Paul Reubens in Pee-wee as Himself (Courtesy: HBO)
Throughout his career, documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf has excelled at portraits of complicated artists and individuals whose work is both highly idiosyncratic as well as, at least seen in retrospect, emergent from specific cultural, social and political milieus. Early work include two films — a short, Smalltown Boys, and his feature debut, Wild Combination — about, respectively, two seminal downtown New York figures of the ’70s and ’80s, artist David Wojnarowicz and composer Arthur Russell. The 2017 short Bayard and Me looked at the relationship between civil rights leader Bayard Rustin through the lens of his relationship with boyfriend Walter Naegel. Less well known but equally fascinating was proto-archivist Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia-based TV producer who singlehandedly tries to archive the entirety of American televised media in Wolf’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
With his latest, the two-part HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself, currently airing and nominated for five Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program, Wolf has made his highest-profile work and with, at least as far as popular culture goes, his highest-profile subject. The free-spirited and sweetly rebellious Pee-wee Herman, the character played by comedian and creator Paul Reubens, is one lodged in many of our consciousnesses, either from the ’80s TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse; Tim Burton’s debut, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure; or, sadly, later persecutory brushes with the law — tabloid fodder that reveled in the juxtaposition of child entertainer and adult misdemeanors.
As a character, Pee-wee Herman projected a child’s emotional knowability coupled with an adult’s mastery of persona and mystery, making him, and by extension, Reuben, someone we feel we both do and don’t know. Spending nearly a quarter of its three hour and 25 minute running time on Reuben’s life before Pee-wee — his years doing performance-oriented work at Cal Arts and then nights at various comedy clubs, where he’d try out different acts and characters — Wolf deftly outlines both the paths not taken as well as the confluence of personal, social and business factors that led to the creation of Pee-wee and the character’s huge popularity. Reubens himself, seen in both archival material but also in extensive interviews conducted by Wolf, is the guiding voice, speaking with more emotional transparency than we’ve heard from him before while also, on camera, provocatively wrestling with his very decision to submit to Wolf’s documentary process.
Reubens passed away during the documentary’s final stretch, and Wolf was “blindsided,” as he wrote in New York Magazine. “My childhood hero, the person I had spent hundreds of hours getting to know, laughing and fighting with, had been dying, and I never had a clue.” Wolf makes the picture’s final moments ones of, yes, sadness, but also, with final interview material left by Reubens, grace. Inquisitive, probing, empathetic and elegant in its execution, Pee-wee as Himself is a tremendously moving work that’s also engrossing cultural history, a blend that Wolf is a master of. About that Russell doc, Wolf said to Filmmaker when we selected him for our 2008 25 New Faces list, “A good story can transcend any ‘scene,’” and that’s what he’s done again here. Below, I talked to Wolf about the long process of obtaining Reubens’s trust, his approach to the artists’ voluminous archive, the difference in practice between journalism and documentary filmmaking, and much more.
Filmmaker: When and what were your own earliest memories of Pee-wee Herman?
Wolf: I was born in 1982, and the show started in 1986 and went on for five seasons, so I probably watched it on live TV. I have recollections of my mom leaving for work, and me crying and it being on TV. And I have recollections of playing with the [Pee-wee] toys, specifically a pull-string doll — a ubiquitous piece of merch that everyone had — that hung above my bed. It was still there when I was in high school, and for my intro to photography class I took a picture of it, a kind of abstract photo of Pee-wee’s hand, and it’s on still my fridge today.
So, as a kid, I was just totally transfixed by Pee Wee’s Playhouse. I wouldn’t be able to even put words to it. Now, in retrospect, obviously I felt accepted by its values and emotionally involved in its aesthetic — the full world-building of the show. I don’t think I necessarily had any kind of preoccupation with Pee-wee as a character, and it wasn’t about the movie [Pee-wee’s Big Adventure]. It really was just the space of the Playhouse, what happened in there, and the values [it represented. [The Playhouse] was a weirdo space, where it was okay to be freaky, artistic, larger than life, expressive, affectionate, sweet and bratty. It just contained an enormous range of feelings that were accepted.
Filmmaker: As you got older, were you keeping up with Pee-wee, with Paul Reubens, and what was going on with his life?
Wolf: No. I had a love for Pee-wee but [I wasn’t] a die-hard fan. He just was someone who was a reference — part of the curriculum of my brain. And when people would brainstorm documentary subjects, for years he was at the top of my list. I knew he was a compelling subject, and I guess I made an assumption that whoever made Pee-wee’s Playhouse is a compelling, complex person. Of course, Paul is known by a lot of people for his arrest. I don’t have any recollection of his arrest or feeling any sort of disappointment about that. I just knew that [event] to be sort of a salacious hook in his story, and I wasn’t drawn to it because of that. Paul Reubens was a fascinating person, and there was very, very little about him out there, even though his work had been so iconic.
Filmmaker: So, when you say Paul Reubens was part of a sort of catalog of documentary ideas, over the years had you been pitching a doc about him before this particular project was able to come together?
Wolf: I wasn’t pitching, but I’m always trying to gain access, to reach [subjects]. And he’s someone I approached a number of times unsuccessfully through probably not the strongest [connections]. There were rumors — untrue — in the trades that the Safdie Brothers were in talks to direct Paul’s darkly autobiographical Pee Wee film, The Pee-wee Herman Story. I knew the Safdies so I reached out and said, “Look, he’s my dream subject. If there’s any way you could connect me, I would be so grateful.” And then, completely unrelated, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, who became the producer of the film, was an old friend of Paul’s. They met on Ted Demme’s film, Blow. Emma’s a very successful producer — she made Joker and produced many Scorsese films, and Paul had approached her for help on how to figure out how to make a documentary. He was meeting with people, and I knew that he even started to make a project with somebody but then pulled out. And then, Emma approached the Safdies because she had been an executive producer on Uncut Gems, and she advised Paul that these could be good partners for a documentary. They then said, “Oh, well, it turns out we know a director who would like to do this,” and they encouraged Paul to meet with me.
When I met with him, he was pretty direct in saying he wanted to direct the documentary about himself but everyone was advising him against that, and he didn’t understand why. I said, “Well, I’m here to meet with you about me directing the documentary. You should get to know me, and then we can discuss if there’s a potential process that works.” This was during the peak of the pandemic, and my film Spaceship Earth had just come out. Apparently, he didn’t like that film and said I wasn’t the director for him, but Josh [Safdie] encouraged him to watch my first film, Wild Combination, and Paul really connected to that film. So, we met again and continued the conversation. We would meet then pretty regularly on Skype to just sort of shoot the shit and get to know each other and have these tense interactions about how the documentary could work and what his role would be in the telling of the story, and then we would hang out again. It was a kind of prolonged courtship, and at some point in that process, he kind of begrudgingly agreed to move forward, but on the condition that I’d be on a 30-day trial period. And so I was. I made Paul talk to me three times a week for multiple hours each session.
Filmmaker: Were you filming this?
Wolf: No, but we decided to record the audio for reference, and I wouldn’t use it without asking him. Even that early, our relationship was interesting. Then, one day, it was like one million pounds lifted. He said, “I’m in, I want to do this.” And that began a long and rocky process that had stops and starts and then was completed after he died.
Filmmaker: What were the types of things that you connected with outside of just talking about him and his own life?
Wolf: We had similar sensibilities. In a way, we just connected as people. And at the same time, there was a lot of friction and distance. I think Paul, by his own admission, was not trusting by nature, and obviously there were reasons why he had been really burned and mistreated by the media. So, there was this oscillation between getting close and also being held at arm’s length. I think we were trying to figure out how to get what we wanted and needed from each other, which is part of the dance that we do with our documentary subjects. This was just way more involved and intense, and his desire for control was much more intense than I had experienced before. But I was like, “I’m just going to keep pushing this forward, nothing can stop me. I desperately want to make this, and we’re going to figure it out.”
By the time Paul had said yes, I had pre-interviewed a number of other people whose names he had given me, and I was ready to go into production. I began shooting all these secondary interviews, but he was procrastinating shooting his own. And then, after a couple months of production, and, at this point, hundreds of hours of private conversations, I started to interview Paul, and that was designed to be a pretty epic, long-form interview. I wanted to shoot in blocks of five days so that we could get deeply immersed. And then we would take breaks, like chapter breaks in Paul’s story. I wanted to do that over the course of three shooting periods, and I would move chronologically through Paul’s life in granular detail so that he would be the primary storyteller and assuming he would perform well in the interviews. I knew that he, particularly with regards to his childhood, was so obsessive about detail because it was clearly an engine of his creativity — like, he could speak for over an hour about his childhood home.
Filmmaker: You brought up the word “trust” earlier, and I thought back to Janet Malcolm’s analysis of journalist and subject in The Journalist and the Murderer in which she refers to “the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism,” and discussing how journalists can betray their subjects “without remorse.” As you say, he had been burned by the media, so wasn’t it understandable for him to mistrust you?
Wolf: I say this to journalists all the time about this “journalism vs. filmmaker” thing. We need so much from our subjects compared to the journalists. The opportunity for a journalist to betray their subjects is so much easier and simpler. I need to invade my subject’s lives with cameras and equipment. I need them to sign legal releases, allowing me to use their life story and materials as the raw material for my work. I need them to work with me, to give me their precious personal possessions. I’ve talked to journalists who will knock on someone’s door and say, “Somebody said this awful thing about you, do you have a comment?” We can’t do that. People are concerned about conflict of interest, particularly in celebrity films, but there is no denying that the relationship between a documentary filmmaker and their subject is a collaboration, because you need so much from each other. It’s a two-way relationship, and it’s a long-term kind of relationship. It just happened to be a particularly complex two-way relationship in this film, and I, in a roundabout way, chose to make that part of the story.
Filmmaker: Let’s talk about that. There are two strands of the documentary. There’s the linear, autobiographical marching through Paul’s life, and then there’s his relationship with you, the tension of that relationship. And then there is also the internal tension you feel in Paul about telling his story. I’m interested in your decision to include both his self-questioning and his pushing back. You easily could have cut it, and you also easily could have made it much more a part of the documentary than it is.
Wolf: The intensity of my experience after Paul died is hard to express. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, that feeling of responsibility. I didn’t want to speak ill of Paul or do anything meanspirited. We had a lot of conflict, and I was angry about things that had gone down. I was also in shock that he died, because I had no reason to believe that he was dying. He looked so healthy in the footage. And so, yes, at first I took a kind of rose-tinted approach [to the edit]. I think it was pretty vanilla. I had a rough-cut screening with some other filmmakers and close confidants who were like, “Wake up and get real.” There’s something I’ve said before that is really true and that I would frequently tell Paul: “You can’t be ‘simple people.’ It’s kind of beneath you to be simple. You gotta embrace your complexity. Being complex is what makes you compelling.” I recognized that I had to take my own advice and to depict him with complexity.
I really am adverse to putting myself in films. I think that is often a crutch, a device that’s used in documentaries for lack of better storytelling techniques. Then I had a conversation with somebody who was like, “Well, isn’t it more narcissistic to uphold that rule that you don’t appear in films rather than to do it if it actually helps support the storytelling?” That day, I went back and started to thread Paul and my exchanges throughout the film. Frankly, that was always an idea that we both had but that I was scared to do. On the first day of interviewing Paul, when things started to just feel frustrating, I [asked], “How do you feel about your relationship with me?” He lit up. It was cathartic for him to play out that issue on camera and with a crew present. As soon as [I began to include this material], I recognized that it wasn’t about me. It was about showing how Paul was wrestling over reconciling these two different versions of himself that were competing for attention but also hiding and not wanting to be seen.
Filmmaker: I was surprised by the lightness with which he often articulated these qualms in the movie. There’s always a twinkle in his eye. He never felt angry to me. Was there a level of intensity to his frustration and to his outbursts that you decided to dial down for the film?
Wolf: Paul is a really controlled person. We had it out behind the scenes, for sure, in very intense ways, but when it came to our conflict on camera, I think he was pretty well calibrated in terms of being cutting or snarky, and he was also humorous at the same time. Yes, he could get angry, and I dealt with him in what was probably the most stressful time in his life. It was also stressful [because of] the premise of being documented by a younger person who expected creative control over the telling of his story. But I think his way of being barbed had a sweetness to it, and that part is very Pee-wee, but it’s also very Paul. There’s where the two overlapped, I think.
Filmmaker: When I interviewed you about Recorder, your film about the Philadelphia archivist Marion Stokes, you described a fascinating, complex archiving system to handle at that material. Obviously, that film is an order of magnitude more than this one, but did you rely on similar techniques and ways of working, or did this project require a different approach to the archive?
Wolf: It was a somewhat higher volume than my other films, but I had more support. Our coproducer, Brittan Dunham, she really was at the helm of the archive stuff. She worked for Beyonce for a long time as her archivist, and she had a very intimate, close relationship with Paul because she got to help him go down memory lane, and she handled his most private stuff with a lot of care. She sat in Paul’s house, where he stored hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tapes, and she went through all of them with him, hand digitizing everything. Paul was an obsessive archivist of his own career, but he also shot tons of home videos with the first models of home camcorders. A lot was shots of deer and squirrels from his backyard but much of it was extraordinary, particularly the Super 8mm. Our associate editor, Vanessa Martino, went very closely through the material. We had archival researchers. It was a robust team working through that archive to support my editor, Damian Rodriguez, and I, but it was similar process to what I always do, which is to have a team of people watching everything and pulling greatest hits for me before I conduct a master interview. [That way] I can learn about my subject through the primary material, not just through what’s being said.
Filmmaker: I love the two-part form of it. I feel it was one of the rare docs I see these days where the format and the content were appropriate for each other. You couldn’t have done this in two hours, but, at the same time, I’m sick of the six and eight-hour extended series.
Wolf: I didn’t want to do two parts initially. I said to HBO, “I think it’s a feature.” And they were like, “We think it’s two parts, and we’d really like it to be two parts.” And I was like, “Okay.”
Filmmaker: And were they saying that because they recognized the density of the material…?
Wolf: I think it’s a model of biographical docs that has really worked for them. HBO is unique in terms of that two-part thing. I think it’s kind of nice, because it’s a bigger canvas in which you structure a natural break. But I think people will probably watch it continuously, and I really was putting it together like a very long movie. I knew I wanted to go deep on the pre-history of Pee-wee, but when I was 45 minutes in and hadn’t gotten to Pee-wee, I was like, okay, this needs a much bigger canvas. If [you include an] epic pre-history, you have a deeper understanding of the logic behind, in this case, a character who may seem simple or straightforward but who is actually the product of a constellation of cultural references and life experiences.
Filmmaker: You shot the interviews with Paul and others. What else did you shoot? All those shots of what he had in his home when he was raided, I assume you shot those.
Wolf: Yeah. We always intended to create a sort of museum of Paul’s collections, including set pieces and props from his work, and to film him going through everything because he was an enormous collector. We outfitted a huge warehouse. You see timelapse footage of that warehouse in the film as well. For me, it felt like a controlled situation to lean into this metaphor of “unpacking the past,” and it was visually interesting. We never got to film Paul going through it. But after Paul passed away, we made use of that space. Our production designer, Alexander Lindy, created a kind of mini museum of Paul’s stuff, like tableaus of his collections. And we did examine the material in question from his second arrest — that actual material we looked at in the warehouse as well.
Filmmaker: So, you’re making the movie – and this is in your doc — and you have to stop, and there’s a break. And then months later you get a call from Paul that you can shoot again. Tell me about that moment, because presumably your crew is dispersed.
Wolf: Everyone who worked on this movie desperately wanted it to come back. Everybody knew how strong the material was, but it was in some sort of limbo that went on and on. It was really devastating. It almost came back so many times, and I would always hesitate to tell the crew because I didn’t want to jerk people around. Basically, I heard from his reps that he was ready to proceed. I spoke to Paul, and he sounded weak. I was taken aback by the conversation but had no context to understand it. But. It was a meaningful conversation in which he told me the things I needed to know to feel confident proceeding with the film, and I was scheduled to film him a week later. Then I flew to Birmingham, Alabama to do a freelance job, and I got a text from my executive with a screenshot of his Instagram page saying that he was dead, and then my phone exploded. I was in total shock. I got a call from Paul’s publicist and close friend Kelly Bucha Novak, who told me that Paul had recorded some something for me for the documentary the night before he died. That day and every day after, I read the 1,500 page transcript of our interview, and was just wracking my brain, trying to understand: Were there signs or indicators that he was sick or that he was dying?
I was so grateful that I had made other films before this. When Paul died it was so overwhelming, and there was so much pressure not to drop the ball. It was also complicated, [how to] dramatize our relationship without making it schlocky or sensational. And how to grapple with that volume of material — it took experience to figure out how to do that. It pushed me to the limits of my ability and experience as a filmmaker, and, all the time, I felt so lucky that I didn’t try to do this at a different point in my career. I really felt like this is the synthesis of everything I’ve done, and that everything I’ve done prepared me to do this. And when he died, it became more similar to the types of films I’ve made. I’ve made a lot of portraits of people who are deceased.
Filmmaker: But never anyone who died during the making.
Wolf: No, and it’s really hard to find anybody who has. The film Goodbye Horses is one, but there aren’t many other examples I could find.
Filmmaker: Why you say the film became more similar to your others after Paul died?
Wolf: Just that it’s dealing with a found archive to bring somebody to life. But I created the archive, a 44-hour interview.
Filmmaker: How much did Paul’s passing reshape what you had already assembled?
Wolf: It obviously shifted the end of the film, but it didn’t radically shift how I wanted to tell the story. Paul didn’t tell me [he was sick] because he didn’t want his story to be told through the lens of mortality or legacy. And I didn’t want to make it about his death — I wanted to make it about his life. So, it didn’t change what I was doing, but the aspect of our relationship — the ethics and the responsibility around that — felt different because he was dead, and I couldn’t get his direct feedback how he felt about it. He did see 45 minutes of a rough cut, which I had shown him [earlier] to try to get the project back on track.
Filmmaker: Did he have input on the cut at that time, or on the material you included?
Wolf: No, but I was relieved he had seen the scene depicting him and his boyfriend and that he knew I was doing that because it’s the most intimate and, I think, revealing part of who Paul is. He was anxious that I, as a gay filmmaker, would overly focus on sexuality as the lens to understand his life. But I understood that relationship which precipitated him going back into the closet to be a fundamental part of who he was, and of some of the more poignant life choices he made to pursue his career. I can’t speak for him, but I think he was good with what he saw, and we ended on a really positive note. But then things kind of went off the rails again, and it was a lot of back and forth for a long time.
