Laura Poitras, the journalist and documentary filmmaker, has the rare distinction of having won a Pulitzer Prize (for her reporting on the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden), an Academy Award (for Citizenfour, about Snowden), and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion (for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, about the artist and activist Nan Goldin and the opioid crisis). Her new film, Cover-Up, examines the career of Seymour M. Hersh—known for his investigative journalism on My Lai and Abu Ghraib, as well as other, more contested scoops—using archival material and exclusive access to Hersh’s notes to probe how accountability journalism is made.
Cover-Up, which opens Friday in theaters in select cities ahead of its Netflix premiere on December 26, returns Poitras to the familiar intersection of government secrecy, source protection, and the journalistic imperative to reveal what powerful institutions want hidden. Codirected with Mark Obenhaus, the film is a political thriller that offers a candid and illuminating look at Hersh’s career and methods, what makes him tick, and why investigative journalism matters today. Our conversation, which took place at the New York office of Poitras’s production company Praxis Films, has been edited for length and clarity.
AJG: Let me start by observing that Cover-Up is a valuable addition to the small canon of journalism movies. Yet I see it as more closely in conversation with fiction films than with other documentaries.
LP: It’s interesting that you reference that, because we definitely were talking about fiction films when we began—we being myself, Amy Foote, and Peter Bowman, the editors—in terms of how we were going to approach its feel and aesthetics. And the films that we were referring to were the 1970s paranoia thrillers, brilliant films that were very skeptical and critical of the state and state power. Alan J. Pakula was at the top of the list. All the President’s Men and The Parallax View were the ones that we constantly referred to. I make nonfiction, but I’m often making films that deal with threats and dangers of the state. So it’s not like I’m stealing from the genre of fiction, but rather, I think fiction steals from real life.
This is a long-gestating project. You’ve said that you first thought about training your camera on Seymour Hersh after reading his Abu Ghraib coverage in 2004. Tell me more about that.
Twenty years ago, when I was preparing to go to Iraq, where I spent eight months documenting the US occupation and the war, I felt very strongly that we were living in a landscape where legacy journalism was failing the public in terms of its coverage of the lead-up to this war, its coverage of the Bush era, the “war on terror,” and how it was reporting on Guantánamo Bay prison and torture. All this nightmarish stuff was happening that we knew was happening, and by and large, legacy media was copying the government’s press releases, even to the point of respected news organizations having editorial guidelines not to use the word “torture” to describe the CIA’s torture. It was kind of staggering, and Sy was doing something very different. He was reporting at The New Yorker and asking: What is actually going on? Why are we going to Iraq? And he was saying there was no connection between the 9/11 attacks and Al Qaeda and Iraq, but he was drawing the connection between Dick Cheney and Halliburton and all the money that was there and using the sort of emergency laws that emerged after 9/11 to get in all these policies that the right had been dreaming of for years.
The Abu Ghraib story broke in April 2004, and I traveled to Iraq about a month later. I had already made the decision to go, but then when I saw those photographs, it was just a level of horror that I could not imagine existed. The film that I ended up making there, My Country, My Country, sort of began at Abu Ghraib because I managed to talk my way into the prison that summer when Iraqis were inspecting it because it was such an international scandal.
When I came back, I reached out to Sy and we met. I sort of laugh about entering his office. There should have been Twilight Zone music playing, because it really was like going back in time, with all the yellow notepads that you see in the film. It was like time had stopped in the 1970s in that office.
What was your idea for Cover-Up in 2005?
Back then, I was proposing to make a film that would follow him in real time, so more observational: Sy meeting sources or in editorial meetings at The New Yorker, throwing things at the editors and threatening to quit, which Amy Davidson Sorkin joked he would do on a regular basis.
He entertained the idea, but after I left, he called me, and he was like: No way. I can’t risk my sources. You know: My sources are too sensitive, and there’s no way a camera can be around. So it was a hard no, but a very gracious hard no. But we stayed in touch.
And nearly twenty years later, Sy tells you he’s ready for his close-up. Why do you think that was?
He certainly was aware of the reporting I did with Edward Snowden. I think he felt that I was doing something that he felt some kind of kinship to in terms of being a bit of an outsider, a bit of a thorn in the side of the government.
I know that he and his wife, Liz, saw All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. I think what maybe resonated with them—without speaking for them, which makes me a little bit nervous—is that it’s a portrait of Nan but also a larger critique of social structures and systems. And this is what I’m trying to do in all my films. I’m not interested in making biopics, but I do tell stories about individuals who are confronting power structures.
Did you go into the film with a clear sense of the story you wanted to tell?
From the very beginning, we were interested in Hersh’s reporting, but also in the patterns we could see across half a century, and particularly around atrocities, cover-ups, impunity, and the role of investigative journalism in circumventing that cycle.
I think one of the reasons why we made this film was because we felt there’s a crisis in investigative journalism, because it’s hard, it’s costly, often comes with legal threats, and often takes a lot of time, and that’s harder to do if you don’t have the architecture to support it.
Did Sy have veto power?
Sy didn’t ask for editorial control, but we did update him to make sure that we weren’t missing things. But he wasn’t difficult. Once he had finally relented to be part of this project, he was just all in.
How did you decide when to get personal?
I was guided by a few things. One was what informed his reporting and what was his motivation, and that’s what we definitely felt about his growing up in Chicago, with his parents being immigrants coming from Eastern Europe, the silence in the house, his dad dies young, and he’s asked to take over the family’s dry-cleaning shop, and nobody was giving him opportunities. And then he sort of stumbled into journalism and found his passion and his love for truth-telling. And so of course, that needed to be in the film. But as I mentioned, I’m definitely very anti-biopic, and I’m also very anti-experts. The people we talked to had to have direct knowledge of the reporting, like Amy Davidson Sorkin, who was his editor at The New Yorker on Abu Ghraib.
There’s a lot of talk these days about bias in the media and how journalists need to be neutral. Can you do investigative journalism from a position of neutrality?
I absolutely believe in certain principles in journalism, like that it should be fact-driven and it should be interrogating power, disclosing any conflicts of interest, if they exist. But I also think that we need to use words to describe what’s happening, and so going back to the Bush era, when news organizations didn’t use the word torture to describe torture, that is lying. It’s not a neutral position, it’s a position that is aligning with the nation-state and asking the press to capitulate to whatever that agenda is. And I think that that’s really dangerous, because you lose trust. So if we’re talking about what’s happening in Gaza, I think we have to use the word “genocide,” because if you look at the evidence of what’s there, that’s what we’re seeing. I don’t think that that’s biased. That is looking at two years of dropping American-taxpayer-funded bombs on a population.
What’s interesting about Sy’s body of work and his career is that his big stories are evidentiary. They present evidence that shows atrocities. We’re talking about the My Lai massacre or Abu Ghraib torture, CIA surveillance on protest movements or involvement in Chile and coups all over the world. In his best stories, he delivers the facts. But he’s never been quiet about his worldview and saying that he was against the Vietnam War and that it was a catastrophe.
I’m sure some people could watch Cover-Up and say, clearly, you’re not neutral. While not a hagiography, the film clearly celebrates Hersh’s achievements. I can imagine someone else doing a film about Sy where he’s this muckraker who’s out to make America look bad.
One of the things that speaks most highly about Sy’s body of work is that regardless of what administration has been in power, he’s gotten under their skin. He went after JFK, he went after Johnson, he went after Nixon, he went after Reagan, Carter, Obama, Biden, and now Trump. I believe in that kind of equal-opportunity adversarial journalism.
And about the hagiography thing you raised: it was important in the film to also include times when Sy got it wrong. Because we always felt like it was our job to talk about the times when he got it wrong or got played or got too close to power. And those mistakes happen in the field of journalism. Probably Mark and I had more of an obligation than most to ask about some of the stories where he made mistakes, because we knew him well and felt close to his body of work.
Was Sy reluctant to discuss his mistakes?
He didn’t exactly welcome it, but he was fine. I mean, ultimately, he would have had zero respect for us if we didn’t, which doesn’t mean that those were his favorite days.
Do you think it’s become more difficult to get the truth out in this age of extreme polarization? Part of me even wonders whether a My Lai–style report published today would have the sort of impact it did fifty-five years ago.
I refuse the notion that we’re in a post-fact world. I believe that people are very aware of if they can’t pay rent or afford healthcare or education for their kids. Those are facts that people understand. Yes, some trust has been eroded. And I think it’s been eroded by the public being lied to by our governments and by the press sometimes. But I’m not willing to concede that we shouldn’t care about what’s happening in the world, or that people don’t care. I mean, journalists in Gaza are dying every day to get out information about what’s happening. I think they are reaching the public. Whether or not they’re actually causing governments to change is the real problem.
Do you consider Cover-Up a hopeful film?
I don’t know if “hope” is the right word. You know, all of my films have protagonists that are really getting under the skin of power, whether that’s government or corporate power. And that offers the idea that it’s possible that an individual or small group of people can change how we understand the world. That’s a powerful message when people are feeling a lot of despair.
A.J. Goldmann is an essayist, critic, and reporter based in Munich.
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