Warning: plot points of We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks are discussed in this Q&A.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney doesn't shy away from controversy. In fact, he may gravitate towards it. His previous works cover the fall of Enron (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), the Elliot Spitzer saga (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer), and torture during the war in Afghanistan (Taxi to the Dark Side).

For his latest documentary, Gibney focused on the story of WikiLeaks—from its successful beginnings in Iceland all the way through Julian Assange embracing Ecuador. The film itself is an extremely thorough look at a complicated tale that still hasn't finished, with both Assange and Bradley Manning currently existing in a sort of legal limbo. It challenged Gibney to craft an ever evolving narrative and inspired him to consider doing a dramatic film about Manning in the future ("We're working on it, I wouldn't say more than that," he told Ars).

Before We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks debuts this Friday, Gibney jumped on the phone for a quick Q&A. He discussed his disappointing interactions with Assange, the interesting scapegoating being done, and the developing role of Manning within the film.

Ars: Assange is built up as the story's hero for much of the film, but by the end he's become an anti-hero like we see on many TV dramas. Was this a conscious decision or something that developed through your process?

Gibney: It was the latter. It wasn't the way we intended to do it in the beginning. I think I saw it as more of a pure David and Goliath story when we first started.

By the time we got close to finishing, we very consciously structured it so that you feel the burning fire of his idealism early on and then you see that he becomes corrupted by the moment. Some of the very things he opposes he begins to resemble, so this struck me as a very powerful but true character arc.

This will sound funny, but the arc really reminded me of Breaking Bad. Once he defeats his enemy—the US government here—he ends up becoming the same type of villain, maybe even worse.

I don't know about worse, but he begins to assume the same kind of characteristics. His organization becomes increasingly secretive and paranoid. Instead of speaking truth to power, he begins to speak lies to power. He begins to take his supporters and force them to embrace conspiratorial lies about the whole Swedish episode.

So suddenly, he becomes a character who is not a crusader for truth. Rather, he's somebody who believes that because he's good, he's permitted to do bad.

Why tackle this topic now? You use footage from some recent, related documentaries and I know there are other WikiLeaks projects in development right now.

Well there's only one that I know of, which is the Bill Condon film [starring Benedict Cumberbatch] that I guess will come out this fall. Some others were in development but I think have fallen by the way side.

But this tends to be something that I do. I look at stories that hit the headlines, a couple years after the headlines have dissipated, and find things inside the story that maybe people missed the first time around. And I felt this was an important story to do that with, such an important moment in history, that it was important to examine it thoroughly.

I must have missed this news at the time, but one of the most interesting things about your filming was that Assange requested that you pay him for an interview...

Just to be accurate, yes, you're right, he wanted me to pay him. And then he said the market rate for an interview was $1 million.

A WikiLeaks film? Yep, and Ars caught a screening. Yep, and Ars caught a screening. Read our review of We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks before it debuts on May 24.

He was always suggesting that he might want to be paid and certainly his agents were suggesting he would want to be paid. But I kept telling him from the beginning that I couldn't pay him, I don't pay for interviews. There were a lot of other people who interviewed him who didn't pay him so far as I know.

That process of trying to get him to sit down and talk was a long one. It started at the very beginning and carried right up to the very end; I was still trying to get him to talk. At the same time, I made it clear to him early on that I was going to make the film anyway whether he agreed to talk to me or not. That was one of those things that just did not compute with him. "Why would you make a film about WikiLeaks if I don't agree to talk to you?" as if he was a puppetmaster holding the strings for all stories about WikiLeaks.

Has he still, to your knowledge, not seen the film? He's already taken to Twitter against the project.

Yes, he has not seen the film so far as I'm aware. I don't know how he could have seen it since he's still in the Ecuadorian embassy. And many of his supporters who have come out and attacked the film, like John Pilger or Oliver Stone, they haven't seen the film either. I find that, again, more than a little bit ironic.

Julian has taken to calling it an anti-WikiLeaks film. It's not an anti-WikiLeaks film at all as anybody who sees it would know. But it becomes convenient for Julian to assume that if there's any criticism of him, you're anti-WikiLeaks i.e. the idea of WikiLeaks. That is precisely the reason for going into such detail about the Swedish episode.

Julian and WikiLeaks, and the very ideals of WikiLeaks, are not one and the same. That is to say, transparency and Julian aren't the embodiment of the same thing. You can hold true to the ideal and not have to march in lock step or believe any of Julian's lies.

The film does make that very clear. WikiLeaks comes across as a heroic representation of transparency. But once you hit that twist in the film, it's clear Assange has fallen from grace in terms of this documentary's narrative.

Sure, and in some ways why should we expect Julian to be the perfect hero? He doesn't have to be. But I think there are some people who feel so needy for "the perfect hero" that they have to embrace everything lock, stock, and barrel. They believe he should be beyond criticism because he is fighting the good fight. I just don't find that to be convincing.

Read on for Bradley Manning's evolution in the film and Gibney's surprising sources.