“The Whole Mission of this Film was About Holding Bannon Accountable for His Actions...I Didn’t Ever Want Him to Succeed”: Alison Klayman on The Brink

If there’s one defining trait of Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and White House Chief Strategist to Trump before he was given the boot from both, it’s his ability to disconnect, to casually dismiss inconvenient truths. And director Alison Klayman (Ai Wewei: Never Sorry, The 100 Years Show) captures this aspect right from the start of her compelling globetrotting doc The Brink. Embedding fly-on-the-wall style with Bannon on his unite-the-far-right/self-promotion tour across Europe and through the mid-term elections of 2018, Klayman opens with a scene in which the Soros-demonizing champion of Charlottesville waxes rhapsodic about one of his, uh, “films” screening in a place best known for mass atrocity. “My shit in Auschwitz rocks,” he boasts without a glimmer of self-awareness. And the layers of irony only grow more head-spinning from there.

In fact, unlike in Errol Morris’s recent misguided take on the man in American Dharma, Bannon often comes across as pathetic in The Brink, an Ayn Rand-reading college freshman double-majoring in philosophy and cinema studies (able to quote Lincoln and namedrop Riefenstahl in a single film!). I spoke to the savvy “25 New Face” alum prior to the doc’s March 29th theatrical premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.