Only one person agreed to be Alex Gibney’s new Elon Musk documentary immediately: Musk’s father. “We had Errol Musk at ‘hello,’” Gibney says.
Eventually, the director would speak with scores of Musk’s associates for his film. His first wife, Justine Musk, appears, as does his ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Claire. Journalist Kara Swisher, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, myself, and WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond also spoke to Gibney for Musk, which hits theaters nationwide on Friday. But landing Errol Musk, with whom the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has a complicated relationship, was a watershed.
“Everybody else took a lot of persuasion,” Gibney says. “It was very difficult to get people to appear because the risk profile for talking about Musk in a way that was honest was high.”
Once Gibney interviewed all of his subjects, he had enough material to make a documentary that runs nearly four hours, including a 10-minute intermission. It’s a damning portrait of the trillionaire CEO, detailing how much of his genius is based on his formidable ability to promote his own mythology—and the stock price of his public companies.
Musk never agreed to an interview with Gibney. Instead, the director’s team researched every public comment Musk ever made and created a simulated Elon Musk who appears throughout the film.
I spoke with Gibney earlier this month about his experience making the film, why he decided to make his simulated Elon attractive, and what material he had to leave on the cutting room floor.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ZOË SCHIFFER: Alex Gibney, thank you so much for being with us today.
ALEX GIBNEY: Good to see you, Zoë.
This shouldn’t spoil anything, but in the four years that you spent making Musk, Elon Musk never agreed to sit down with you for an interview. Instead, your team looked back through the archives of everything he has said publicly, and you put together a sort of simulated interview, which appears throughout the film as a through line. Basically, it plays into Musk’s idea that we are all, in fact, living in a simulation. How did you decide on this approach for the film?
Well, what were we gonna do? He’s the main character.
I actually thought because he’d been so outspoken about this idea of a simulation, that cinematically we should lean into that. We should play in Elon’s sandbox and have a simulated interview. As we began to develop that idea, by using his real words, his actual audio recordings, but placing them in a kind of avatar which we would design, I think there became all sorts of thematic reasons to do it.