T-Squared: My Q&A With "Al-Qaeda"

Last Wednesday night, as part of our TribLive events series, we were fortunate enough to host the Texas premiere of a brand-new documentary, My Trip to Al-Qaeda. The film, directed by Academy Award-winner Alex Gibney, stars native Texan Lawrence Wright, the longtime New Yorker writer and the author of The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about 9/11 and its aftermath . The book, published in 2006, spawned a one-man play called "My Trip to Al-Qaeda," in which Wright reflects on his reporting on the war on terror and his time and interactions in dangerous places overseas. The play, in turn, spawned the documentary, which played the Tribeca Film Festival this year and debuted on HBO this evening.

Following the screening, which took place at the Blanton Museum of Art on the University of Texas campus, I interviewed Wright and Gibney about the making of the film and their views of the delicate, controversial subject matter.

"My Trip to Al Qaeda:" Q and A with Lawrence Wright and Alex Gibney from texastribune on Vimeo.