Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

There are few writers as notorious and eccentric as Hunter S. Thompson. His politically incisive journalism during the 60s and 70s fused the bizarre, the imagined and the actual to create a distinct style of journalism that became labelled ‘Gonzo’. He wrote several books the most famous of which, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was made into a film by Terry Gilliam in 1998. Based on true events, it is a drug-fuelled journey that came to represent everything that Hunter was about – the surreal, the politically-challenging and the lost ‘American Dream’. The Skinny chatted to Alex Gibney the director of Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson about his upcoming film.

Gonzo has a substantial political content because of the nature of the work Hunter was involved in. This aspect is something which is more in line with your previous films (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)), did you intend Gonzo to have such a strong political content from the outset?

I think inevitably I’m inclined to go there. In some ways I started out wanting to make this as a respite, as something different, but inevitably I get drawn back. Hunter was drawn there too, he called himself a ‘political junkie’. We included some stuff that was fairly recent including a brilliant piece he did on 9/11 on the very day the towers came down, but also the older political reporting that he did back in the 60s and 70s turns out to be very enduring. It has a lot to say about our condition today. So for all those reasons it seemed to make sense.

Do you think there’s a need for a challenging style of journalism, like Hunter’s, especially in today’s political climate?

I think there is. I don’t think it’s useful for everybody to write like Hunter or to have that kind of style. But one of the things I think is great about him is that he was a novelist and a journalist embodied, so a lot of his writing mixes fact and fiction in ways that get to a deeper truth. He also uses humour that way too, he takes a righteous anger and channels it into a wicked humour which can be very invigorating. It also has a way of penetrating the kind of stage-managing that politicians do today that always seeks to hide the rough edges and to sugar-coat their messages.

Did you think about taking a ‘Gonzo’ approach to the style and making of the documentary?

We did think about, and I think we did have fun with a more playful approach, something that would mix fact and fiction. We’re inter-mixing photographs and movies and different types of music and sometimes even with archive footage - as you pan the faces of a crowd suddenly one of them turns into a lizard head and sticks its tongue out at you. So in a subtle way we did. The other thing we had going for us was these tremendously anarchic and wildly angry and talented images by Ralph Steadman which really give the film a kind of pop that it might not otherwise have had.

Yes, there’s a fantastic part of the film where we see Ralph Steadman’s illustrations before he met Hunter and then what they became after.

Oh, it’s fantastic! It looks sort of like an uptight Ronald Searle or something and then you see them afterwards and they’re unhinged, it’s fantastic. He’s reached back into some recess of his psyche and pulled something fantastic out. They’re really capturing a kind of central truth.

You have Johnny Depp narrating the documentary and lots of people will make the connection with the voiceover he did in Fear and Loathing, how important was it to have him involved in the film?

It was critical because I wanted the narration not to be narration but I wanted it to be Hunter’s voice. So if there are readings it is Hunter doing the reading. We constructed the film out of bits and pieces of his writing so you feel like he is narrating or telling his own story. Only one person could really do that and do it justice and that’s Johnny because he could be Hunter. He’s the guy who went up and lived with Hunter for a number of weeks just before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And now I think he breathes the same air that Hunter breathed.

And he was close friends with Hunter too…

He was great friends with Hunter, right to the end and he paid for his funeral - the spectacular funeral that I shot for the film where they blasted Hunter’s ashes into outer space. They mixed his ashes with the gunpowder in the fireworks.

How much do you think Hunter was a character of a certain place and time?

I think he was very much a person of his time and place. He really inhabited a role in that culture that was fundamental. At the same time what’s interesting about Hunter is that there’s an enduring truth, even to the stuff he wrote way back. I was surprised when I went back to read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 and you think what relevance is this going to have to anybody today? These strange names that nobody remembers; Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey even Richard Nixon is fading into obscurity, but you read it and it feels fresh. It feels like he’s writing about the campaign between McCain and Obama. He was certainly of his time but I think he has this enduring quality that really makes him special.

Hunter had a certain philosophy and attitude to life are there any aspects of that which you think the world would be a better place if people would adopt today?

[laughs] That’s a good question! I’m not sure if we’d all be better off if we all acted like Hunter. But I think what there is about Hunter that I think is a great joy to everybody is this ability to turn anger and sometimes rage into a wicked humour. That has tremendous ability and is a powerful tonic for everybody without ignoring the stuff that goes on around you. If we could all learn to do that, that would be a trick!