All that money, and all that responsibility, don't come for free. The founders are Kaleil Isasa Tuzman, a charismatic leader, and Tom Herman, a laid-back, touchy-feely guy in a goatee. The two have to fend off competitors, deal with increasing pressure from their investors and ultimately face off against each other. In the end, their business shatters, seemingly as fast as it came together.

Noujaim hit upon the story because GovWorks co-founder Tuzman was her roommate. Shortly after Noujaim started filming him, she met Chris Hegedus, an experienced filmmaker who wanted to make a documentary about a start-up company. The two decided to collaborate, and Hegedus' husband and partner, D.A. Pennebaker, agreed to produce. Together, Noujaim and Hegedus shot the movie, letting the story unfold in classic cinéma vérité fashion, capturing it with the often dark, often grainy -- but omnipresent -- images from a pair of digital video cameras.

The film tracks the entire process: the long hours, the dry business meetings, the flights on no sleep and a curious business culture of company retreats and corporate cheers. It manages to be smart and succinct yet messy and complicated at the same time, asking questions about ethics and responsibility, casting young against old and magnifying a tale about the Internet boom out of a couple of charismatic personalities. I met with Hegedus and Noujaim for an hour on a busy press day upstairs at a midtown Manhattan pub.

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What do you think the people were attracted to? Was it the money, the ideas, the potential or just the newness?

Hegedus: It was the adventure. Here was something, the Internet, that was created and giving everyone the opportunity to be part of this exciting new thing. When you create a new business, you can be your own boss. You can invent what you're doing. It was very creative. It was anti-Establishment.

Noujaim: At the beginning there was more of this rock star mentality -- until they had to answer to these V.C.s [venture capitalists] asking when they were going to be making their first profits. And then of course, with the huge pressure of having $60 million on your shoulders and all of your friends' careers hanging over your head, things got very serious.

The us-against-them mentality started to drift away as soon as they wanted serious money. In the film, we see Kaleil and Tom fumbling with "them." We don't necessarily see the two plotting against "them."

Hegedus: Their site was not a quirky, sexy site that might have been much more filmable. But in a lot of ways I was instantly attracted to Kaleil. I thought he was very charismatic. I also thought he was very ambitious and brave to try to do government. It was such a big, unwieldy idea. They were kind of forced quickly into more conservative roles because they had to deal with government officials. A lot of business behavior, that reverting to Goldman Sachs -- where most of them had worked -- just came back to them.

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