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Oscar winner Alex Gibney discusses the Pope and the future


Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
14 February 2013

In the very same week that Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney sees the UK releases of his documentary feature Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, comes the incredible news that the Pope has resigned, and we were fortunate enough to sit down with the esteemed director to discuss his thoughts on the surprising news.

The film focuses in on a case whereby a priest named Father Lawrence Murphy was accused of sexually abusing 200 kids at a deaf school – a crime conveniently covered up by the Catholic Church, and Gibney tells us of his admiration for the survivors featured in the feature, while also telling us what one question he would ask the Pope, and his own methods of filmmaking.

 

 

How did the project come about?

It started with a piece in the New York Times, honestly, and the story was so horrifying, you know, a guy abusing 200 kids in a deaf school. It came to me to make a movie about it because of two things, one was – that story had documentary links to the top, to Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict, and it seemed to speak to how the whole system worked, so I thought that by following the story of this one case, you could go from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, all the way to the top of the Vatican, and that would be an interesting story if it panned out that way. The other thing was, there had been many cases of clerical sex abuse and many films about it, and people were always talking about them as victims – the politically correct term is “survivors”.  In this case, I thought, wow, these guys are heroes, they fought for something even though they were deaf. Somehow they made a difference, despite the fact the church was not interested in listening to them, and that they couldn’t really make their voices heard. So I thought, wow, that’s something. I discovered along the way, which I didn’t know when the piece came out, that honestly, in 1974 the leafleting of those flyers around the Milwaukee Cathedral was probably the first public protest of clerical sex abuse in America.

 

Did you anticipate the news of the Pope resigning at all?

No I didn’t anticipate it at all. In fact, I got a call from CNN at 6.15am, I was in upstate New York and I thought it was a prank call, somebody had been put up to it. But they were calling me for a reaction, so no, I didn’t anticipate it at all. It came as a great shock.

 

What was your reaction?

Well, I didn’t know what to think. The first Pope in 600 years, in a way, I think it was the best thing about his papacy to be honest with you. Not only the fact than in order to reckon with his sex abuse scandal he would have to resign, but I think also Pope’s don’t resign, and that in itself was a very important step, in fact the most important step – to say, “Yes, Pope’s can resign. A Pope should resign, so I’m resigning.” He’s a man doing a job and I think that is a pretty important statement.

 

There is a fearlessness, not only of the victims, but the people defending them, did you have to be fearless yourself when tackling this?

People ask that like there were people lurking around every corner. There really wasn’t. Once it came out there had been a certain number of attacks, the Catholic Church has a kind of thuggish wing, you know, there is an organisation in America called the Catholic League, run by a guy named Bill Donohue and he goes out and attacks people and calls them all sorts of names and digs up dirt on them, you know, he really went after Andrew Sullivan who wrote a piece about this on his blog, so there’s that. But when I was making it it didn’t seem like there might be some pushback when we’ve finished.

 

Were you surprised by how much material was available to you, in a sense that there was actual video footage of Lawrence Murphy from the time?

Yeah that always surprises me, but you know what? It’s so serendipitous, it’s like, if you look it’s just amazing what you find. I’ve started a lot of films where it looks like no-one is gonna talk and there is no footage to show, and then you keep digging and digging and digging and the next thing you know, you turn up with stuff. I mean, Terry Kohut – one of the survivors – shot a lot of wonderful footage, and actually, believe it or not, some of that footage is promo film of St. John’s. “Oh let’s take some promo films of what we do here at St. Johns”. So you never know where you’re gonna find this stuff. Then we heard about this video tape of Bob, Arthur and Gary going to confront Murphy, but we couldn’t find it. One tiny piece had been out on network news or something, and we contacted Bob’s family and lo and behold we found the tape, the whole tape, and it was just fantastic. To me, that’s the beating heart of the film, that strange encounter between those guys – particularly Bob Bolger and Murphy. I think in a way, as a filmmaker, I almost get chills thinking about it, that Bob who died and knew he was dying, did this. To leave us his last will and testament, but it ends up being a cinematic moment that has life after death. I mean now Bob has his moment in the sun, it’s really fantastic. Nothing is more telling than the hunched over figure of Murphy saying “I’m sorry it was a long time ago”, he just wanted to crawl into his cave, but that woman Grace, who is signing furiously at Bob saying “You’re a Catholic, you’re a Catholic” and he keeps saying “No this is not about religion, this is about crime”. That’s it, in a nutshell. That’s what the story is about. Who knew?

 

Do you think those who spoke up have been empowered since you made this film?

They do feel empowered and honestly, look the Pope just resigned. The guy at the end goes ‘Deaf Power’, and I don’t think you can give credit to these guys for taking down the Pope, but I do think they feel part of something important – which is that people are finally raising their voices and saying “Enough”. You know, this is a secret that has gone on too long and the church hasn’t done anything about it. They’ve done some things, but nothing substantial, they have allowed this to happen. But now you’re seeing big changes, a Pope resigns for the first time in 600 years, and these guys do feel empowered, they feel a part of something big, and for those guys that is something. You have to remember that when the police came to investigate one of these incidents, they came to talk with Murphy and they said, “We’ve been told you’ve been abusing children”, and he said, “You can’t listen to deaf children, they’re retarded.”

 

When you first approached them did they have any concerns at all about your vision?

Yeah they wanted to know who I was and what the film was going to be like, so yeah they did have concerns. Some of them had been interviewed on TV before and some of them came forward for the first time, and obviously that’s a very scary thing, suddenly you’re talking openly, not just to another person, but to millions of people. You’re saying, “Let me tell you how I was abused as a child by a priest.” That’s scary. But I think what they discovered was, that by keeping it inside, it was eating them alive. Particularly Terry discovered that, and that’s when he writes that letter to Father Murphy, where he lays it all out. He said he could go on living his life as a fully realised human being after he wrote that letter. Before that, he was compromised. He and his wife couldn’t have children because he felt that he was too balled up with anger and shame.

 

A natural reaction to watching this film is just anger and disillusionment with the human race, was that the case for you when making it? Were you angry?

I was angry [laughs] that’s a fact. But you know, there is a balance here. There’s horror, but then there are the people who fight against the horror – isn’t that it in essence? It also taught me something important about institutions, and I think that the Catholic church is right to some extent that they aren’t the only institution that has paedophiles among them. I mean, you guys knew here because of the Jimmy Savile scandal, and in America we’ve got the Penn State scandal, the boys scouts scandal – there are a lot of institutions that do horrible things, how about Wall Street? But what you learn from this story, is the degree to which people who think that they’re doing something good, believe that it gives them a pass when it comes to other acts that may not be so good. It’s like, on balance, “Okay, so we’ve covered up for a few paedophile priests, but think about all the good that we do, we don’t want to destroy that.” That seems to be at the heart of this whole church problem, but it’s also more broadly speaking, and institutional problem. Institutions defend themselves, and to some extent that’s how individuals work. I’ve been really interested to read recently the work of some psychologists about how we may be, as human beings, hard-wired from moral mediocrity, that, you know, if we do something really, really good, then we’re entitled to be a little bit bad. It’s like going out for a long jog and coming home and filling up on chips and dips. Like, I deserve it. So I think that this idea of noble cause corruption is something that is very powerful at the heart of this film, and it’s something that we should all be alert to. When institutions turn, we should all be attentive to the idea that the more pure hearted the institution claims to be, the more likely there may be some bad deeds going on.

 

If a powerful institution can cover things up at such a high level, what do you think it’s going to take to take them down?

At the end of the day, one can’t wait for the Vatican to reform itself. Seemingly, they’re not responsive. Particularly I think John Paul and also Ratzinger – he was called “John Paul’s rottweiler,” they were merciless in terms of pursuing decenters in the church. But at some point you’ve got to ask yourself – what kind of church do I want to be a part of? Do I want to be a part of a church that covers up the crimes of its priests? So people can vote with their feet, or they can vote with their pockets, and start putting money in the collection plate on Sundays, that’s one thing, and then people can keep demanding that these things be treated as crimes. That’s the remarkable thing honestly. You see it now in the United States, but it’s really remarkable in Ireland where there is really very little division between church and state, and how the single society in Ireland has really risen up and taken charge and said “No. We’re not walking away from this, this is a civil matter and these are children who are being tortured.”

So I think it can be done, both in that civil way – through aggressive prosecution, through aggressive civi suits – and also the members of the church have got to draw distinctions. You know I try very hard in the film not to make an anti-Catholic film. That guy Father Thomas Doyle says “People ask if I act for Catholics”, so I said “Why don’t you act for the church?” and he says, “I act for the church all the time. It’s what I do. But the church to me is the one billion Catholics, not the hierarchy. It’s about crime, not about faith, and that’s a crime story.”

So when people start making those distinctions it becomes easier to take it on, because there is a big crime at the heart of this story which has gone mostly unpunished and that is the storing and the keeping of these documents, which reveal the extent of these crimes – that’s the cover-up. Like in LA, this guy Cardinal Mahony, a civil suit has managed to disgorge these documents, the most appalling record of a group of priests who were all sleeping with this one woman, and she got pregnant, they sent her to the Philippines, stuff that doesn’t come out, just appalling. Anyway, that’s a long-winded answer to your very simple question – but I think that’s how you fight back.

 

You talk about Ireland as well, did you know the scale to the film when you started out or was the structure something that developed as went along?

It evolved. There was no organic reason to go to Ireland I have to be honest. I’m of Irish descent and that interested me, but also it seemed to that something explosive was happening in Ireland, and it did relate. I began to get interested in this idea of patterns, these patterns of cover-up. In Ireland you could see the shift most dramatically, the way civil society was starting to take charge. Also, frankly, in Ireland you could see most dramatically the grip that the church had on society. The idea that people would kneel when a priest walked by, so somehow I found a way to include that aspect to the story within this story, because it seemed important for a number of reasons. One, because it is the story. It’s a global story. Also, for a long time the church had said this sex abuse crisis was an American problem. These licentious Americans in the 60’s, that’s the problem. Well, it’s clearly not.

 

 

You mentioned earlier that you’ve started a few projects where you realised that you didn’t have enough footage or material to continue ahead – was there a tipping point with this film where you realised that you did have enough?

Yeah, I mean look, we knew we had the testimony of a deaf man at the heart of it, but you always keep looking for things and going after things, and there was a tipping point – when we got that footage of the cabin exchange, that was it. That’s a movie. It was like the Enron film that I did, when you have the audio tapes of the Enron traders that’s it, that’s a movie. It’s also a telling moment too, I don’t believe so strongly as other people do about these arbitrary distinctions between fiction film and non-fiction film, I think docs are just legitimately movies as fiction films are – but particularly so when you have material that you can’t imagine being as effective if you had actors portraying it. So when that video footage of that cabin confrontation came into our hands, it’s like, how could you portray that any more effectively? It’s so viscerally powerful. It’s too bad Terry wasn’t shooting that scene – he was’t there – because Arthur was shooting it and he was scored that the camera was all over the place, but then that does add to the intensity, so that’s where I think we found it. But there were other things I kept going after, I couldn’t get a high-ranking member of the church to come on board, and then finally, after much, much, much persuasion I got this Archbishop Weakland on board and agree to be interviewed and that was terribly important, and then we found all this footage from St. John’s. It’s one of those things, if you keep digging it’s amazing what can turn up.

 

How did you convince Archbishop Weakland?

I said look it’s about truth telling, it’s about coming forward. Also, I said, you can say something about how a member of the church tried  to do something, and he responded to that. I was criticised by some survivors groups for including Weakland, not being as critical towards him as I might have done, particularly early on I think he was relatively insensitive to his concerns of victims and they felt that was not sufficiently emphasised. I didn’t diminish the scandal that ended his career, that’s clear as a bell – but there is something terribly important about Weakland’s role in this film, and also terribly important in terms of the dramatic narrative. He connects us to Ratzinger in a personal way. He knew Ratzinger. He goes to Rome to fight for these kids, so you understand the process – it’s not just speculation, you know that this guy was at the meeting at the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, trying to say “We’ve got to go forward with this clerical trial of Father Murphy” and they turned him down, so I think that was important.

 

Hypothetically speaking, if the Pope came into the room now and you had one question for him, what would you ask him?

Why did you put the welfare of Murphy above the welfare of those children, in the sense of justice. I suppose that’s a small question, there are much bigger questions you could ask, but I guess I’d like to ask him the smaller question. The other question I guess you could ask would be, why didn’t you defrock Maciel? Why didn’t you move to defrock Maciel? You had the power. You were Pope.

 

Throughout the making of this film have you gained more of an insight into why he did that, or is it still as opaque?

It’s still as opaque as ever. I think it has something to do with the way the institution works. Again, it gets back to institutional fixing, that’s both what is unique about the Catholic church, and what makes it a compelling metaphor for institutional failures. You know, he was always about trying to protect the institution is my guess, and he felt he was doing that, even though he wasn’t. I think he was weak and cowardly when it came to trying to push this forward, but I think he was very much a creature of this institution.

 

The Vatican weren’t providing any interview access, but have you have any feedback on the film? Do you know if anyone has watched it?

I don’t. I don’t know. I’m trying to find out. We did send them a copy [laughs]

 

You got some big actors involved doing the voiceovers, can you tell us how that came about and how you approached them and why they wanted to get involved?

Look, I mean they were moved by the story and we cast them kind of intuitively. We sat down and listened to voices and cast them intuitively, figuring, if Terry had a voice, what would he sound like? We came at it that way. A lot of them are Irish-Catholic decent and that’s pretty much the way we went at it. There was a decision early on whether we would use voices at all or subtitles, and actually use the silence. But we ultimately decided to use voices because we felt it would be more emotionally powerful and more visceral, and also, frankly, you would pay more attention to this magnificent visual language, rather than reading subtitles. There was also a technical problem that we knew we wanted to cut away to a lot of archival footage for reasons of mood and others, and in the case you have testimony off camera where one person is talking and then somebody else starts talking and it was gonna get very complicated with subtitles as you’d have to figure out different typefaces and stuff like that and I felt it would be too distracting. But I thought these guys came onboard and they were fantastic and the other thing we decided to do was not have them read as translators/narrators but instead to be the characters, to perform the roles, again more for emotional reasons than anything else.

 

From beginning to end, how long did the whole project take?

Two years.

 

Is that typical for a documentary project?

No. It’s long, I think. I mean, some are longer but some are much, much shorter. I think for me sometimes these investigative ones it takes a lot of time to get the money together and the deal and sometimes, for me, it takes a bit of time to finally get all the pieces that you need and sometimes you’re going out and doing that simultaneously to cutting. The hard part of these films is that you’re writing the script at the end, trying to feel your way towards the story, but even as you’re going things are happening and also you’re getting access to new people which demands that the structure changes, so it can take a long time – particularly when you’re doing investigative work.

 

Does that mean you typically have two or three film projects on at the same time?

Yes. And that is why I do. To be honest, that’s why. Sometimes you can just say, oh screw it. After six months, that’s it. That’s okay, but my goal in making these films is to hopefully make a film that has importance in the moment but lives on and says something larger over a longer period of time, to make a movie that stands the test of time, so if you have a couple of them going, then one can stop and take a pause while you dig in on the other.

 

So how many have you got going on at the moment?

I have two in the cutting room right now. Lance Armstrong and a music film about Fela Kuti.

 

How about the WikiLeaks project?

That’s done. It premiered at Sundance. It’s called ‘We Steal Secrets’. There was a big kerfuffle recently, as one of the executive producers – Jemima Khan – wrote a big piece in the New Statesman about her falling out over the making of the film, so Focus is gonna bring that out this spring.

 

I wanted to ask an emotional rather than technical question – who of all the characters, the guys you met during the making of this film, has left the deepest impression?

Terry. I mean, Terry just went through the deepest journey I think. The enormous changes he went through, I think that was something – he really impressed me. In a very different way Bob Bolger impressed me because of his determination. I mean, Bob was determined from not long after he left school, he was gonna do something, he really pushed everybody forward and it was sad that he couldn’t have made it live for this – but we have the videotape.

 

You talk about having projects on the go, when you have got a constantly evolving story like this, do you know when to stop and take it to the edit room?

Very often we feel like I have enough to take it to the edit room and feel that there is enough to structure a story, even if I may know that we’re gonna need more stuff downstream. But once we had the Bob Bolger video and we knew we were gonna be able to get it, and we had some of the key interviews with the guys then we took it into the cutting room because we knew that we were gonna have to spend a lot of time in this Milwaukee story. The hard part in this story was weaving between the intimate story of Milwaukee with the panoramic story of Rome and Ireland, and that took a long time to work out, a lot of experimentation. When you’re thinking in dramatic terms, where does that video footage go? The video footage of the cabin conversation – does it go at the very end? Do you squeeze it in at the beginning? That was the piece of the puzzle we didn’t know quite how to fit. Those were the questions that were hard to solve, it was solving the narrative.

 

Are there any other documentary filmmakers that you particularly admire?

Yeah there are loads. I mean, both classic ones and contemporary ones. Recent days I feel like the documentary is having a huge renaissance, it’s kicking ass. I see things like The Gatekeepers by Dror Moreh, that knocked me out. Waltz With Bashir was such a fantastic film, you know, an obscure one I saw called Diary of a Times Square Thief. I was very much influenced early on by people like Maysles, you know, Gimme Shelter was a very important film for me, and then also Errol Morris, he really changed things in a big way for docs because he expanded the language and we’ve seen both the good and the bad of that, but it’s really exciting. You go to festivals and although I see all the fiction and non-fiction films, it seems to me that the non-fiction films are pushing the boundaries of cinematic language sometimes more than the fiction films are. 

 

 

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