Paul Reubens I didn’t tell its director that he was dying.
On July 31, 2023, the news of Reubens’ death was a shock for documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf, who had spent a year trying to convince him to make the ambitious two -part documentary “Pee-Wee like himself” Now transmitting in HBO Max, and more than 40 hours he interviewed him in Chamber.
But in 2023, the project was in danger of crumbling: the two had been at a point dead for a while on the subject of creative control and finally found a path to follow. He had a last scheduled interview, scheduled for the first week of August. Then the texts began to enter. Wolf sat there trembling.
They had spoken above all: the childhood of Reubens, their complicated relationship with fame, their ambitions, their commitment to their alter Ego Pee-Wee Herman, his sexuality, his arrest, except the fact that he had been fighting cancer during the last six years. But after the initial shock, a renewed purpose was established.
“I went to work the day after Paul’s death. I began to read the transcription of 1,500 pages of our interview during the night and I was surprised by the importance and meaning that arose to understand that I was contemplating mortality privately,” Wolf said. “I knew that this was an extraordinary situation that was part of the story of the film and that the bets were the highest he had experienced.”
During the next year, Wolf would wake up and told himself: “You can’t drop the ball. He takes the occasion.” It was, he said, “the most challenging, involved and emotional film process that I have passed and maybe I will happen again.”
Reubens wanted to direct his own documentary. He always appreciated creative control and could not understand why he would give him to tell his own story for the first time. But everyone around them seemed to think it was a bad idea. It would take more than a year to meet Wolf, whose cinematographic credits include documentaries about the cellist Arthur Russell and Marion Stokes news archivist, to consider letting go.
Even after Reubens agreed to let Wolf direct the project, he continued to go back and resist sometimes. At first, they decided to record their telephone conversations also, recognizing that their dynamic illuminated something true about Reubens.
“Immediately, Paul was rebelling against the process, venting the steam, procrastinating, mocking me, sometimes being an adversary, but in a fun way, Wolf said,” Wolf said. “I was frustrated. I thought, how am I going to overcome this? This is the theme of the most resistant interview I have found. Then I realized that this is a fairly significant form of portrait. This shows Paul’s discomfort and uncertainty about really showing himself and shared.”
The result is a collaboration, Wolf said, but one in which he also had editorial control. It wasn’t going to be a success piece, but it was not going to be a piece of Puff.
Wolf, 43, was part of the generation of children who grew up with the children’s television series “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”. It was, he said, the first time he felt viscerally moved by a work of art.
Still, he did not approach the project as a fan. He came as a filmmaker who makes documentaries about homosexual artists and unconventional visionaries that “beg the reevaluation.” However, unlike most of its subjects, Reubens was an icon and a cult figure.
“I was determined not to make a film that fell into the traps of the biographical film of celebrities with topics of other famous people and the manufactured self -reflection,” Wolf said. “I wanted to make an artist’s portrait.”
Much of the film focuses on Pee-Wee’s prehistory, which shows how his childhood, his artistic awakening, his first days of improvisation and his “Saturday Night Live” The rejection would converge in the commitment to this alter ego. Part of that involved committing to Reubens sexuality directly. In the movie, Reubens talks about living openly as a gay man, and then returning to the closet.
“I had always intended to leave, but it was very ambivalent about it,” Wolf said. “And I saw myself as a younger gay person who could help someone achieve that and also to give a feeling of nuances and depth to his art that one could appreciate, and to understand the personal sacrifices that were required to do that.”
Reubens’ career was derailing when he was arrested for indecent exhibition in an adult film room in 1991. They gave him a small fine but the damage was incalculable. In 2001, he was arrested and accused of possession of child pornography, which was reduced to an obscenity charge with probation. These are covered in the second part of the documentary.
“I wanted to leave the record, particularly on the unfortunate notes at the foot of their arrest, which to some extent have eclipsed their artistic achievements,” Wolf said. “That for me was felt as the easy part and also the least interesting part of the movie.”
“Pee-Wee like himself” premiered earlier this year in the Sunday Film FestivalWhere Wolf could see emotional responses from the public, regardless of whether they came to him as fans or for some curiosity about controversies. That emotional intensity was what I expected to feel.
“I wanted to make a movie with a wide variety of emotions, from joy and delight to tragedy and sadness,” Wolf said. “Paul contains that great spectrum of feelings. And he wanted the viewer to feel it, to have a lasting connection with him. When a movie can affect you emotionally, it becomes unforgettable.”
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