Biografía

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.

Graduated from Yale with a degree in Japanese Studies.

(On El ángel exterminador (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 Naranja mecánica (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 [La mentira de Armstrong (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.