Taxi to the Dark Side, an account of U.S. interrogation policies in Afghanistan and beyond, won the 2008 Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category. Shot with Panasonic’s AJ-HDC27 VariCam HD Cinema camera, Taxi to the Dark Side marked the second Academy Award nomination for director/writer Alex Gibney, whose Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a Documentary Feature Oscar.

Gibney’s most recent film, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, had its world premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, where it screened in the documentary competition.

Produced by THINKFilm and Jigsaw Productions, Taxi to the Dark Side takes as its jumping-off point the suspicious death of Dilawar, a taxi driver, at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Featuring candid interviews with American servicemen, fellow prisoners and newspaper reporters, the documentary goes on to meticulously trace the spread of a central, controversial tactic in the U.S.’ “war on terror.”

Cinematographer Gregory Andracke, who shares the director of photography credit on Taxi to the Dark Side with Maryse Alberti, is a veteran documentary cameraman. The winner of numerous Emmy and Peabody awards, Andracke was the DP on the 1989 Academy Award-winning You Don’t Have to Die, as well as Citizen Kane, The Killing Ground and Rehearsing a Dream, all Academy Award nominees in Best Documentary categories.

“Alex is always anticipating a theatrical release for his documentaries, and the VariCam is a great system for going in that direction,” Andracke says. “The ability of the VariCam to deliver 720/24p was a primary consideration, and when the HVX200 came on the market, we felt that it was a superb complement to the VariCam, a small package to photograph scenes where the VariCam was too ‘big.’”

“Alex purchased one of the first HVX200s in the U.S., and we took it to Guantanamo Bay in early 2006, when our shoot began,” Andracke continues. “It was determined that I would use the VariCam for the majority of the shoot, and the HVX200 would be used as a cuts camera when necessary.”

“I find the dynamic range of the VariCam to be superb,” the DP notes. “Taxi to the Dark Side really challenged the camera: we had some quite unpredictable situations in Guantanamo with high-contrast scenes under the noon-day Caribbean sun and no opportunity to modify them with lighting. The camera really digs into the shadows, and the results were excellent.”

Gibney says of his work, “I think that the subject of corruption unites my films. Enron was about economic corruption, and Taxi is about the corruption of the rule of law. Both are about the corruption of character—how good people can end up doing very bad things." Having found his subject, Gibney chose not to approach it journalistically but, rather, to give it the more classically cinematic structure of a whodunit.

In addition to interviews, Gibney unearthed photographs, videotapes and documents—particularly from the mysterious Bagram prison—that have never been seen before.

When a director plays detective in this fashion, there will not only be discoveries, digressions and disappointments, there will also be difficulties. “The problem with this approach in a documentary,” observes Gibney, “is that the story has to be rewritten constantly in the cutting room. I find that the best documentaries end up being structured like good fiction films. But this is very hard to do in practice because the ‘script’ of a documentary is written during and after shooting.”

Gibney also finds that the story he is trying to tell is often at odds with his key thematic concerns. “I always want to include key ideas and am frustrated when they seem to get in the way of the story. So, there’s a tension in the cutting room. At some point, on every film, the evolving story seems to raise its head and demands to be given its due. When I don’t listen to that insistent voice, I usually do so at my peril.”

The online edit of Taxi to the Dark Side was done at New York's FRAME: RUNNER. Color correction, which took place at PostWorks New York, entailed the use of a Pandora Pogle workstation controlled by a Pandora Evolution control surface, all run on the Pandora PiXi color corrector. The film-out took place at Alpha Cine Labs in Seattle.