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Typically when you watch a documentary about larger-than-life figure who has been heavily involved in the news, you don’t expect to learn much. Maybe you’ll learn a couple of fun facts you can share at your next cocktail party. That’s not the case when it comes to Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee. Showtime’s new documentary, which premieres on September 24 (that’s tomorrow!), shows that its subject is, in fact, more dangerous than even his wide news coverage has led us to believe.
Gringo focuses on the tech mogul and one-time Libertarian Party presidential nominee hopeful John McAfee —yes, the same guy behind the popular computer virus protection software— during his time in Belize. In 2013, McAfee was connected to the murder of American expatriate Gregory Viant Faull. It’s a confusing case that was never resolved thanks to deportation laws and Belize’s struggling legal system, but it was one that captured the public’s interest for a brief moment. However, Gringo proves that we should have been paying more attention to McAfee. In her documentary, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays In The Picture) presents new evidence for the Faull case, along with connecting McAfee to another murder, the rape of his business partner (microbiologist Allison Adonizio), and claims that McAfee commissioned his own personal army to run part of Belize. Decider had the opportunity to talk to the documentary filmmaker about her must-watch film. Burstein explained how she came to be involved in the project, the measures McAfee has since taken to discredit the documentary, and how she felt personally threatened by both McAfee and his followers because of Gringo.
“I first read about him in 2012 when he was on the run and on his way to Guatemala for the Greg Faull murder,” Burstein said when asked how she came to be involved in the project. Burstein came to know McAfee’s story through Wired’s widely read feature on the eccentric millionaire. “As a documentary filmmaker, you follow the news. You follow these interesting stories, and you ask yourself ‘Is there something there?’”
“I have an attraction to subjects like a John McAfee character,” she said. “I have a history of doing films about extraordinary people and examining how their lives were affected by being rich and powerful and famous, from Robert Evans to Tonya Harding to now John McAfee.” Burstein focused on Evans in her documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture and Harding in the ESPN 30 for 30 film, The Price of Gold.
A few years after the Wired story piqued her interest, Burstein was approached by Spike to do a film on McAfee. She passed on the project because of Spike’s unclear focus. However, a year later when she was approached by a producer and journalist Jeff Wise to do a more focused documentary on McAfee, she said yes. Wise has been following McAfee for a number of years and has written several stories on him. According to Burstein, “[Wise] went and filmed a couple different interviews, and they were highly engaging,” she said. “I decided that this is something I do want to take on.”
However, Burstein made it clear that this is her documentary. “Jeff is an excellent journalist, but he’s not a filmmaker. So he stepped away, and I made the film,” she said. “I told John through email several times, from the beginning, that Jeff is not involved in this on a creative level or content level. Yes, he did instigate it, but he’s not involved now. He didn’t ever believe me, and he still to this day doesn’t believe me.”
Burstein’s documentary presents a shocking amount of new evidence, further linking McAfee to the murder of Faull and connecting him to several previously unexplored crimes. When asked how she was able to discover so much more information on McAfee’s crimes than mainstream news, Burstein pointed to the news cycle. “I’ve become very familiar with how [mainstream news] works by covering these types of people before in documentaries,” she said. “It works on a cycle of people’s attention spans. So when you’re hot and when you are of the 24 hour news cycle, then they cover you. And when you’re not, they don’t cover you anymore.”
Burstein said that John McAfee’s case was the most extreme example of her personally uncovering something the mainstream news missed. “When I started out as a documentary filmmaker, I didn’t see myself as having that purpose, but I’ve fallen into it because I’ve become very curious about certain people and certain cases,” she said.
For the most part, the documentary is constructed through filmed interviews of people who either knew McAfee, knew of him, or worked for him. Gringo never features an on camera interview from McAfee himself, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t present. The film focuses on several email conversations between McAfee and Burstein. “Mostly [the communication] was through emails, yes. And certainly not a sit down, traditional interview that one would have in a film, which I’ve always had.” Burstein also received calls and texts she believed were from McAfee. However, following Gringo’s press release, which announced that the documentary would feature cryptic emails from McAfee, the millionaire made a statement to the press, denying that he directly contacted Burstein.
“He then made a statement saying ‘I never wrote these emails, even though I signed them all. It was volunteers of mine who ghostwrite for me, but they’re always with me, so they have the same IP address, so you can’t prove it was me or them,’” Burstein said. “That then put him in a situation where he couldn’t email me anymore, so I just read about him in the press now.”
McAfee has made his disapproval of Gringo widely known. In an interview with Bloomberg, McAfee said the documentary was fiction and claimed that Showtime paid for interviews. Burstein refutes those claims, saying that McAfee is the one who has paid people to lie on camera. “He went and hired someone in Belize to videotape people on YouTube — or he put it on YouTube — to say, you know, ‘I was paid huge amounts of money by Showtime to lie,’” she said. “The first three people on there I have never met or spoken to in my life. A couple people that I did speak to say that they never spoke to me. And then there were a couple of people that I did speak to, and I was upset.”
“I called them, and I was like ‘Why did you say this?’” she said. “They said ‘John paid me $1,200 — or through his associate in Belize, he paid me $1,200 to say this, and I took it.’” The videos can be found on McAfee’s YouTube page. Burstein further explained her phone calls with her sources. “I was like ‘Well, did you tell me the truth? It’s not too late. If you didn’t tell me the truth, I have to take it out of the film. If you felt that in any way you were lying to me, which you now claim to be lying, I will take it out of the film.’ And they’re like ‘No … I wasn’t lying.’’
The filmmaker made it clear that the only time Showtime paid sources was to license certain photos. “I’m very transparent. Yes, there were some people who I licensed photos from after the interview, and it was a nominal fee. That is not unusual in documentary filmmaking,” she said. “But what he is getting people to accuse me of is not true.”
When asked if here have been threats made to any of Gringo’s interview subjects, Burstein had this to say: “Well, yes. [McAfee] hasn’t seen the film yet, but I believe he had someone at Toronto vetting it, plus there have been a couple reporters that have called him.
“There is one Belizean guy who gave some important information to the film that I then ended up talking to because John sent someone to him. I told [McAfee] the premiere date of Showtime, but I didn’t tell him the Toronto date, so he was like ‘Oh it aired, and you need to say this and do this.’ And [the Belizean man] was scared, and he did it. I was like, ‘How can I protect you?’ And he’s like ‘I did what I had to do. I’m OK now,’” Burstein said.
According to Burstien, this is the first time she has been involved in a dangerous situation because of her work. “It is completely new to me to be in this situation of actual danger. I have definitely done films where I’ve studied people of this nature, sort of, kind of, but this is a different animal, and I am learning as I go.” she said.
The filmmaker also revealed that there have been moments during Gringo’s creation and release when she has felt personally threatened. “Yes, there have been moments where I’ve personally felt threatened, yes. Absolutely. Not on a daily basis,” Burstein said. ���I feel like this is fairly high profile, and in that way it helps protect me. But before it was out, yes I received some — which I put in the film, some of them — some very threatening emails. What I didn’t put in the film was followed by a text message asking me where I live. That moment was scary for me. Fortunately, I’m married to a journalist who deals with dangerous situations, and he’s like ‘Oh don’t worry about it.”’
That danger increased when Gringo was first announced. “Toward the end of finishing the film, when it was being announced in the press, there were some of his acolytes that emailed me in a threatening way and people in his entourage that called me to say, like, ‘Oh this person might show up and is claiming they want to hurt you,’” she said. “That did scare me a bit, enough to tell this to Showtime, and we decided to take some precautions at the festival. Nothing happened. It was being precautionary.” One of those precautions involved hiring a bodyguard for Gringo’s Toronto premiere.
For the most part, Bustein and McAfee’s relationship was entirely digital, as it’s shown through emails in the film. However, the filmmaker did confront McAfee once during a Libertarian convention — an encounter which is in the documentary. “I was so scared to do that, by the way,” she said.
Burstein explained what that moment was like for her. “We had had a long email communication, but still, I had never met him in person. I’m going to be on camera doing this. I don’t have that Michael Moore, you know Nick Broomfield personality. I’m just me, and I didn’t even want to be a character in the film,” she said. “I was like ‘OK, he must have Googled me. We’ve been talking for several months. He’s I’m sure Googled imaged what I look like, and he’s going to know it’s me.’ And yet he didn’t.”
“Maybe it was like out of context for him, so he just didn’t think or see it, but he was furious. He was furious, but he handled it … he handled it in a cavalier way,” Burstein said. “And then I started getting the most threatening emails from him that I’ve ever gotten before or since. So he didn’t feel cavalier even though that’s how he purported himself.”
When asked if she would consider ever doing another documentary on McAfee, Burstein refused, saying that she likes to move onto other new subjects for every project. However, she would consider doing another film on a subject like McAfee. “I am fascinated by people who are in the limelight and have accomplished amazing things. I respect them in some ways,” she said. “But then the other part of their life is very complicated and often not right and confusing, and that is what interests me.”
Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee premieres on Showtime Saturday, September 24, at 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT.
