'Pee-wee as Himself' director reveals what happened after Paul Reubens backed out of documentar

Yahoo

25-05-2025

The two-part HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself (on Crave in Canada), directed by Matt Wolf, is an incredibly fascinating exploration of the life of Paul Reubens, who created the infamous character Pee-wee Herman, and died in 2023. But part of the alluring aspect of the documentary is questioning how much Reubens will actually open up to Wolf.
As Reubens states in Pee-wee as Himself, he wanted to make his own film about himself. "Turns out that you're not really supposed to direct your own documentary," he says. While identifying that the belief is that you don't have "perspective" on your own self.
In the interviews with Wolf, you get the sense that Reubens is never actually sure that he wants anyone telling his story for him, creating a complex dynamic between Wolf and his documentary subject.
"My first meeting with Paul, it was clear that there could be a power struggle with this subject, because Paul said when I met him, 'I want to direct a documentary about myself, but everybody's advising me against it, and I don't understand, why,'" Wolf shared with reporters ahead of the documentary's premiere. "It was a lot of talking and processing to get Paul to sit into that interview chair."
"When Paul sat down he was very rebellious and slippery. He wouldn't follow my lead with any questions. He wanted snacks, pretzels, lollipops. He would make funny facial expressions and it was a competitive dynamic. I remember before the shoot I said, ... 'Typically when we do these interviews, people sort of get tired around five hours.' And he said, 'I'm not going to get tired, you're going to get tired.' ... So it was kind of like game on from the beginning. But he was sort of rebelling, procrastinating, giving me a hard time."
At one point Wolf actually said to producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff, "I don't know if this is going to work."
"It occurred to me then that this is who Paul is, this is portraiture. We're seeing in real time him, in theory, rebelling against me, but he's really kind of grappling within himself about how much he's willing to share," Wolf said.
Pee-wee As Himself is quite a comprehensive journey through Reubens life, from his upbringing and connection to the circus, to avant-garde performance theatre, joining the Groundlings and the development of Pee-wee Herman.
"Paul had just an extraordinary recall for details from his childhood. Like the colour of the wallpaper in his childhood bedroom, he could talk about that for like an hour," Wolf said.
Reubens also had an impressive archive that he kept throughout his life, from things he filmed himself to significant artifacts from moments in his life.
"He saved most of these tapes ... in a temperature controlled bedroom, and he had recordings of almost every public appearance and media appearance he ever did," Wolf said.
"I think some of the most revelatory material is the Super 8 that Paul shot from the 1970s. The Groundlings was hardly documented. He has some of the only stuff we were able to find, and boy did we search. And his early relationship with his boyfriend Guy, beautifully rendered on Super 8, and that's all shot by Paul. So to my knowledge, there was no material that was off limits."
Wolf identified that the most powerful connection he had with Reubens was when they spoke about him coming out and the discussion about his early relationship, and the decision that followed to go back in the closet.
"My career absolutely would have suffered if I was openly gay," Reubens says in the documentary.
"That was, I would say, the most powerful connection I ever felt to a subject," Wolf said. "Paul went into this process wanting to come out. That was a decision he had made. He was aware that I was a gay filmmaker. ... I wanted, as a younger person, to support him in that process, but he also was intensely sensitive that the film would overly emphasize that, or focus entirely from the lens of sexuality when looking at his story."
"I do think that the level to which Paul discusses his, I wouldn't say sexuality, but his relationships and intimacy and vulnerability, and the poignant decision he made to go back into the closet, I do have to believe to some extent he shared that because of our connection."
Nearing the end of the second part of the documentary, Reubens and those who were close to him talk about his arrest on charges of child pornography, connected to his collection of vintage gay erotica. The charges were later dropped.
But then we find out that after a year Reubens stopped cooperating and never completed the final interview about his arrest.
"I had been promised final cut and Paul was given meaningful consultation," Wolf explained. "It's a dance that we do to figure out how to include somebody, both for fact-checking and to take the temperature of how they feel about the representation of their story, and Paul and I were at odds about that."
"I wanted to do for Paul what I said I would do, which is to create a nuanced and complicated portrait of an artist, and to reappraise the significance of his work so that people would stop looking at his arrests as the first point of entry into Paul Reubens. But I didn't feel that I could accomplish that with the level of control that Paul wanted. And we were going back and forth trying to make an agreement on very specific terms as to how involved he would be in post-production. I held the line on that and that went on for over a year, and I was prepared to move on, go on to different projects, and then suddenly we heard that Paul was ready to finish his interview, to sign his release, and that it needed to happen within two weeks."
When Wolf spoke to Reubens to discuss how the final interview would go, the filmmaker could tell that something was "off."
"A week later, I'm en route to Los Angeles to proceed with filming this final interview and I got a text from my executive at HBO with a post from Instagram saying, 'Is this real?' And it was a post that announced that Paul Reubens had passed away. And I was just in total shock," Wolf said. "And then I got a call from Kelly Bush Novak who was Paul's publicist, but also a very close friend, and she was like, 'I tried to get to you before the news broke, I couldn't, but Paul recorded something for you, for the documentary. And he had things to say, but he ran out of time.'"
"I went into Kelly's office and she played the audio for me and it was devastating. But he wanted it to be said, what he had to say in the documentary, and I had to figure out a way to use that not in a sensational manner."
As we hear Reubens say in a voiceover in the documentary, he wanted to show people who is really is, and how "painful" it was to be labelled a pedophile.
"I wanted to talk about what it's like and have some understanding of what it's like to be labeled a pariah, to have people scared of you, or unsure of you, or untrusting, or to look at what your intentions are through some kind of filter that's not true," we hear Reubens say. "I wanted people to understand that occasionally, where there is smoke there isn't always fire."
"I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love and my desire to entertain, and bring glee and creativity to young people, and to everyone."
With 40 hours of interview footage, Wolf identified how unique the process of creating Pee-wee as Himself was as a filmmaker.
"It was thrilling to go this deep. I've never been able, or I don't know if I ever will go this deep with another human being," Wolf said. "I revered Paul as an artist and had come to know him in complex ways as himself. And it was ... thrilling to be able to excavate this much material from him and really to collaborate."
"I think people often overlook the sense that documentary filmmakers, unlike journalists, have a much more collaborative relationship with our subjects. We need lots of things from them, we have to invade their home with our cameras, and to gather all of their archive and scan it."
The filmmaker said that the "intensity" of the project changed him, specifically has made him feel more confident.
"It made me confident that I can rise to the occasion under really extraordinary circumstances," he said. "I came to understand how scary I am as a documentary filmmaker approaching a subject."
"Obviously, the power dynamics I had with Paul were unique. He's a celebrity. He [was] a different generation. We also had a lot of stuff in common. But through his eyes and how extreme he felt in this process, I understood better how it feels, not just for him, but for anybody I approach to be the subject of a documentary."