Alex Gibney
speaker
375 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 27 Mar
Alex Gibney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He said, look, we're making a show about a mobster. If he doesn't kill the guy who was the snitch, then what are we doing? We're just making bullshit. And so they move forward.
Very violent and grisly, yeah. He literally chokes him to death with a wire.
Yeah, I think that's right. And that's the best thing often about notes in general. You know, sometimes, particularly reaction, not so much the prescription, but the, you know, the reaction to like, this doesn't feel right. It's sometimes worth listening to.
I think they were talking about political correctness. You know, there was a willingness to say things that were downright offensive. And also a willingness, even in the writer's room... to get ugly, to talk about stuff in a way that was brutally honest and would reveal about themselves stuff that wasn't particularly elevating or inspiring, maybe just the opposite.
But that to me was actually one of the great lessons of doing the show. It's like when you start to pre-censor yourselves all the time, we've all got weird, dark, inappropriate feelings or thoughts. And to the extent that they're routinely repressed, they'll come out in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways, you know? What was that line about?
If only Hitler's art teacher was a little bit... more attentive.
The terrifying beauty of the show was that these people were so complex.
They were both so charming and brutal. And one of the things that they made a point of during the making of the show, which I thought was so great, is whenever it seemed that the characters were becoming too likable, particularly the mobsters were becoming too likable, they would have them do something brutal. Yeah.
Just to remind you, because also in the back of his mind, you know, David is making this show, which is a character drama about a family, but it's also a commentary about America. And the brutality of America and the rapaciousness with which capitalism sort of, you know, chews people up and spits them out.
And The Sopranos is kind of the logical extension of that scene in The Godfather, you know, where they're all sitting around the table asking The Godfather to share all the bought stuff. politicians and police officers, and it's, we're willing to pay a fee. After all, we're not communists here. Right? But it's a brutal commentary on capitalism and America and the cruelty of the country.
So all those things are going through their heads, and they're willing to be ugly. And I think that's what people ended up loving the show for, is it didn't pull punches and suddenly the uncomfortable conversations that you shied away from because you might offend somebody, they were engaging in those conversations on screen.
And that's what great art does, is it allows you to get into areas that maybe you're not permitted to as part of your daily life.
That's right. But at the same time, because they're all coming out of their personal experiences, I mean, it was supposed to be about David's mother, and then all the writers found out that they had major issues with their mothers. So it ends up being, you know, a lot of this experience ends up being universal.
I think the other thing that makes this show so successful, too, is that, you know, there are a lot of conversations about that are extremely unironic, and they're very funny for it because these brutal mobsters are having very sensitive discussions about how their feelings are hurt, or should I buy flowers for my wife on her anniversary? Stuff like that.
You know, normally, in most mob movies, you see the action. Yeah. You don't see the day-to-day interactions where you're trying to figure out whether or not you should show up for your son's soccer practice.
Well, it's not open under the current system. So something new is going to have to come along to blow it open again. Because HBO also, remember, was a different kind of a system. And it was coming up and they knew they had to do something different or they weren't going to I mean, what's the point of trying to become another network?
If you're far behind in a sailing race, it doesn't make any sense to follow the same wind that's already got those boats that are way ahead of you. You tack on a different course and hope to catch a different kind of a wind. So at the moment, it's pretty bleak for trying to do personal art that's going to connect with viewers.
But the hope is, the hope at the bottom of Pandora's box after a lot of bad shit has come out, is that there is a new distribution mechanism out there that will allow this relationship once again to find a way. You know, and it's kind of what you see happening in journalism.
Like the Substack model is interesting because suddenly you see some people are making bank on Substack by going directly to their readers. Yeah. Interesting. That was the hope in podcasts for a while, too. And actually, I think podcasts, you know, some over time still find a way to get audiences, but it's not as easy as it seemed like it was going to be at first.
And also, you know, some key players in the distribution universe are are tech players who have other businesses. Yes. You know, if I'm Apple, do I want to do anything that's going to offend somebody and so they might not buy an iPhone or an iPad? And if I'm Amazon, do I want to do something that might offend somebody who might buy their sneakers on Amazon? You know?
Showing 341–360 of 375 · page 18 of 19
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