> No End in Sight es un nuevo documental critico sobre la guerra en Irak. Ha recibido excelentes críticas. Lo curioso es que lo filmó caballero, Charles Ferguson, que se hizo espantosamente rico después de vender su empresa a Microsoft. Estaba aburrido y angustiado, sin nada que hacer, y decidió hacer una película sobre el debacle de la guerra.
7.8.07
No End in Sight: un nuevo documental sobre la guerra en Irak
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His movie, his message about Iraq, his start to a new career
Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
In 1996, Charles Ferguson sold the startup company he founded to Microsoft for $133 million. He was 41, had $14 million worth of growing Microsoft stock in his pocket after paying off investors - and was thoroughly exhausted after barely sleeping the previous year. Then for the next eight years, he wrestled with the question that relatively young entrepreneurs rarely consider until they hit it big:
Now what do I do?
"For quite a while I didn't know," said Ferguson, as he looked out a window of the book-filled two-bedroom Berkeley home near Strawberry Canyon where he has lived since before he struck gold. While he was hardly idle during that time - he wrote two books, including the scathing "High Stakes, No Prisoners" (1999) about his startup experience, traveled and served at the Brookings Institution think tank - he felt unfulfilled. He couldn't sleep, and felt himself growing too dependent on sleeping pills that left him feeling dopey. And for a man who thinks at warp speed, that wouldn't do.
A little more than two years ago, Ferguson said he started to "get my energy back." What germinated during his hibernation was "No End in Sight," a documentary about how the United States has botched the occupation of Iraq. It opens Friday in the Bay Area after winning the special jury prize for a documentary at the Sundance Film Festival this year and garnering largely rave reviews in New York, where it opened last month.
Such plaudits are impressive for a first-time filmmaker, as Ferguson served as writer, producer and director. They're even more remarkable given that he chose to tackle a complex foreign policy issue for his first picture, a choice that required him to film in some of the most dangerous parts of Iraq.
And then there's the fact that his resume - software entrepreneur, political think tank analyst, technology consultant, math major at UC Berkeley - wouldn't seem to prepare him to make a movie.
Oddly, it did.
While other Iraq-related documentaries have critiqued the reasons the United States went to war, none (outside of PBS' "Frontline" series) has deconstructed how American leaders have mismanaged the occupation and helped plunge Iraq into civil war and chaos. The strength of the film - aside from its methodical analysis - is that Ferguson didn't rely on a cadre of Bush-bashing pundits and journalists to make his point.
Instead, Ferguson, who holds a doctorate in political science from MIT, lands interviews with many of those who either created or were assigned to carry out the doomed policy. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was in charge of Baghdad in the spring of 2003; Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell; and Gen. Jay Garner, who was in charge of the occupation - appear in extended interviews and anchor the film.
Critics and others who have seen the film are raving about Ferguson's interview with Walter Slocombe, the former senior adviser for national security and defense for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was supposed to oversee Iraq's reconstruction. Slocombe's comments provide a moment that will have opponents of the war slapping their heads in exasperation.
How did Ferguson get these people to talk on camera? It turns out that his time spent as a fellow at the Brookings Institution and as a consultant to several federal agencies served him well.
"His political science background is what helped," said Alex Gibney, the veteran filmmaker ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room") whom Ferguson recruited as executive producer. "He was able to penetrate that world and gain the confidence of people who were making these decisions. For a film like this, it's all about getting inside."
"Charles is a wonk and he's very smart," said Robert Litan, a senior fellow at Brookings who worked with Ferguson. "And this (how he got the film made) is a story of a wonk made good."
It almost didn't happen.
In 2004, Ferguson told several journalist friends and some contacts in the film industry that he wanted to make a movie about the U.S. occupation. Don't do it, was the unanimous reply. Do something easy for your first film. Make it local. Plus, Ferguson said he was told, there are 10 other filmmakers pursuing this idea. So he waited.
A year later, nobody was making this movie, George W. Bush had been re-elected and as Ferguson said, "There still was very little good discussion about the nature of the occupation, the nature of American policy in conducting the occupation in the media. And I thought, '... I'm going to make this movie.' "
Having cash in the bank gave him the power to do just that and fulfill his childhood dream of making a movie. He financed the film's entire $2 million budget.
Ferguson grew up in San Francisco's Sunset District, and his parents started taking their only child to the San Francisco International Film Festival when he was 8. While the hippie trippy culture surrounded him in the city, he didn't indulge in its offerings.
He was more bookish, admittedly a bit square for the era. He remembers going as a teenager to an eight-hour Soviet film that played in town. "There's this joke about Soviet films," Ferguson said, "They're either about 'Boy meets tractor' or 'Boy meets tank.' "
His father was a business consultant who stopped working as alcohol began to consume his life, Ferguson said. His dad died of alcoholism when Ferguson was 19. His mother works at a foundation that helps low-income children attend college.
He attended UC Berkeley on a scholarship, then MIT, and started consulting in Silicon Valley at the dawning of the Internet age. Soon, he decided to start his own software company. He recruited the more laid-back Randy Forgaard as a partner, and together they formed the backbone of Vermeer Technologies, a Web page application.
Forgaard jokes that while his official job at the company was chief technology officer, what occupied most of his time was calming down investors, employees and others with whom Ferguson got frustrated. Ferguson moves idea-a-minute fast - one of his recent indulgences was renting time in a Georgia race track to learn to drive high-end Porsches at 130 miles per hour - and doesn't suffer those who aren't traveling at the same speed.
"Charles is absolutely the smartest guy I know, and he holds himself to a very high standard," Forgaard said. "And he gets frustrated sometimes because he holds other people to the same, very high standard. But that's what makes him so successful. The company wouldn't have been successful without him being that way."
During production, Gibney said he had to smooth things over with various crew members and others a few times after Ferguson ruffled feathers. But soon Gibney began to appreciate Ferguson's driven nature.
"He could be a prickly person to deal with sometimes for some people," Gibney said. "But you have to understand what you want. And Charles does. He is very driven. I never had a difficult relationship with Charles at all."
Ferguson's film needed a driven person leading it, as the most challenging aspect, of course, was filming in Iraq. In March 2006, he and his crew headed there for two months of filming, accompanied by a top-flight private security team. They intended to fly into Baghdad, but the airport was closed. So they drove in from Turkey, guarded by the private Kurdish security team Ferguson hired at great expense, a convoy of four armored pickup trucks carrying 20 armed security officers. On the ride in, three roadside bombs detonated in front of the convoy as they moved toward the city, but no one in the party was injured.
A different firm escorted Ferguson and his crew around the streets of Baghdad. Six people, all carrying automatic pistols, would walk down the street surrounding the filmmaker - who was wearing typical Iraqi clothing and sunglasses over his blue eyes - as though he was their friend.
At that point, did Ferguson ever think, "I have millions of dollars in the bank. Why am I here?"
"No, I wasn't thinking that, actually," Ferguson said, allowing himself a small smile. "It's pretty obvious, actually. This subject is important. Nobody had made a serious film about the subject. You can't make a serious film unless you spend time there. So I had to go."
Meanwhile, executive producer Gibney was getting antsy. He told Ferguson that he was doing too many interviews (200 hours' worth). He urged him to treat the main subjects as characters in an effort to humanize them.
Ultimately, Ferguson came up with a narrative thread for the film: The story is one of people trying to save a nation.
"It became clear that there were a lot of intelligent, capable, good-willed people who tried to do something about this and knew what to do, but who were thwarted by the decisions made by a small number of people at the top of the government who just would not listen," Ferguson said.
"Unfortunately, it's too late for Iraq," he said. "But this is not the last time America is going to go to war. This is not the last time where there will be a debate about what to do about a failed state or a dictator. I hope people come away with the understanding that war is sometimes necessary. And if you go to war, you're going to have to do it very carefully and with humility."
As for Ferguson, he's hooked on making films. His next project: "It's basically a movie full of conversations primarily about our contemporary romantic-marital commitment, our erotic condition."
So you're going to follow up a hard-hitting foreign policy documentary with a movie of people talking about love?
"Sort of," said the never-married bachelor, who isn't in a relationship. Dishes remain in his sink from a dinner party the night before. "For a reason, I have an interesting take on that."
No End in Sight: The film opens Friday at the Embarcadero, the Shattuck in Berkeley and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/07/DDT6RE0572.DTL
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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