Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, a cool-headed analysis of the systematic use of torture by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, won this year’s Oscar for best documentary. It’s not like the writer-director expects his movie, which opens here on Friday (April 4), to force the Bush gang to stop killing people overnight, but he’s still pretty fired up about it.

“My sense of outrage is seemingly unlimited,” Gibney says, very calmly, on the line from his office in New York City. “Of course, the amount of corruption we’re looking at is bottomless too. They are deeply invested in this crap, and now Bush is just trying to run out the clock while Republicans hold their breath, hoping he’ll just go away.”

The filmmaker is no stranger to Bush-league chicanery. In his award-winning Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Gibney illustrated how high-rolling players with government assistance can pick the pockets of
ordinary citizens. But only in recent years have federal agencies laboured in such a concerted way to spy on Americans, shred their basic constitutional rights, and hollow out their bank accounts to pay for atrocities abroad.

Does Gibney think there will be a reckoning when this administration sails off into the sunset?

“The first thing that will happen,” he deadpans, “is that all the documentary filmmakers in the country will be out of work! No, there will always be something. But one would like to think there will be some kind of thorough investigation. My view is that you can’t really move forward until you reckon with the past. Otherwise, the future will always be haunted. Whether or not politicians have the courage to deal with it is another question.”

Yes, but does he ever feel frustrated by the slow rate of change south of the Great White Border?

“No, because I’m engaged. That’s all I can say. You do get tired, though, because it’s one criminal act after another with them. It’s dismaying to the general public and they don’t even know how to feel about it.”

While the pols and the press may be playing a waiting game, Taxi is actually having some effect in other halls of power.

“The film is already being taught at the Army JAG school,” he says of the military’s legal branch (the Judge Advocate General’s Corps). “I’m giving a speech with the film at the Navy War College. I know that a group of retired generals and admirals saw it and all have endorsed it. There’s the sense that this film has resonated with a lot of people who are not your usual liberal, Amnesty International types. Something fundamental has been breached here, something that goes beyond partisan politics and speaks to the very essence of who we are supposed to be.”

Gibney is currently working on Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and several other docs. He does, however, find time to retreat into playing and watching sports as a way to offset the madness.

“I love sports because it’s the last undetermined drama in American life,” he says.