Alison Klayman on her New Film ‘The Brink’ and Her Unlikely Relationship with Steve Bannon

Before Alison Klayman agreed to make a documentary about Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News and President Donald Trump’s Chief Strategist, she had one caveat — she had to meet him first.

“I needed to meet him in person, partly to see if I really felt like I could spend the time with him,” Klayman said. “Is he gonna be someone worth watching? Will he be able to carry the film?”

As soon as she met him, that answer was an "easy yes.”

From their first conversation, Klayman was struck by Bannon's chattiness and "forceful charisma," but also by the cracks in his carefully-calculated messaging. "He has this vanity, and these blind spots where you’ll have him revealing himself in ways that he doesn’t intend," she said. “The opportunity to be embedded and really let his agenda reveal itself felt like an opportunity of historical importance — to ask some bigger questions about what the nature of evil is,” she added.

To Bannon, there's a "banality" to evil, as he told Klayman. She remembers one time when he spent several minutes illustrating that point with the example of the Holocaust, pointing to the Nazi leaders fetching Hitler his morning coffee. "There were people that actually sat and thought through this whole thing and totally detached themselves from the moral horror of it,” he told her, looking directly into the camera.

As a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Klayman found a particular irony in Bannon's lecture on the Holocaust — particularly given that she believed his own ideology and leadership has helped fuel a resurgence of neo-Nazism.

“My grandparents are Holocaust survivors,” she said. And Bannon knew that, she added: "he thought he was being provocative." Bannon’s condemnation of the Holocaust bears heavy similarities to the condemnations that followed the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va, which was organized by Neo-Nazis who credit Bannon as a figurehead. By co-opting the rhetoric of moral outrage against anti-Semitism, Bannon seems intent on delegitimizing the connection often drawn between Nazism and his brand of alt-right fearmongering.

But under Klayman’s direction, the connection is impossible to miss, as the film frames him in a visual and situational context that can highlight the dangers and hypocrisies in his worldview. “I thought that opening scene was an opportunity to examine the human reality behind people who do great harm and promote policies that hurt people and, I think, hurt our country,” Klayman said. “I knew right away that that was a great way to open [the film] and really tell people there’s a filmmaker behind this. I’m giving you a chance to meet Bannon with naked cuts so you really trust the filmmaking.”

Given the degree to which she disagrees with him, why, then, did Klayman choose to make the film? She said her involvement began when she was contacted about the project by producer Marie Therese Guirgis, a former employee of Bannon’s.

“Guirgis knew Bannon in one of his many previous lives — before the Tea Party, before his politics became sort of extreme.” Guirgis contacted him often after he joined the Trump campaign as CEO in 2016.

“She wrote him hate mail,” Klayman said. “He would write back politely, and she thought there was something bigger that could be done with this access, beyond the small gratification of telling him off personally.” That was the impetus for a “vérité” documentary.

“It’s not about sitting down with him for an interview,” she said. “My job was more to observe than to speak up most of the time.”

The film may seem to show Bannon in his natural element, but he had to agree to Klayman’s guiding hand. When starting out on the project, Bannon needed to sign a release giving her full creative control.

“There’s a way to responsibly put things in, especially where I knew that he was lying or distorting information,” Klayman said.

Klayman parsed Bannon’s rhetorical strategies and emphasized the characteristic persistence that has allowed him to take on many different roles. “He’s willing to use dog whistles as well as blatantly racist, bigoted language. It’s kind of a frightening skill, and it emboldens the people around him. It’s not so much that he’s a brilliant strategist, it’s just — that’s his way,” Klayman said. “The way he works the media, using his personal charisma, is also part of it. He’s carved out a place for himself, and when he loses it, he’s continually looking for new opportunities. He’s always trying to ride the wave, spend other people’s money, and get himself the credit.”

“I think he’s a figure who thrives at the brink. He’s been brought to the brink many times. He’s had many different careers. In the film, he experienced a lot of losses. But you get the sense that he doesn’t give up,” she said.

—Staff writer Joy C. Ashford can be reached at joy.ashford@thecrimson.com.