Ask British filmmaker Nick Green if he liked Carlos Ghosn, the subject of his new documentary Carlos Ghosn The Last Flight (a world premiere in Sheffield this week) and he gives an equivocal answer.
“He (Ghosn) is a hugely impressive act. He has got an extraordinarily impressive brain. He can remember a figure from 25 years ago…he has got extraordinary powers of recall but he is not an easy man to get on with.”
It’s not exactly that Green disliked Ghosn, more that he couldn’t get through to him on a personal level. “He is just a difficult man to crack.”
Ghosn is the business tycoon who used to run Renault-Nissan, but was arrested in Japan for alleged financial improprieties. Somehow, he escaped from Japanese prison and made it back to Lebanon, where he remains today.
Green opens the film with footage of Ghosn on the firing range with a handgun. “He’s a great shot,” Green says of the businessman. The sequence came about after he asked Ghosn what he did to relax. The reply was to play cards and to shoot at targets.
“When you talk to him (Ghosn) about it, you get a sense of how his mind works and how the shutters come down to anything that might distract him. He is almost laser-guided, really.”
Seeing him on the range gave Green an insight into how Ghosn ran his business, in a “quite a singular, unbelievably focused way.”
Ghosn had started using guns in eerie and unlikely circumstances. In 1986, the then Renault boss Georges Besse had been killed by terrorists. After the assassination, the company gave its CEOs the option of having weapons for protection.
Those who worked alongside Ghosn tended to have the same opinion about him. They didn’t necessarily like him but they respected him. He was a very heavy-hitter in the business world, someone prepared to take decisions which cost thousands of employees their jobs.
Ghosn had already agreed to speak before Green was brought aboard the project. Producer Nora Melhli had somehow got the tycoon on board. The filmmakers also secured access to former Nissan executive Greg Kelly, arrested at the same time as Ghosn but who remains behind bars in Japan. Kelly remains super sensitive about saying anything which might prejudice his case or be used against him by the Japanese persecutors, but he was ready to talk.
Grey areas still surround Ghosn. “This is a story which has just germinated really. It has got a hell of a long way to run. Whether Carlos did anything wrong or not, we are not going to know for some time. Obviously, from a storytelling point of view, it is just very, very challenging.”
No one yet knows if Ghosn will finally be judged by history as a folk hero who took on a cruel and arbitrary Japanese legal system or whether he is just a fugitive on the run.
“The only story we could tell is the one that we have which is basically how did Carlos get to the position where he felt that escape was the only way of getting his point over fairly, and getting his life back into a space that he felt he deserved.”
It’s clear that Green has little envy for his subject. “It’s a bit of an awful job being a CEO of a big multinational. I guess once a quarter, you might get some good results through but the rest of the time, you are just firefighting problems.”
Ghosn’s friends say that since he escaped Japan, he has become more attentive to his family. There are hints that he is reassessing his priorities after his Josef K-like experiences. His wife, Carole, remains devoted to him, and he to her.
This is one of several films Green has made about middle-aged alpha men, following on from previous works about such cheery figures as President Assad in Syria and President Putin in Russia.
“I am quite sort of fascinated by the drive of that kind of character because they are the rank opposite to me,” Green volunteers. He describes himself as “reasonably determined to do a good job, but quite laidback.”
No, he couldn’t imagine firing 21,000 Nissan workers and being able to live with himself. That, though, was the kind of decision Ghosn took on a regular basis with no qualms whatsoever.
The BBC will be showing the Ghosn documentary. A French channel has also come on board. However, no date has yet been set for it to screen in Japan where Ghosn, after his jailbreak, is considered persona non grata. “I really hope the Japanese will buy it but ultimately they end up with egg on their face,” Green says. “It is a national embarrassment how somebody was able to cross the border without being caught – particularly the most famous prisoner in Japan at the time. They will be mortified, I imagine, when they see it…”
