You might recognize Alex Winter from the Bill & Ted movies, and that’s cool. But these days his primary interest lies in documentaries about web culture. His first, Downloaded, looked at the rise and fall of Napster now, in Deep Web, he tackles the U.S. justice system’s case against Ross Ulbricht, founder of online marketplace Silk Road. We spoke when Winter brought the film to Hot Docs in April.
Deep Web is a story that might have taken many different directions. It touches on American politics, cybercrime, the war on drugs, judicial process and even the architecture of the internet. How did you decide what to focus on and what to push to the side?
I was interested in putting a terrarium around one moment in time, from the moment Ross Ulbricht was arrested until the end of his trial and sentencing. I was always interested in focusing on that moment in time and digging into the implications around that moment. That was really my driving motivator: What would actually serve that story? What gets us from here to here to here?
Right, because you could easily do a feature documentary on Bitcoin alone.
There’s another movie there, yeah. There’s five movies. I’m only trying to tell specific stories within those worlds. My editor and I would be working for weeks on our Bitcoin section and then be like, “It’s 10 minutes, let’s make it six minutes. Let’s make it four minutes. Let’s cut all of it out completely” [laughs]. That was kind of the process, you know.
I get the sense that you’re very sympathetic to Ulbricht’s situation, and that your movie tries very hard to keep its distance.
Being enmeshed in this story is pretty emotional, and to watch the efficiency with which the machine just clamps down on this stuff and buries it all is pretty emotional. It was important to me to communicate these ideas to people, to not sort of get lost in the wash of it.
Did you have any trouble convincing Keanu Reeves to record the narration? You guys do go back a ways.
We’re always involved in what the other is doing, and he loves this technology space. It was funny, because I called him and asked him, and I think he was offended that I hadn’t asked him sooner! I just hadn’t thought of it. He has this ability to infuse things with emotion but not editorialize, which was really important.
But now you guys have to deal with all the Bill & Ted III questions.
You know, it didn’t really occur to either of us until we were done with the recording. We looked at each other and said, “Oh, shit, the Bill & Ted crowd is going to go nuts over this.”
Alex Winter on balancing facts and emotion in his storytelling:
Winter on being a documentarian who’s also a beloved cultural figure:
Winter on the documentary filmmaker’s endless struggle for financing:
See our review of the film here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
