Charles Ferguson is a director affiliated with the HBO Wikileaks project.
HBO has announced that Oscar-winning director Charles Ferguson will helm HBO's Wikileaks movie effort.
Mr. Ferguson won has Academy Award for the film Inside Job, a tale of the U.S. financial crisis of the late 2000's. He previously explored the Iraq War with his film No End in Sight. The Wikileaks project will be his first made-for-TV documentary.
Mr. Ferguson's style varies. In Inside Job, he crafted a very traditional documentary, with long shots of well-lit experts (each carefully positioned 1/3 left or right of center) talking to camera in front of static backgrounds. It On the other hand, in No End in Sight, he crafted a more narrative form, taking advantage of the desert to provide the long lonely shots of destroyed buildings and drifting black smoke that give the film an almost haunting feel at times. Where will the new project fall?
Mr. Fergusons politics will also be interesting. His previous films make clear that he is no fan of the Bush Administration, but this will be his first movie that largely falls during the Obama administration. Will he portray Assange as an uplifting hero who destabalizes power (focusing on leaks against Bank of America and other corporate scrooges)? Or will he portray the Bradley Manning controversy, in which the Obama Administration is accused of torturing a soldier who shared secrets with the Wikileaks site.
No matter what, the HBO project is now certain to be one of the most interesting.
