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Coming to Cannes was never the plan. Eugene Jarecki originally intended to premiere “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” his documentary about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, at Sundance this year.
And it seemed like perfect timing. Assange’s deal last June with the U.S., in which he pled guilty to publishing U.S. military secrets, meant he no longer faced extradition and could return to his native Australia after spending five years in a U.K. prison and seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. It was just the happy ending Jarecki thought his documentary needed. But as Jarecki started to tinker with the film, he realized the story he was telling had changed, and he needed more time to capture Assange as he returned home.
“The whole center of gravity shifted,” Jarecki says. “It wasn’t going to be ready, so I had to do the unthinkable, which is to call Sundance and tell them that with incredible regret I couldn’t do it.”
But as painful as that decision was, there are benefits to debuting the film in France, instead of the U.S.
“It hadn’t dawned on me, it would have meant premiering the film in a country where Julian Assange is not allowed to be and that seemed ethically compromising,” Jarecki says.
“The Six Billion Dollar Man” paints a sympathetic portrait of Assange, who remains controversial for his decision to publish everything from diplomatic cables to classified footage of airstrikes in Afghanistan that pulled back the curtain on the inner workings of the U.S. government and its allies. Critics of Assange argue he’s reckless, providing a platform for leakers to share information that could endanger lives. Supporters believe he’s a crusader for truth, willing to risk it all to hold the powerful to account.
Cannes audiences can decide for themselves on May 21 when “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” which follows Assange from the early days of WikiLeaks through his decades-long legal battles, premieres in Cannes with the man himself in attendance. Variety spoke to Jarecki ahead of the premiere.
Why did Julian Assange interest you?
We need more people who stand up to power, or this world is fucked. We all live on a bell curve, and people have made a theater of distraction out of his personality. We need to know about what is happening to our world, but we’ve watched Assange get buried by layers of propaganda and nonsense and distraction. Look at the death toll in Gaza for journalists. Last year was the most murderous year in history for journalists, and that’s 10 years out from when Assange warned the world that America would lead the way into a world in which the regard for truth itself has been eroded. And when you don’t have truth, you have no North Star by which society can achieve any level of democracy, dignity, humanism. Whether you like or dislike Julian’s funny hair or his Australian accent or his snobby personality, I could give a shit.
He has many detractors. What, from your perspective, is the case against Assange?
In the beginning, he was captivated by the power of the technology he unleashed. He’s compared to Prometheus in the film for having brought to people a kind of modern fire in the form of access to the real documents about what the most powerful country in the world was doing in the name of war. And he was quite captivated with the incredible unleashing of that fire. I think Julian was probably insufficiently cognizant of the danger that unleashed information could also pose. So for example, one of the early releases that WikiLeaks did was the Afghanistan war logs, field reports about the incredible atrocities being committed by U.S. forces in the so-called “War on Terror,” but in his zeal to show the world the horrors that Chelsea Manning made available via WikiLeaks as a leaker, I think he was, and he would admit it himself, insufficiently cognizant of the need for certain measures of redaction. But the U.S. government has affirmed and conceded in black and white that no single person on this planet was ever hurt because of any release by WikiLeaks
When did Assange’s attitude towards redacting sensitive information change?
He caught up pretty quickly when he started working with the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and other major news outlets around the world. He was a shoestring organization that was patchworking this together, and he had some catching up to do. WikiLeaks is often tarred with a couple of brushes that are not fair or accurate. One is that it is claimed that WikiLeaks released 251,000 diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department to its embassies around the world without having redacted those names. The truth of that, which is revealed in our movie for the first time, is that it was not WikiLeaks who released that material. WikiLeaks had fiercely protected and guarded that material, and it was actually a journalist at the Guardian who foolishly wrote a book in which he gave to the public all it needed to crack that and get inside those documents and see the unredacted names. The other thing he’s often accused of is having meddled in the U.S .election by having released emails that had to do with the Democratic National Committee’s efforts against Bernie Sanders. Those showed the world that the Democratic Party was making it virtually impossible for Bernie Sanders to win that election. I would ask anyone, what kind of world do you think we’d be looking at right now had it been Bernie Sanders who got elected at that moment, and not Donald Trump?
Both Republican and Democratic administrations saw Assange as a danger. They both tried to prosecute him. Why was this a bipartisan issue?
Because he’s threatening American power, and American power is the one thing that moves past party lines. The parties disagree on domestic, usually social issues that have a lot of heat around them, but they really don’t disagree on the projection of American power and force around the world. They all agree that they want the country to operate in this extremely post-colonial, imperial fashion in the world. Historically, it’s always been that there’s a boogeyman — the Russians or the Middle East. And there’s always generally consensus that America should keep being the warmonger of the world. Julian Assange and people like him, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner and others say, “Here are the receipts, if you want to look at them.” And they don’t want that. As someone in our film says, the last thing they want is an informed public, what Eisenhower called an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. That’s the last thing that either party wants.
In the film you chart the seismic change in our understanding of the internet. It had this early promise that it would democratize information. Instead the internet and social media accelerated a process in which the whole notion of an empirical truth has become watered down and distorted.
[Jarecki pauses and his eyes start to mist.] I got slightly choked up. There was a moment of promise and that is really heartbreaking. The internet was offering a kind of collectivism around the world. It seemed so free. Wouldn’t it make it far harder for me to be told to bomb a person in another country if I’m in the middle of buying a sweater from them on Etsy with my with my kid’s name sewn on it? I still think there’s potential for that. But those in power very quickly saw the danger. It very quickly dawned on them that that fucking fire would get out of control if they didn’t assert control over it, and that’s what we are seeing play out now. Everything became data mining, everything became espionage. Everything became, “Oh, we’ve got them all in the same place, and they think they’re singing ‘Kumbaya’ around the campfire. Let’s put some microphones under the stones around them.”
Your film talks a lot about the dangers that journalists face today. How do you feel about the mainstream media organizations that support reporters’ work? At the moment, many of them seem to be cozying up to power and falling short of the profession’s ideals?
I want to be compassionate to the journalists, but withering against their institutions. It is extremely difficult to be a journalist in the modern era when your bosses are in bed with centralized power. These companies are lying to pretend that there is an absolute brick wall between the business affairs side of their institution and the editorial. We saw that recently in terms of what Shari Redstone is doing and why the head of “60 Minutes” left. News organization after news organization have folded to a would-be dictator, by allowing that wall to be made of mesh. And when that wall is porous, the people in the editorial department are forced to run scared from truth-telling. World-destroying capitalism affects media companies, just like it affects polluters, just like it affects all of us. And until this changes, we’re on a road to perdition. In all of this, Julian Assange was an early messenger who got buried because of the message.
Have Assange’s views of the internet changed because of the legal ordeal he’s gone through?
I’m going to let Julian speak for himself. He’s been muzzled long enough. He should be listened to without me putting word into his mouth.
You capture Assange returning home to Australia, but one thing that your film does not do is have a big sit-down interview with him about everything that happened. Why did you make that choice?
I didn’t think stuffing a mic in Julian’s face was dignified. He’s in the film, and he speaks in the film in a way that I think captured what his re-emergence meant in terms of getting a chance to be with his family, and to begin to look at the world as a free man. We capture a bit of that in the film, but we do it judiciously.
Will Assange be in Cannes at the premiere?
I am very proud to say that Julian Assange will be on the red carpet. He is going to come along with the president of Ecuador, who gave him asylum in the London embassy. Interestingly, they have never met. A whole bunch of people that Julian may have been involved with in different ways will be able to see him as a real person for the first time, and not just as a cause they were fighting for.
English (US) ·