a passionate love affair between cinephiles and Wes Anderson, the release of 'The French Dispatch' is more akin to settling into a comfortable relationship. The excitement inevitably fades when you pretty much know what you're going to get, but that does not negate the fact that Anderson is one of the most technically proficient filmmakers working today. 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Whether telling a story about a splintered New York dynasty or one about a faded European hotel where it used to be possible to find some faint glimmers of civilization in this barbaric slaughterhouse known as humanity, Anderson has always been attuned to the beauty of magical idylls, to the violence of losing them, and (most of all) to the fumblingly tragicomic process of building something better from the rubble. So at a time when global warming and gun violence have become inescapable — a time when fascism and xenophobia are no longer abstract threats so much as Republican campaign promises — it's no wonder that America's fussiest auteur is operating near the peak of his powers. 'Isle of Dogs' is the work of an artist who's howling into the same wind that's currently blowing in all of our faces. Blending Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki into a darkly comic fable about a boy, his dog, and a world that's on the brink of running out of biscuits, this is a movie that literally asks: 'Who are we, and who do we want to be?' And since it's a Wes Anderson movie, those questions are posed straight into the camera. It's funny, it's grim, and it's probably the most pet-able bit of dystopian fiction we've ever seen. —DE If all of Anderson's movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, 'Asteroid City' is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality. Some might see that as self-amused navel-gazing, but the unexpected moment towards the end when Anderson finds a certain equilibrium between those contradictory forces — with a major assist from a movie star whose name you suddenly remember seeing in the credits some 100 minutes earlier — is so crushingly beautiful and well-earned that the artifice surrounding it simply falls away. Read IndieWire's complete review of 'Asteroid City' by David Ehrlich. For such a singular artist and aesthete, Wes Anderson has always been comfortable with wearing his influences on his sleeve, rightly confident that he can celebrate his touchstones without resigning to them. For proof, just look at the way his characters worship each other in order to find themselves — from Ned Plimpton's childhood obsession with Steve Zissou, to the mild awe that Gustave H. inspires from his new lobby boy, Anderson understands that self-discovery is the last stage of a failed attempt to become someone else. Maybe that's why 'Rushmore' represented such a breakthrough for him, because this coming-of-age story about a super precocious kid (and the grown man who goads along their mutually assured destruction) is so giddy about the things that made it possible. Running on the fumes of the French New Wave and drafting behind American touchstones like Mike Nichols and Albert Brooks, Anderson's second feature is like an artistic manifesto that never declines to cite its sources. And, not for nothing, it gave the world Jason Schwartzman, reinvigorated Bill Murray, and — most importantly — made it possible for generations of viewers to say 'Wait wait, go back… was that Rory Gilmore!?' 'Rushmore' is a film as self-possessed as its hero (and many times cooler), and that makes it a favorite for many, but it lacks the sentimental spark that galvanizes Anderson's more mature work. —DE The Wes Anderson movie that people think of when they think of Wes Anderson movies, 'The Royal Tenenbaums' is a story about failure that's told by someone who's afraid of his own ambition (or, more precisely, afraid of his unwillingness to tame it). Unfolding like 'Fanny and Alexander' as remade by a very drunk Whit Stillman, 'The Royal Tenenbaums' is responsible for so many of the worst quirks of recent indie cinema, but it falls victim to exactly none of them. It's a film where the characters are cobbled together from affects, but all manage to feel human. It's a film that feels overstuffed to the gills, but one whose every moment is iconic — gather enough twentysomethings together, and their Tenenbaums tattoos could serve as storyboards for the entire script. It's a film that leaves me a little cold every time I watch it, but always feels worth watching again. —DE Wes Anderson's career can be cut into two distinctly different parts: Before 'Fantastic Mr. Fox,' and after 'Fantastic Mr. Fox.' Stung by accusations of self-parody, Anderson could have eased off the gas after 'The Darjeeling Limited' divided critics and inspired all sorts of talk about how the filmmaker had grown subservient to his own style. But rather admit that the tail was wagging the dog, Anderson snipped the damn thing off and let his next hero wear it as a necktie. He introduced himself to audiences as an aesthete, and every one of the films he made after 'Bottle Rocket' had a little less breathable air than the last, but that was fine by Anderson. If anything, he wanted more control, he wanted to play God, he wanted to make something so airless that his characters wouldn't even need to have lungs. And so he ventured into the painstaking world of stop-motion, working in a medium where literally nothing made its way on screen unless he thought to put it there. It turns out that yeah, everything else was just getting in the way. Flattering Roald Dahl's (lovely) source material into a gloriously wry domestic comedy about compromise, belonging, and accepting one's lot in life (be it in below ground or above), 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' is more than just one of the most quotable films this side of 'Casablanca,' it's also an immaculate portrait of flawed 'people' doing the best they can for themselves and each other. —DE A pre-pubescent 'Badlands' that's told with the endearingly pathetic quality of an elementary school play, 'Moonrise Kingdom' is the rare American film that's about children, but not necessarily for children (a schism that studios can't seem to wrap their heads around, but one that artists like Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and Hayao Miyazaki have always been able to reconcile with ease). The movie begins with the most perfect premise that Wes Anderson has ever devised for himself: Two kids get together and try to run away from home, only to be stymied by the fact that they live on an island. If you squint, that pretty much sums up every Wes Anderson movie. But 'Moonrise Kingdom' isn't a story about being stuck, it's a story about how the things we can't escape are often the things that love us the most, about how the greatest myths are the ones we create for ourselves, about how everything is better when narrated by Bob Balaban. It's like a mousetrap, it's written with a whimsical Dickensian flair, and it's filled with lines so evocative that merely reading them can bring the whole film back to life ('I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about'). Anderson has made a lifetime's worth of family sagas, but none of his other movies so pointedly capture what it feels like to have a home. —DE There will always be some debate as to whether or not 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' is the best Wes Anderson movie, but there may be no denying that it's the most Wes Anderson movie. The latest work from an artist who seems to become himself a little bit more with every film, this flawless, four-tiered confection is like a wedding cake filled with arsenic, a nostalgic comedy that functions like a requiem for itself. Anderson's stories are about boys, men, or male foxes who seek to live in snow globes of their own design, ensconcing themselves in the empire of their own imaginations. Some of his films (e.g. 'Moonrise Kingdom') are about creating those magical spaces, but most of his stories are about the heartache of losing them, about the tragicomic process of building something new on top of the rubble. With 'The Grand Budapest Hotel,' Anderson directly confronts the hermetic fantasy of his films, reaching into the not-too-distant past and exhuming the spirit of Stefan Zweig in order to mourn the world we lost, the civility that we've forgotten, and the beauty of creating beautiful things even when we know that the world will never let them survive. The film is so beautifully realized that Ralph Fiennes' career-best performance almost feels like the cherry on top. Also: Willem Dafoe playing the best henchman who Bond never killed, and Tilda Swinton as a sexually active octogenarian. And Saoirse Ronan's Mexico-shaped birthmark. Oh, and also the best line that Anderson has ever written, shrugged off like an afterthought in the first act: 'You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed, that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant… oh, fuck it.' —DE Best of IndieWire The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' Nightmare Film Shoots: The 38 Most Grueling Films Ever Made, from 'Deliverance' to 'The Wages of Fear' Quentin Tarantino's Favorite Movies: 65 Films the Director Wants You to See
