Monday night, Academy Award–winning documentary director Alex Gibney will premiere his latest project, Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream, a film about the disparity of wealth in America. In particular, Gibney highlights the differences between the historically extravagant apartments of 740 Park—a building that has housed everyone from a young Jackie Onassis to John D. Rockefeller Jr.—and impoverished residents in the South Bronx. VF Daily caught up with the Taxi to the Dark Side director about the psychology behind wealthy lobbyists, the building’s most delusional residents, and David Koch’s parsimonious tipping habits. Highlights from our chat:*VF Daily:*Your project is inspired by Michael Gross’s book 740 Park. Had you read it before making this film?Alex Gibney: I mentioned this project to Jane Mayer at The New Yorker, and she said, “You might want to take a look at that book.” I did and I loved it. The focus for me was the residents of the building now, notably David Koch, Stephen Schwarzman and John Thain. They seem emblematic of this rising disparity between rich and poor in America.

How do they set themselves apart from the building’s other residents?

I think David Koch in his insistence on Ayn Randian–like principles. The idea that it’s a good thing for people to be poor because they’ll work hard and try hard to succeed, and the only thing that you can do to damage them is to help them in any way, shape, or form. Believing any attempt to impose laws on the powerful and the mighty is somehow akin to socialism, rather than simply being a way to try and organize a decent society.

Stephen Schwarzman was an interesting character because he’s an exemplar of someone who, rather unapologetically, has tried to openly rig the rules in his favor. The one particular example we saw in the film is the hedge-fund loophole. When Barack Obama attempted to speak out against it, he said that the repeal of the hedge-fund loophole would be akin to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

Then John Thain, who’s famous for his rather excessive spending, and also for the fact that he tried to insist on fantastic amounts of bonuses for his Merrill Lynch employees, even though the company was going down a hole and had to be forced to be rescued by the federal government.

We all know that those men are incredibly rich, but psychologically what do they have in common?

When you make that much money, somehow you believe that it’s due entirely to your mental acumen—that it’s got nothing to do with anything else. If anybody suggests that you should pay slightly more taxes, or help out in some fundamental way to make the country a better place, you’re so thin-skinned that you believe that you’re being attacked personally—that you’re a victim.

This guy Paul Piff did this really interesting experiment with the game of Monopoly. He would have two people come in, and he’d flip a coin, and the person who lost would get a thousand bucks, a hundred dollars every time they passed Go, and one die. The person who won got $2,000, $200 every time they passed Go, and two dice. Inevitably, that person wins. But what the experiment shows is—despite the fact that both players know the game is rigged—the person who inevitably wins imagines that they’re winning due not to some kind of circumstance—not luck—but it’s due only to their skill and intelligence.

There are certain markers in the game. He puts a big bowl of pretzels on the table and puts it equidistant from both players. We discovered that as the winning player starts to win, they inevitably pull the bowl of pretzels toward them and they start to eat more and more of the pretzels. It’s crazy. So what you see is that wealth in and of itself has a kind of corrupting influence on the human psyche. The idea that Stephen Schwarzman could ever compare paying more taxes to Hitler’s invasion of Poland is such a staggering mismatch of circumstance, you can’t even begin to imagine! He later apologized for that, but where does that even come from?