Biography

Dedicated his Oscar win for Best Documentary for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) to Dilawar, the 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver on whom the documentary is based.

Father Frank Gibney was a journalist and scholar.

Attended film school at University of California, Los Angeles.

The International Documentary Association presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Dropped out of UCLA to become an editor at the Samuel Goldywn Co. where he cut trailers, re-edited films and eventually becoming an editor.

(On The Exterminating Angel (1962)) It's dark, but it's also wickedly funny and mysterious in ways that can't be reduced to a simple, analytical explanation. I always thought that's what's great about movies sometimes- the best movies have to be experienced; they can't just be written about.

[on Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place (2011)'s original footage]: If you had to watch all 40 hours, it would be like something out of A Clockwork Orange (1971). They'd have to prop your eyelids open. Kesey had an innate distrust of experts: stay away from the experts. In this case that meant stay away from a cameraman. Imagine how great it would have been if they had a real cameraman. But instead you get all the bonehead mistakes of the amateur. There are no establishing shots, the camera is always jiggling, and none of them had a particularly good eye.

On a day-to-day basis, I like Lance. But over time one of the things I learned is that liking somebody is not the same thing as approving of what they do. I was definitely drawn into Lance's orbit and I became a fan as I acknowledge in the film. I liked him and I liked going along for the ride...but at the same time be wildly pissed off that I had become part of an elaborate PR board and that he had looked me in the face and lied to me.

[at the completion in 2010 of "The Road Back", a biography of Lance Armstrong] And then this story took a wild turn as former teammates began to come forward, and there was suddenly a grand jury federal investigation and possible criminal indictments...We put the film aside and waited 'til the smoke cleared and then I got a call from Lance Armstrong and he said all this is true, I've been lying to you and I apologize. We started to talk about him sitting down and trying to make it right. So that film became a new film [The Armstrong Lie (2013)] and I had to put myself in the middle to explain what had happened. I realized that I'd shot something pretty interesting which was really the anatomy of a lie.

I have been spiritually lucky and financially unfortunate to have been a freelancer most of my life. It's not easy making a living goring sacred cows.