Elon Musk took the spotlight at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday. Well, not in person! But he and his influence took center stage as filmmaker Alex Gibney discussed his new doc, simply called Musk, during a press conference around lunchtime.
The film about the owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, world-premiering in the Italian fest’s Venice Open – Out of Competition program, comes from producers Jigsaw Productions (Gibney, Jessie Deeter, Erin Edeiken), Closer Media (Zhang Xin), Anonymous Content (Nick Shumaker, Jessica Grimshaw) and Double Agent (Dana O’Keefe).
Despite its 225-minute running time, the Venice synopsis of the doc is brief and to the point: “An incisive look behind the legend of Elon Musk, the world’s most heralded ‘inventorentrepreneur’ who exerts an enormous influence on the world in which we all live.”
Gibney shared how the doc team reached out to Musk for the film, without success, and how the focus of the project changed once the tech mogul “got wrapped into Donald Trump” and his story. The result is a mix of “the reality of what he has done and the unreality of his narrative,” the filmmaker said. “In the service of that, we created this formulation that came out of Musk’s own ideas about the notion that we’re living in a simulation or in some kind of existential video game, to convey in formal terms, through a kind of avatar, which speaks with Musk’s actual words, and video game imagery” both sides, the reality and the unreality.
