Paul Reubens didn’t inform his director that he was dying.
On July 31, 2023, the news of Reubens’ demise got here as a shock to documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf, who had spent a yr making an attempt to persuade him to make the formidable two-part documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” now streaming on HBO Max, and over 40 hours interviewing him on digicam.
But in 2023, the undertaking was at risk of falling aside: The two had been at an deadlock for some time over the difficulty of inventive management and so they’d lastly discovered a means ahead. He had one final interview scheduled, set for the primary week of August. Then the texts began coming in. Wolf sat there shaking.
They’d spoken about all the pieces — Reubens’ childhood, his difficult relationship with fame, his ambitions, his dedication to his alter-ego Pee-wee Herman, his sexuality, his arrest — besides the truth that he’d been battling most cancers for the previous six years. But after the preliminary shock, a renewed objective set in.
“I went to work the day after Paul died. I started to read the 1,500-page transcript of our interview through the night and was struck by the significance and meaning that came by understanding that he was privately contemplating mortality,” Wolf stated. “I was aware that this was an extraordinary situation that was part of the story of the film and that the stakes were the highest I had ever experienced.”
For the following yr, Wolf would get up and say to himself, “You cannot drop the ball. Rise to the occasion.” It was, he stated, “the most challenging and involved and emotional process of filmmaking that I’ve ever gone through and maybe that I’ll ever go through again.”
Reubens needed to direct his personal documentary. He’d at all times prized inventive management and couldn’t fathom why he would cede it in telling his personal story for the primary time. But everybody round him appeared to suppose that was a foul concept. It would take over a yr of attending to know Wolf, whose movie credit embody documentaries about cellist Arthur Russell and news archivist Marion Stokes, to contemplate letting go.
Even after Reubens had agreed to let Wolf direct the undertaking, he continued to push again and resist at instances. Early on, they determined to file their cellphone conversations as nicely, recognizing that their dynamic illuminated one thing true about Reubens.
“Right away, Paul was sort of rebelling against the process, blowing off steam, procrastinating, teasing me, sometimes being adversarial, but in a funny wink-wink way,” Wolf stated. “I was frustrated. I thought, how am I ever going to get through this? This is the most resistant interview subject I’ve ever encountered. Then I realized this is actually a pretty significant form of portraiture. This is showing Paul’s discomfort and uncertainty about really showing and sharing himself.”
The result’s a collaboration, Wolf stated, however one wherein he additionally had editorial management. It wasn’t going to be a success piece, however it wasn’t going to be a puff piece both.
Wolf, 43, was a part of the technology of youngsters who grew up with the kids’s tv sequence “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” It was, he stated, the primary time he’d felt viscerally moved by a murals.
Still, he wasn’t approaching the undertaking as a fan. He was coming as a filmmaker who makes documentaries about homosexual artists and unconventional visionaries who “beg for reappraisal.” Unlike most of his topics, nevertheless, Reubens was an icon and a cult determine.
“I was determined not to make a film that fell into the traps of the celebrity biopic with platitudes from other famous people and manufactured self-reflection,” Wolf stated. “I wanted to make portrait of an artist.”
Much of the movie focuses on the prehistory of Pee-wee, displaying how his childhood, his creative awakening, his early improv days and his “Saturday Night Live” rejection would converge into the dedication to this alter ego. Part of that concerned participating with Reubens’ sexuality in a direct means. In the movie, Reubens speaks about residing overtly as a homosexual man, after which going again within the closet.
“He had always intended to come out but was very ambivalent about that,” Wolf stated. “And I saw myself as a younger gay person who could help somebody achieve that and also to give a sense of nuance and depth to his artistry that one could appreciate, and to understand the personal sacrifices that were required for him to do that.”
Reubens’ profession was derailed when he was arrested for indecent publicity in an grownup movie show in 1991. He was handed a small fantastic however the harm was incalculable. In 2001, he was arrested and charged with misdemeanor possession of kid pornography, which was decreased to an obscenity cost with probation. These are coated within the documentary’s second half.
“He wanted to set the record straight, particularly about the unfortunate footnotes of his arrest, which to some extent have overshadowed his artistic accomplishments,” Wolf stated. “That to me felt like the easy part and also the least interesting part of the film.”
“Pee-wee as Himself” premiered earlier this yr on the Sundance Film Festival, the place Wolf acquired to see emotional responses from audiences, irrespective of in the event that they got here to it as followers or out of some curiosity across the controversies. That emotional depth was what he hoped they’d really feel.
“I wanted to make a film with a big range of emotions, from joy and delight to tragedy and sorrow,” Wolf stated. “Paul contains that big spectrum of feelings. And I wanted the viewer to feel it, to have a lasting connection to him. When a film can affect you emotionally it becomes unforgettable.”
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