{"id":333889,"date":"2025-12-06T22:09:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T22:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/333889\/"},"modified":"2025-12-06T22:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T22:09:07","slug":"how-the-six-billion-dollar-man-reframes-the-saga-of-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/333889\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u2018The Six Billion Dollar Man\u2019 Reframes the Saga of Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen they began making The Six Billion Dollar Man, a provocative documentary<\/a> re-examining the political legacy of and legal battles faced by Julian Assange<\/a>, director Eugene Jarecki and producer Kathleen Fournier (The House I Live In) held differing perspectives on their subject. Jarecki felt he\u2019d \u201cbetrayed\u201d the polarizing WikiLeaks<\/a> founder, fading from his initial admiration of the man for speaking truth to power, while Fournier was less enamored. Like many, she had given credence to allegations against Assange of sexual assault and 2016 election tampering, both of which he\u2019s denied. Therefore, making their film was \u201cthis whole journey of unpacking and really understanding the mythology that went into this entire saga,\u201d Fournier said before a packed house at a THR Frontrunners<\/a> screening, sponsored by Charlotte Street Films, last month.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Six Billion Dollar Man goes against the grain, insofar as public opinion has moved against Assange to some degree, at least since the early days of WikiLeaks, which exposed corruption at the highest institutional levels. The film combines archival footage with original interviews with players in Assange\u2019s grand saga \u2014 he was granted asylum in Ecuador until 2019, when he was found guilty of violating the United Kingdom Bail Act and sentenced to prison in the U.K. \u2014 while arguing that an immense propaganda campaign was waged against him over several years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the making of the movie, rumors swirled about Assange being extradited to the U.S. \u201cEverybody on his team said to us, there\u2019s no way he will ever go to the U.S. If he gets extradited, he\u2019ll end his own life,\u201d Fournier says. \u201cSo we felt this tremendous, crushing pressure to get the story and to said it out quickly.\u201d The movie was supposed to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, but at the eleventh hour, Jarecki and Fournier learned that Assange\u2019s legal team had negotiated a plea bargain and he was being released. So they held the movie back to recut it, capturing the new footage on the fly, before premiering it in Cannes.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film contains fresh revelations about Assange and the legal efforts against him that ought to complicate the way many view him. Jarecki, for one, recognizes Assange is still not a guy that everyone will be warm to \u2014 but as he told the Frontrunners audience, he hopes that the focus returns to the substance of what Assange has done and continues to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhether one finds him prickly, whether he\u2019s a dick, whether he\u2019s lovable, I could care less from the perspective of what he\u2019s done with his personhood,\u201d the director said. \u201cWikiLeaks was, at the end of the day, a safe haven for people to be able to tell us what we need to know about what their institutions are doing. Like him or not, [Assange] gave years and years of his life and would\u2019ve kept giving years \u2014 if he hadn\u2019t kicked America\u2019s ass.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When they began making The Six Billion Dollar Man, a provocative documentary re-examining the political legacy of and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[10546,10167,1129,88,167825,206,168757,16821,168758],"class_list":{"0":"post-333889","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-awards","9":"tag-documentaries","10":"tag-documentary","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-julian-assange","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-thr-frontrunners","15":"tag-thr-original-video","16":"tag-wikileaks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}