Academy Award Winner Morgan Neville Captures Lorne Michaels

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Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.

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Speaker 2: My guest today is.

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Speaker 1: An Academy Award winning filmmaker whose work has captured some of the most iconic figures in American music, film, and television. Morgan Neville's twenty thirteen film Twenty Feet from Stardom won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. A few years later, his twenty eighteen film about Fred Rogers, Won't You Be My Neighbor, became the highest grossing biographical documentary of all time. Neville has directed films about subjects ranging from Keith Richards to Anthony Bourdain, from Orson Wells to Steve Martin and Paul McCartney. In addition to his Academy Award, Neville has earned a Grammy, an Emmy, and a Peabody Award for his work. A native of southern California, Neville studied Colonial American history at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as a journalist and later founded his film company, Tremolo Productions in nineteen ninety nine. Neville's most recent film, Lorne profiles the creator of Saturday Night Live. Having made films about subjects both living and deceased. I was curious what Morgan Neville finds unique about each type of project.

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Speaker 3: I mean, there's a saying in the documentary community that the dead or the better because you don't have to deal with the real person, you know, But I actually kind of love both. I mean, I love the excavation of trying to paint a portrait if somebodyho's not around.

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Speaker 2: Why did they say the dead or the better?

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Speaker 3: Just because you don't have to deal with the ego and the complications that come with the living things without.

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Speaker 2: And without getting into details. We're not out to embarrass anybody.

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Speaker 1: Give us an example, what are the difficulties when you deal with the living icon vanity?

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Speaker 2: You know how I look, angles and things like that.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, if you're trying to make a documentary, you're often filming in unflattering situations that aren't well lit, and they're not wearing makeup or whatever.

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Speaker 2: You know.

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Speaker 3: So just people wanting to have a sense of control, and people who generally have a sense of control over everything in their life, but they have to give that up to make a documentary, which can be incredibly uncomfortable for some people. So you know, I feel like over the years, I've earned enough of a trust that people actually be afraid they or they just know that whatever they're going to go through, it's going to be worth it in the end. So Steve Martin was like that, McCartney was like that, Lorne got there, but it took a long time to get there.

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Speaker 1: We're going to get to lorn in a minute, because your new film is about Lorne. But I realized that, like when you go and do this, for example, about Wells, why Wells, like using him as an example of someone who's just so overpowering his legacy.

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Speaker 2: Why did you? Were you commissioned or you did it on your own?

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Speaker 3: No, it was my idea. I mean I loved Wells growing up. You know, it was a film nut. But the film he made f for Fake. It's a kind of a documentary, but it's also kind of an anti documentary. It completely influenced me when I was thinking about making documentaries in the beginning. And I remember Wells. You know, my dad showed me Wells movies when I was a kid, and you know, so it was somebody who I always looked up to. But the legend of this last movie of his that he had never finished the Other side of the Wind. I thought, if I could ever get my hands on that footage, I'd love to make a documentary about that last chapter of Welles's life. And Wells is another person who had the persona and the man were They were two different things in the beginning, and they became one thing. You know, he became the persona. Wells was somebody who was trapped by early success without a doubt. So you know, the end of his life, he makes this movie. For seven years, he works on this movie. He never finishes it. And I've heard from many many people that he had many opportunities to finish the film and he never realized he did. You know, there was always an act of self sabotage, you know, or an you know, there's always an excuse not to finish the film. Because he knew whatever he ever did in his life, he was going to be judged against.

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Speaker 1: He'd rather welcome into what dinner party have and regaining people with anecdotes about Citizen Kane.

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Speaker 2: And didn't he dining out on Citizen Kane?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, but he would complain about that too. He said, everybody wanted to have lunch with him, but nobody wanted to give him money to make movies. But I've heard from a number of different people at different studios at different times that they did offer him some money to finish and he never actually took them up on it.

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Speaker 1: Right, Wells is somebody who his posthumous shadow that he cast is kind of not kind of it is overwhelming. Wells is somebody who I don't think ever had a serious interview in his life.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, he did terse.

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Speaker 1: He's Cavott and he's telling stories about Churchill bowing to him and all these jokes and so farth and he's very charming, very glib. Yeah, I don't think Mick Jagger's had a serious interview in thirty years when he really opened up about his musician I would never want to talk to people about their love life and their arrest, record or whatever, And with Jagger, I thought, I want to talk to him about musicianship.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's interesting. I mean I've interviewed Jagger a number of times. You know, Jagger was taught by Andrew Logldham and all these people in the sixties that you're going to be oppositional, you know, so having interviewed Mick a number of times. I know, whatever I'm going to pose it in a question, he will disagree with it. So you almost want to go the opposite way with the direction of the question because he is just by his nature he will disagree with you.

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Speaker 2: And what do you think that is?

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Speaker 3: Because the Stones were the band who were disagreeable. They were like the anti Beatles, so they said, you're the bad guy. So just the way they were taught to do interviews in the sixties was just be disagreeable, Siman.

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Speaker 1: I would talk about them. I did the Beatles Channel. I interviewed Paul at his home. You know, the Beatles were movie stars. The Beatles were the Marx Brothers. The Beatles were an act and the Stones are not an act. The Stones are one front man, a kind of second Banana with Keith and his personality. And I said in the Beatles were four people, four unique identifiable. The Beatles became the Beatles as largely as as actors as they didn't musicians, and the musicianship was just mind blowing.

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Speaker 2: But anyway, have you ever been commissioned to do a film?

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Speaker 3: I have, you know, like I got a call from Paul McCartney's manager saying would you be interested, and said, yes, yes, I would be interested. So there are things calls that come in all the time of somebody who would once to know if I'm interested, and those can be some of my favorite films. I was a Beatles freak my whole life, and I loved Wings and all that. But mister Rogers was my childhood who was like deeply embedded in me, and that was me coming across a commencement address. He gave it Middlebury University on YouTube and me just watching it and somehow just struck me profoundly that this was a voice I was not hearing in the culture, you know, something deeply empathetic. I mess this kind of radical kindness that mister Rogers was about. And then I went down a wormhole watching more and more mister Rogers. One night, I woke up in the morning, I turned to my wife and I said, I think I need to make a Mister Rogers.

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Speaker 2: Document or with a decision based on what.

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Speaker 3: It's funny, because it was totally instinctual, it was really just and all these things are. When I instantly say yes, I want to do it, that's always a great sign you know, whether it's somebody coming to me or me stumbling across something. But I just know because I'm going to give years of my life to these projects, so I need I have to really really care about them.

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Speaker 1: But Fred Rodgers' life seat where it is a career, seems so hermetic. He's in a certain path, I know, and like, what makes you decide you want to go deeper?

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Speaker 3: Seeing these speeches he gave later, I just felt like, this is a voice we don't have in the culture.

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Speaker 2: It's a set off.

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Speaker 3: The set, you know later in life. He would, you know, universities or elsewhere, And after watching a bunch of them, I just thought, I need this voice. And it's interesting because I started that film the month before the twenty sixteen election. Originally I was going to call that film the Radical Mister Rodgers. And the day the election, I called my producer and said, we can't call this film the Radical mister Rogers, and we called it once should be my neighbor. But it was the film I worked on for the first year of the Trump presidency, and that was my therapy for dealing with the first year.

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Speaker 2: Of the Trump Good therapy, good choice.

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Speaker 3: But when that film came out. I think it connected in such a big way because for the exact reason I felt I needed that voice people, decency, decency, kindness, grace, you know these things that he stood for. That humanity, yeah, that we don't value enough. Again, it's like an instinctual thing. But if it works for me, I deal, it'll work for an audience.

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Speaker 1: I want to get to Lauren eventually, obviously, But like McCartney's a good example of you know, you see him, footage of him. McCartney is somebody who's coming along a jetway. The press is corralled in some pen, the Beatles are walking by on some ramp. There's no human being alive with more extant footage than him. Yes, maybe Muhammad Ali. Yeah, and you see him and you decide how am I going to cleave through this? Was there a thought about that completely?

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Speaker 3: I've devoured every Beatles documentary and I've read most of the books, you know, and so I know all that stuff. I know what he says about things, and I know he's been interviewed more than almost any human. So my job was to tell this chapter that I thought was pretty undertold actually, which is post Beatles from the moment the Beatles break up till the moment John dies, essentially. And I also knew, like most people, he has a jukebox of anecdotes that when you ask him about high High or live and Let Die or whatever, he'll tell the same story he always tells. I knew in the beginning I did not want any of those stories. So I had a strategy. It was kind of a twofold strategy. It was to go in big picture and tiny picture. So I would go in. I would start the interviews by talking about painting or talking about the idea of parenting or competition like ideas, so we had to have a real conversation about things, and then I would ask him micro things about what did you like about the Rick mbucker four thousand and one base as opposed to the Hoffner bass, and then he would talk about that. It was like, oh, I'd never get to talk about this stuff. So once he gets in the mode of.

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Speaker 1: Like the thing with Rick Rubin, Yeah that's the cleanest McCartney i've seen. Yeah, it was him talking to Rick because it's a subject to he wants to talk about completely.

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Speaker 3: So once he realized, oh, we're just not doing the greatest hits of the stories. Then we actually had great conversations, and I feel like I got him to a place where he talked about a lot of things I've never heard him say, such as, I mean everything from I mean, he tells this story of almost drowning in Hawaii. He's never told that story before, you know, in the beginning, just talking about the kind of the deep well of doubt he was in, you know, which I think people think of Paul McCartney as always winning, you know, And I knew from the moment we started talking about this period of time that he had a lot of deep scars still, and I think even the film has been him processing this kind of coming to terms with, Oh, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was, you know. And I think this actually came out of Get Back project, because get Back, in his mind was always Let it Be. It was the film of Let It Be, which was on you know, it was, but it was all the bad stuff. That original movie was a divorce movie. Lindsay Hog Michael Lindsay Hogg is being so my.

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Speaker 4: You know.

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Speaker 3: When we this idea of making something about the Wings period, I thought, well, what I want to know is what happens to that guy the moment that band breaks up. So in my mind, my film begins like the day after the Beatles break up, essentially, and Paul is heartbroken. You know, everybody's heartbroken, the fans, the critics, John's not, but but Paul, it just doesn't know what to do with himself and has to kind of put his life back together. But I think in the way that get back made him realize, oh, it wasn't all bad. I think that opened the door for him to say, Okay, this next chapter that was painful for me to live through, maybe that wasn't all bad too.

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Speaker 1: I think that Lennon is somebody who the contrarianism that fueled his music was also what was the demise of the Beatles. Lenin was somebody who just like you know, he had one foot out the door all the time. He wanted to walk away. McCartney would have stayed there. I mean, the joke being all of these artists, the Stones, everybody, like, you know, I don't see myself doing this after I'm forty exactly why I don't. I mean, that would be horrible. I'm forty years old, I'm still singing the same. So now he's what eighty three exactly before I get old, Right, it's insane and so it's but but the thing with Lenin is Lenin seemed to me like somebody who I never met I wish I had. He was primed to walk away from a lot of things that if it didn't go his way or he felt like he was working for somebody or whatever. And then of course he had a woman in his life, and that's always important for good or ill.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, but he was a revolutionary and artistic revolutionary too. So the Beatles. I found a clip of him from before they announced the Beatles broken up, from December of sixty nine where he says the Beatles became a museum and if you know there's anything it's true of today that we don't need more museums, so it needs to be blown up. Yeah, I mean I think that was John's attitudes, like everything needs to be blown up, right now, you know, every convenstitution.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Now, on this show, when we do our show, we do sometimes a little prep. We watch some YouTube to see what kind of if we're an unfamiliar with them, what kind of a talker the person is. If there's somebody in public policy or what have you, academics. Now, Richard's to me is not William F.

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Speaker 2: Buckley.

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Speaker 1: And when when you go in there, how do you get somebody who's known for kind of almost a haikup like brevity. I mean, I always assume you're gonna sit down, He's gonna see there and go, yeah, man, make out.

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Speaker 2: Some months, Yeah, it's gonna be like haiku.

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Speaker 3: I mean you want to know how that film started? Yes, that film started because his manager, Jane Rose, said, Keith is recording some music. He hasn't done an interview in a long time. He wants to have some tape of him doing an interview. Would you come interview him? I said, yes, yes, I will come interview Keith Richards. So to prep for it, I brought one hundred albums on vinyl and a turntable to his house and I had, you know, Muddy Waters and Hank Williams and you know, all these.

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Speaker 1: You know, I'm going to steal all this, little Walter, all this from you.

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Speaker 3: And so in the beginning, I just said, hey, let's just play records, and he loved it, and we ended up spinning records for hours. I mean it's in the documentary, but it was supposed to be like a one day thing. And then at the end of it, he said, you're coming back tomorrow, and I said, sure, I'll come back tomorrow. And it just happened like that. Even when we sold it to Netflix, it was a short, but by the time I was done, it was a feature. But it was done loosely, you know, like it's a sketch. It's not. You know, certain films of mine are more like writing novels, and then some are like sketches. The Keith was like, fast, don't worry about it. It's just giving you this sensation of what it's like to be there with Keith in the room. And I think the film does accurately capture that. Like, what's it like to hang out with Keith?

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Speaker 1: Well, okay, oh, what's it like to hang out with Keith beyond spinning records? What's his passions? Is he into gardening like other Englishman? What's his thing?

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Speaker 4: He does have a beautiful gardener.

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Speaker 2: I read something I've.

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Speaker 3: Never met anybody more comfortable in their own skin than Keith Richard's.

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Speaker 2: Wow.

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Speaker 3: I mean, you want to know how he lives forever? Said he doesn't care about things, he's not stressed, he's not control that. He is the most zen person. I mean, if you could bottle that, it would be incredible. He is just so I need to be more like Keith Richards.

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Speaker 4: We all do. I mean, he's just he's so relaxed.

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Speaker 3: He entered and I've never met anybody where if you put a camera on him or take it off of him, that there is no change whatsoever, Like does not matter if there's a camera, there's not a camera. He is exactly the same person in every room at every time. And that, you know, is something that I was just taking notes on. I mean, it was amazing.

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Speaker 2: I'm assuming you approach Jagger for the Keith thing.

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Speaker 3: I probably did, but not in a in more of a cursory way, like if you want to come in. But I also knew it wasn't aggressive, but it wasn't supposed to be a stoness document right.

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Speaker 2: In fact, I someone with great insight into him.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, But also I felt like that documentary was the chance to ask all the questions that nobody ever asks. So whenever Keith is interviewed, he gets asked questions about, you know, his complicated relationship with me, and I was like, this isn't about that, you know, this is about just hanging with Keith and kind of what's Keith into and how does he move through the world. And I'd actually produced Crossfire Hurricane, that Stones documentary, so like, I know the Stones story and love it, but it just felt like alone with.

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Speaker 2: Keith was the goal.

00:16:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Director Morgan Neville. If you enjoy conversations with filmmakers who shine a light on the most famous figures in music, check out my episode with the director of What the Hell Happened To Blood, Sweat and Tears, John Sinfeld.

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Speaker 5: I'm fascinated by what's the story?

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Speaker 4: Is it compelling?

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Speaker 5: Is there enough depth to it? So that's the first thing. Second question always is is there enough audio visual material with which to tell the story? And sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't. I did a film a few years ago about the jazz icon John Coltrane, and there's very little footage on him, but we managed to find a way to tell the story. I did one on John Lennon. He was perhaps the most photographed and filmed man of the twentieth century, and there was plenty of film for us to use.

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Speaker 1: To hear more of my conversation with John Sinfeld, go to Here's Thething dot Org. After the break, Morgan Neville explains Lorne Michael's process behind the curtain at Saturday Night Live. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. After five decades in show business, SNL creator Lorne Michaels has shown a willingness to step into the spotlight more often than in the past. He has appeared on SNL numerous times and is now the subject of Morgan Neville's newest documentary film, Laurne. Having resisted public attention for years, I wondered what convinced Neville that Lorne Michaels was finally ready to have a film made about him.

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Speaker 3: I mean, one of his friends said to me, I've never known anybody who more really wants a documentary made about him and simultaneously really doesn't want a documentary made about him. And that was my experience. You know, in the beginning, literally the first day of shooting is what you see in the film. I pull out a camera and he hides like I can't find him for half an hour.

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Speaker 4: You know, I'm looking for him.

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Speaker 3: He won't wear a microphone, you know, and he's kind of running away from me a lot at the beginning of me the film, and I kept wondering, why why am I doing this? Why is he doing this?

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Speaker 2: We can stop?

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Speaker 3: And I remember seeing Higgins want Steve Higgins, the producer, snl there and he looked at me and said, remember you chose this. So said, yes, I did. I did, but you know, I like a good challenge.

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Speaker 2: And what changed.

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Speaker 3: Part of it is he got used to me, And part of it is I'm trying to build trust with him and understand that I'm really just there to understand him, you know, I'm not there to judge him. But I think that is seductive to a person. And what I think really motivated Lauren. I mean, yes, part of it is legacy and all that, but it's that he feels like when he does his job, well, it's invisible, and I think he just wants for people to understand that he works really hard, that he really does something, because I think people don't really understand what the Wizard of Oz does behind the curtain, and it's tough work. So I think he wanted people to have some understanding that he actually is doing something well there.

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Speaker 1: Were elements of that job. There are elements of that system there that he's constructed that overlap with other comedy realities, you know, stand up and sketch comedy and so. But Lauren built a system in which what his greatest gift is to me, among his gifts, is to get you to understand that if you work hard, and you are gifted, and you have some comedy chops, you're going to excel in a venue that has ebbed and flowed in terms of its popularity. But now it's that they're on at eight thirty in la and now that they're like the fifth highest rated show in prime time.

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Speaker 3: Lauren does care deeply. I mean, that's what I saw. I think people think that he sits back and makes these big decisions about who makes it and who doesn't make it. But I think the reality is Lauren is in the trenches fighting, you know, for next week's show. You know, he is sweating detailed jobs. That is his job. I mean, he is so you know, knows to the grindstone. And I don't think people appreciate that. I mean, I know he does so many things. And Mulaney says in the film that people have no idea what Lauren's doing to protect them and to help them.

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Speaker 2: He wants me to do well.

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Speaker 4: He doesn't do well.

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Speaker 3: I do well, And people say, oh, you know, I didn't get enough airtime this week, or you killed this sketch or whatever, and they have all these complaints. But believe me, there's a bigger picture that he is doing the best by everybody there. And he's also completely meritocratic. He's fair about everything. So if you're good, great, you know there is but it's.

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Speaker 1: Also not his fault. I mean, I shouldn't say, or his responsibility. It's not like a father who throws those kids in the water and say you learn to swim. Now, the show business gods throw you in the water. We want you to swim, not Louren. That's just the business. Lauren's in the business. But he's not making that decision.

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Speaker 3: No, and so many Look how many cast members started as writers too, you know Bo and Yang and you know Bill Hater, you know so many of them that he understands it's gradually growing. And then when you know they're the kind of new cast members who are kind of provisional light cast members. I forget the term they use you know, and then they're kind of introduced. He figures out a way for them to introduce themselves, usually on a weekend update segment, you know, and trying to kind of build a persona. And so he really he needs stars. He needs stars. He wants to mint stars.

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Speaker 4: You know.

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Speaker 3: That's what's really carried that show. But the other thing somebody said to me is what's interesting is when the show's doing really well, Lauren is pessimistic because he's thinking, these people are all going to get movie and TV deals.

00:22:27
Speaker 2: They're all going to leave in early two years.

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Speaker 3: And when the show's not doing well, he's optimistic because he knows it's going to gel in two years.

00:22:34
Speaker 1: Net maybe you know, for me, he's somebody who this is show business. He wants you to know that it is a meritocracy. You've got to get it together, you've got to figure out how to perform. He'd be with Higgins or the director, and he'd be in his room, the small room upstairs above eight h and he turned to somebody, Eagles, I'm going to give Jim something because he hasn't been on the air in three weeks. He was very you know, he's thoughtful, always you haven't been on the air in three which you're going to give you this little thing in the twelve thirty slot. He taught me some little things about the show, like if something was really nasty and vulgar, he goes, what's twelve thirty?

00:23:06
Speaker 2: You know what I mean? That third slug? You know, the later, the better off, it's dirty.

00:23:10
Speaker 5: You know.

00:23:10
Speaker 2: Now they're on at eight thirty.

00:23:11
Speaker 3: So, as a good friend of Lawrence, how did the film strike you?

00:23:15
Speaker 1: I think that it struck me as what I expected from him.

00:23:18
Speaker 2: Cautious. He's cautious.

00:23:20
Speaker 1: Lauren's never gonna throw down and say, oh god, he just had this mad crush on Gilda and I tried to date. He's not going to confess anything. That's just not his style. He's very English that way. He's much of an Anglo file that way. But you do see to your credit, you see the person who has risen to this place. This is a movie about Lorne for fifty years, and Lauren in the last ten years has risen to this place where he's like Carson, he's a television institution. But you see with him in the last when as far as when he started going on the show, when he started appearing on the show and he would play himself in the back and that was the beginning of that obviously, And now it's like to get to fifty. It's history, it is. Lauren is part of history.

00:24:07
Speaker 3: Nobody's ever done it right.

00:24:09
Speaker 1: And I think that Lauren is somebody who Lauren's older and like all my friends, I'm sixty eight and I have a lot of friends who are fifteen years older than they, which puts them in their eighties, and nearly all of them have one thing in common, and that is they're rich beyond belief. They're famous beyond belief. What they're putting out. People are still by and they're not done. They're not done. Lauren said to me, when you retire, you die, and he's seriously, these guys have no desire and no intention of retiring.

00:24:37
Speaker 4: I believe it. You know, McCartney's touring, you know, I.

00:24:40
Speaker 2: Find that unbelievable.

00:24:41
Speaker 4: Yeah, and Lauren's eighty three.

00:24:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're still they're like you stop, why?

00:24:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, getting no interest in stopping. But I know that Lauren today is not who he was in the nineties and is not who he was in the seventies. I mean, because many different reasons having a family, Like I think Laurene is probably much softer version now, and not that he's soft, but he's not. You know a lot of people talk to me about him having kids and how that affected him and kind of made him just relax a little bit a little bit, So I know I'm getting just a kind of a slice of who Louren is. But again, it was more of trying to feel like, what's it like to be in the room with the guy. You know, what's it like for people who've been in that universe who work with him under him. I was really happy ultimately with that. Lauren let me in enough to kind of glimpse some.

00:25:32
Speaker 2: Of that.

00:25:34
Speaker 1: Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville, If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:25:47
Speaker 1: When we come back, Morgan Neville looks back at the Oscar winning moment that elevated his career and how he's noticed the documentary industry transform over his thirty three years of filmmaking. I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is here's the thing Morgan Neville's twenty thirteen documentary Twenty Feet From Stardom profiled the backup singers behind some of music's biggest hits. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in twenty fourteen. With more than fifteen years of experience up to that point, I wondered if he'd ever considered the possibility that one of his films would win such a prestigious award.

00:26:36
Speaker 3: No, I mean no, I mean I say that I've been making docs for thirty three years. The first fifteen years, nobody cared. And it wasn't just that they didn't care about my films. They didn't care about documentaries. I mean there were occasional documentaries like Roger and Me or March of the Penguins or you know something, but it was not a thing. You know, to get a documentary into a theater was unheard of, and basically PBS and HBO were the only places you could make anything that I've seen my industry change multiple times during the time I've been making films, and it's changed completely. But I think part of that change, actually, Twenty Feet from Stardom was my documentary about backup singers. But I think that actually was one of those pivot moments. It was also the moment when Netflix started putting documentaries on a streaming service next to thriller and comedy. They become programming, you know, but just being able to find them and putting them on an equal plane with other types of movies I think changed people's.

00:27:37
Speaker 1: Percentcation them out of the basement. Well, I'm David Nutrien, who's the artists director of the Hampton's Film Fest of course the co chair of with Randy Master. We would do this, and I said to Newton, as the years ago, by especially the last five six seven years, docs are programming very competitive. You say, well, how about that one sold gone Athles a saint to you, No, no screening, screening. We're going to do a big one in the city in September. You just go to miss by a month whatever. So the availability, where I should say, the scarcity of docs we like, has completely changed recently.

00:28:08
Speaker 3: I mean to me, the problem is that all it's like what's happened in a lot of things like publishing or music, like the kind of what what they call them publishing the mid list titles. They're not blockbusters, but they're not tiny. They're just like the things that are, like singles and doubles. People aren't as interested in those, you know, in the places they used to make a lot of these kind of smart but small films like Showtime used to do a lot of them, CNN films used to do a lot more of them. It just doesn't work for the streamers in the same way. So a film like Best of Enemies, like I don't know where I would sell that film well today today, And those are so many of my favorite films to make, but to watch too, you know, just.

00:28:50
Speaker 1: We're winning an oscar is one thing, and that's that's nice. I mean, we screened Louis Sahaios's first doc. I think it was his first doc. I think it was a sound man. We were told back then. But Sohios did the cove the cove the following year, I'm on stage with Steve Martin. We hand him the Oscar for the cove. It was kind of thrilling because it was like seven months prior or eight months prior, we were in on Long Island. Now let me ask you all, so you live in La. I do you're from La Yeah, you grew up in what part of LA.

00:29:15
Speaker 3: I actually grew up in Santa Barbara?

00:29:17
Speaker 2: You did, You grew up north and your whole childhood.

00:29:20
Speaker 3: Lived in LA When was a little kid, moved to Santa Barbara and then yeah, grew up there.

00:29:24
Speaker 2: What your parents do? Were they in the business.

00:29:25
Speaker 3: My dad was an antiquarian book dealer, so I grew up in the book world, so very interesting. And my dad, but my parents were kind of bohemians, are the Nope, No, both gone, both gone, you know. But my dad loved you know, writers so huge hemiway fans. So as a kid, our family trips would be to follow the bulls in Spain, you know, things like that. So I did a lot, went to a lot of bullfights. But things like that, you know, or strange, you know, we had writers stay at our house constantly, you know, so it was kind of you know, salon my over selling it. But it was a quasi bohemian kind of upbringing. And but my dad was a film freak, a music freak, and a book freak. And your mom, my mom helped my dad run everything. She was great, you know. My dad was brilliant in many ways, but was.

00:30:14
Speaker 2: An administrative disaster.

00:30:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, And he wasn't good with social My mom was brilliant socially, you know, could talk to anybody. So the two of them, you know, were really like a you know, Frediser Jinder Ruders kind of.

00:30:28
Speaker 2: She was his partner. Yeah, now you go to Penn I did. Was that a legacy thing? Why did the West Coast guy go to the East Coast?

00:30:35
Speaker 3: I was a kid from California who wanted to get away from California. So I go to school in Philadelphia. I majored in Colonial American history, so because I was like, oh, there's a real history here. So I just I loved it and I loved, you know, all of that kind of old history. But the funny thing is when I was on the East Coast then I would talk about La history and people would say, that's an oxymoron, you know, what do you mean? So my first documentary was basically my retort to that. It was a film called Shotgun Freeway drives through Lost to La and it's this meditation on history in La. John Didion's and James Elroy. It's like a crazy Delroy. Yes, before he had really hit it.

00:31:18
Speaker 2: Is he still alive?

00:31:19
Speaker 4: He died right now, he's alive.

00:31:20
Speaker 3: It's funny because he was another writer, one of the writers who I passed through my childhood in a weird way at our house. But we ended up filming with him, and you know, used to break and enter people's homes. He was kind of like a backdoor man who would break in and like sniff women's panties and things like that.

00:31:38
Speaker 4: Elroy, Yes, yes, early in his life.

00:31:42
Speaker 2: I didn't see any panties anywhere in the house.

00:31:45
Speaker 3: We were in a house and he's like, oh, I'll show you what I did, and we go through. We were filming it at my parents' house and he went into my mom's panty drawer and started sniffing her underwear.

00:31:56
Speaker 1: Can you imagine an image where someone goes into your mother's bedroom and there's sniff your mother's paties in front of you.

00:32:02
Speaker 4: There you go, and I'm filming it.

00:32:05
Speaker 2: When you go to Penn and you studied was it again.

00:32:08
Speaker 3: Colonial American Colonial American history? But I was a journalist, you know. I mean, even though I was studying Colonial American history, I wrote for the paper I left. When I graduated, I went to the Nation magazine. That was my first job, and there I started fact checking for Gorbidal, So that might be where you're going. Because I did the film Best of Enemies, which we screened at the Hamptons Film Festival.

00:32:31
Speaker 1: Isn't the one where he uses the ugly epithet of vidaliist him.

00:32:34
Speaker 3: Buckley and the doll are debating each other and Buckley uses.

00:32:38
Speaker 1: I'm a queer, yeah, yes, something like that, pick your word, yeah yeah, I remember. That was super controversial. So when people saw it in that film and they didn't recall that or didn't know about that.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: They were like, Wow. They couldn't believe Buckley was that easy to get.

00:32:51
Speaker 3: And Buckley thought the tape had been destroyed, and I think he actually had had somebody take the tape out of the vault at ABC and just detroy it because that one tape is missing from the ABC vault. But the only reason that still exists is that Vanderbilt University has a TV monitoring service.

00:33:08
Speaker 2: They've had since the television archives that I used on went to GW.

00:33:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they had like a black and white copy of it.

00:33:14
Speaker 2: Right, what's a film?

00:33:16
Speaker 1: You really think you what you set out to do, you accomplished, it was successful for you. Among you probably have several or a few. What's the most successful film you made in terms of you meeting your goal?

00:33:27
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, because a film like twenty Feet from Stardom. You know, I had a producer who said that he had gone to a Leonard Cohen concert had gotten really stoned. Gil Frieson was the producer, and he had been at A and M Records. I remember him, Yeah, he'd been the president of A and M. And he spent the whole concert watching Leonard Cohen's backup singers and thinking what's their story? And he came to me and said, I'm interested in backup singers, and I said, that's potentially.

00:33:54
Speaker 2: I was stoned when I came up with the side of it.

00:33:56
Speaker 3: But so I said, so, what what's your idea? And he said, no idea, just backup singers. So I didn't know what it was going to become. So there are films like that where you're just on a journey and you're really discovering it and they grow. And you can tell when a film is going to be good is it grows in all the right ways, so like it picks up momentum. It's not like pushing a rock up a hill. You know, it just gets better and better, and twenty Feet was one of those. But I think probably once should be my neighbor. Just from my instinct of what I wanted it to be. Everything clicked. I just felt like it in a way in terms of what you want, in terms of what I wanted, you know. I mean part of documentary is I feel like there's so many other things you can't control that just have to follow your way to And that was just a film that everything worked about it in terms of timing things I couldn't control.

00:34:47
Speaker 2: Right.

00:34:47
Speaker 1: Do you find while you're making a documentary there's a lot of handholding and guidance by you to get subjects comfortable in front of the camera.

00:34:55
Speaker 3: There's a lot of handholding, you know, sometimes if somebody's used to being on camera, almost the opposite of okay, we're not on camera. I mean the first day I filmed with Steve Martin for his documentary, literally the first day, he came out and he had two pairs of glasses in his hands and he said, you know, should I wear the black glasses the brown glasses? I said, Steve, it's a documentary. You can wear whatever you want, but wear the black ones.

00:35:19
Speaker 1: But then do you feel someone like him? I would assume him because when I've met him, he's very cagy. Yeah, Steve Martin's very cagy. Like, he's so fucking cagey, you know. Like one time, I'm standing there at sen Now was saying, it's me, Tina and him and somebody else. And as I'm telling a story and I'm reluctant to try to regale them, let alone tell a story to them, because they're also funny and smart, which I'm not.

00:35:41
Speaker 2: And literally, as I'm telling you her, he goes. He does like the biggest.

00:35:46
Speaker 1: Theatrical yawn you've ever seen in your life. And I thought, Okay, he's funny, he's clever. I would assume he'd be among the people who would like, just.

00:35:55
Speaker 2: Fuck with you. Did he fuck with you? No? He was honest.

00:35:58
Speaker 3: No, he was honest, straightforward, And I think Steve has different modes, you know. And also it's funny. The thing that made me realize I could really get there with him is his novels, actually, because he has a deep understanding not only of story and narrative, but of character. And I think in the beginning, I said, as a storyteller to a storyteller, this is where I need to go to tell the story. And I think he said, okay, I'm game to do that, you know.

00:36:28
Speaker 2: Not cooperative?

00:36:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, completely resist.

00:36:31
Speaker 3: And we started with as I started pretty much all my films, with a tape recorder and just us talking. So Steve and I talk for hours and hours and hours.

00:36:39
Speaker 1: There must be a large bin of things you wanted to do, and you changed your mind.

00:36:46
Speaker 2: You explored it a little.

00:36:47
Speaker 1: Bit, like to describe a situation where you go, let's do mister or miss mss X, and then you do. You delve into a little bit, describe that process.

00:36:55
Speaker 3: Then you go, no, I mean one name I could name because they're dead, is I want to do a Raymond Chandler film. You know, I love Chandler's writing. He was a hermit, and I tracked down the handful of people who were alive who knew him and started making it. But it was like sand going through my fingers, like I just couldn't summon him as a character, and so I just I walked away from it. You know, it was just too hard to make a film about a character who was hiding his whole life.

00:37:23
Speaker 1: There.

00:37:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there were nine seconds of footage that exist of Raymond Chandler and one interview recording, so that was impossible.

00:37:33
Speaker 2: I mean.

00:37:33
Speaker 3: There was another one where I was approached about doing a documentary with a very famous comedian and I met with him and you know, kind of said, explained, you know that we have to kind of go there, and you know, it's about the whole process of you know, there's a certain amount of vulnerability that you have to show up with. And they said, okay, you know, and then we went and I met with him again, and it became clear my second meeting that they just wanted to show funny clips of themselves and have people say nice things about them, like they really were not going to go there.

00:38:09
Speaker 2: It's a tribute and.

00:38:11
Speaker 3: I just said I and I bowed out, you know, I said, I can't do that. So there are situations like that. I've had a number of situations like that for me.

00:38:18
Speaker 1: People will say, oh, who do you want to act with? And there's almost none of my peers. There's some, but hardly any. You know, I admire their films, I want to go see their films. I don't know if I want to do that with them, which is so intimate. Who do you want to do a movie about that you wish you could meet them?

00:38:33
Speaker 3: I mean my White Whale, and he's dead, so I'm not going to meet him. But in my fantasy. Shel Silberstein, who was a famous writer, wrote all these great you know, with the Sidewalk Ends and the Giving Tree and all these incredible children's books, but also wrote a boy named Sue for Johnny Cash, also lived at the Playboy mansion. Also, you know, like lived many many different lives, and I've I love his writing particularly, but you know, just somebody that I would love to have met, but also, you know, would love to make a documentary.

00:39:07
Speaker 2: About what do you do next?

00:39:10
Speaker 3: I'm not making a film at this moment for the first time ten years. No, No, I'm just promoting this. But I've been making so much that I'm just I don't want to. I want to fall in love with something to make because.

00:39:23
Speaker 1: It's the topic an idea, not a person with any Susan Lacy would do her films.

00:39:28
Speaker 2: And I love the jan Fondo one.

00:39:29
Speaker 1: The one on Spielberg was a bit too everybody's I think it's afraid of Spielberg to really dig in there I'd love to interview Spielberg and talk about other things.

00:39:36
Speaker 2: But for you, is it likely a person or could it be.

00:39:39
Speaker 3: I'm actually because I've done a lot of biographical right films, I'm kind of ready to do something else, you know, and I've made non biographical films, but I think I'm looking for something else. I'm also working on scripted projects now, so you know, something else, new challenge. I mean, I've done so many different things in documentary has been incredible, and I will always make documentaries, but as you get older, time is the thing that's the most valuable. So I just want to know that I have to love something to want to make.

00:40:06
Speaker 1: It's interesting because it's like music, because when I watch your films, what I always remember is great films.

00:40:11
Speaker 2: You have an ear.

00:40:12
Speaker 4: I'm a musician too.

00:40:13
Speaker 1: There you go, you have an ear like in my acting. I think about it. It's like music. How should I be playing this?

00:40:18
Speaker 2: It is?

00:40:19
Speaker 1: There's a way to play it. I want to find the notes that I've written down. But been with you. You've made a lot of great films. You're an immensely talented man, extraordinarily talented man, and what I think a lot of it has to do with your ear.

00:40:31
Speaker 2: You have an ear.

00:40:32
Speaker 3: Well, It's funny because you know I said this to somebody. You know, film school teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary because film school is about your voice. What do you want to say? You're the next door some wells tell us what you have to tell the world, and documentary is all about your ear.

00:40:49
Speaker 4: What do you hear? You know?

00:40:50
Speaker 3: I feel like my job is listening really really hard. I see a lot of people come out of film school to make documentaries and they've decided what the film is before they've made it. But I think the sense of discovery is the thing to do. Al Masles, the famous documentary filmmaker, said one of my favorite quotes, if you end up making the film you set out to make, then you weren't listening along the way.

00:41:12
Speaker 1: My thanks to documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplin Woolner. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.