{alltv} Eliot Spitzer exposed again in film "Client 9"

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Alex Gibney is the Oscar-winning director of anti-war documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side," who has examined many issues including what led to the demise of energy company Enron.

In his new documentary, "Client 9," Gibney has focused his lens of disgraced, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who prosecuted many corporate and Wall Street chieftains for misdeeds when he was the state's Attorney General.

But in 2008, the media exposed Spitzer's hiring of prostitutes. He was investigated by the federal government, although never charged with a crime, and he resigned as governor. Once considered on a path to the U.S. presidency, Spitzer has only recently resurfaced as the host of a CNN talk show.

Gibney sat down to talk with Reuters about Spitzer, and "Client 9," which began playing in U.S. theaters on Friday.

Q: You interviewed a lot of key players in the scandal, including Spitzer. Were they eager to talk?

A: "Early on, right after the scandal broke, his enemies in particular were only too happy to dance on his political grave, so we got a lot of those guys, and that was great because they were very candid. They were very open. It gave you some sense of the conflict that had been happening in New York over a period of years. Then...after the federal government said they would not prosecute, we slowly went at Spitzer, and said, 'hey we're going to do this anyway, Peter Elkind is writing the book, and I'm doing the movie. Over time, he agreed."

Q: Did he ever say he thought doing "Client 9," or similar projects, might help redeem him in the public eye?

A: "He never put it that way. I'm sure there was some kind of calculation. I think it was something more like this: "look, these guys are going to do it anyway. They will probably do a reasonably fair job. It's probably in my best interest to cooperate because otherwise they won't hear my perspective."

Q: Did he know you had his enemies on tape, too?.

A: "I think he knew we were going to get them, and over time, the interview I conducted with him -- it's actually four interviews - he learned the people we had. I think that was a motivator, too. That's always a motivator for me. If I know my enemy is speaking, I want to raise my voice."

Q: He compares himself to Icarus, the boy in Greek mythology who flew close to the sun on wings of wax. Agree?

A: "I had to smile when he said that. Just to compare yourself to Icarus shows a certain amount of hubris. At the same time, I do think his story is a story of hubris, and he got reckless. He got carried away. He thought he was all powerful. I think everybody wonders what the hell he was thinking. Even he doesn't quite know or cannot quite articulate what he was thinking. But it must take a pretty big dose of hubris to imagine he could get away with what he was trying to get away with, even as he had some of the world's most powerful people in the world on his trail looking for any misstep."

Q: Right, so this is a mythological tale, a story as old as politics itself. Then, what's new about Spitzer's story?

A: "I don't think it's what's new about it. I think it's one of those tales that we never get enough of...It's like saying, 'what's new about a love story?' People fall in love. We all fall in love, but the fact is we all want to see that story. This is a story of rise-and-fall, and it's a spectacular rise and a spectacular fall and at the center of it is sex and marriage and, also, men like warriors of old, beating each other up over territory. It's a primal tale."

Q: Why don't these guys get it? The fact is, they are all powerful, but they are not above the law.

A: "I think because they are more like us than they can imagine. The only thing that separates them from us is they have a tremendous amount of power, and that sometimes gives them license to do things that maybe we can't do because we don't have that kind of power."

Q: "Client 9" has a lot of twists and turns that look at prostitution, greed on Wall Street and abuse of power in Washington. What are audiences to take away from this story?

A: "We're all human. We have to be better, I think, at both forgiving our own human foibles, but also holding our public officials and our business leaders to high account for the things they do in public. There are no simple lessons to be learned here, because these things are complicated...It's not so simple to say Eliot Spitzer was a good guy and now he's a bad guy. The fact is he's a pretty good guy, in my view, in terms of what he did from a public policy standpoint, who stumbled, rather badly. In fact, it was a free fall."