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00:00 Well, it's interesting, we were locking pictures last year, like in June, and we're editing
00:05 the last details of Michael Hart in this garage in Martha's Vineyard.
00:09 And my daughter comes in, she's in college at the time, and she goes, "You know that
00:13 shot of Michael J. Fox where he's just looking right into the lens and doing nothing?
00:19 And he has this kind of like peaceful look?"
00:23 And she, my daughter, works with people with disabilities.
00:26 She goes, "I think that's the most moving thing that I've ever seen."
00:30 He goes, "Put that at the end.
00:33 Just like the movie's over, just end with that."
00:35 And the shot is in itself like him being finally, after all this, you'll see in the movie,
00:41 it's like it's up and down and it's a wild ride, but he's still finally.
00:47 And to me it was like, "Oh, that's our title."
00:48 Wait a minute, I'm sorry, my script just went to pieces.
01:02 Where is it?
01:03 It's his first day as a kindergarten mom, he doesn't want to be late, but this could
01:07 affect his entire life.
01:08 Mal's right, after all, this is my alma mater, I am a legend there.
01:17 And they laughed, and I just went, it was just like a wash of like, "Wow."
01:25 I got one too.
01:32 There's no drink, there's no drug, there's no woman, there's no nothing that could touch
01:35 that moment for me as a 22-year-old guy who'd been fighting for three years to make it.
01:41 Ah, good, good, good, good.
01:46 The laughter, you can't help it.
01:49 I just found something, a way to communicate with you that you didn't expect, you have
01:54 no answer for it except to make a noise.
01:56 "Kidding me?"
01:57 You just have to let air out.
02:05 It's really honest.
02:09 Welcome to Behind the Lens.
02:10 Today, you all know his work, it won him an Oscar in 2007 for An Inconvenient Truth, and
02:18 several documentaries on and on.
02:21 It might get loud, Waiting for Superman, he named me Malala, I could go on short films,
02:29 and a whole career doing episodic television, which I didn't realize that you had really
02:34 started that way.
02:35 And now, his latest film, which is called Still, a Michael J. Fox movie, is nominated
02:40 for seven Emmy Awards, two of those nominations belonging to Davis Guggenheim.
02:46 Welcome.
02:47 It's really fun to be here.
02:49 Yeah, congratulations.
02:50 I mean, this is the most nominated of the documentaries this year.
02:54 It's kind of wonderful.
02:55 I was back east and someone called me, I was like, "Oh, is that good?"
02:59 And they were like, "Yeah, it's good."
03:01 That's really good.
03:04 It's such an interesting movie in so many ways, in dealing with Michael J. Fox, taking
03:12 the footage from his movies, weaving it in and out, recreations, all those things I want
03:16 to talk about here.
03:18 But how did you...
03:19 I look at all your work and I just mentioned some of it here, and it's a lot of serious
03:23 subjects and a lot of different kinds of things.
03:26 When the idea of Michael J. Fox came to you, what do you think?
03:29 I was in a rut.
03:31 I was in a dry spell as a director.
03:33 It had been a couple of years since I'd found the next thing.
03:36 And if I look back, it sometimes takes three or four years to find the movie that I love.
03:42 And it was to a point where I put these cards on a board, or I pinned these cards, saying,
03:49 "How would I describe...
03:50 I can't find a movie.
03:51 What are the adjectives?"
03:55 And they were...
03:56 Because I felt like I was making the same movie over and over again.
04:00 And the movie...
04:01 Hardly.
04:02 Well, it's interesting, when you get older, you kind of rely on some of the same techniques.
04:07 So in my mind, it was like, "Come on, Davis."
04:12 So my cards were adventurous, wild, form-breaking, funny, and the last one was no famous people.
04:23 So I hit all those cards.
04:25 And I think if you see the movie, you'll see we really tried to push the form, to change
04:31 what you think a documentary is, and actually make people laugh.
04:35 But the famous person really tripped me.
04:38 I read his books, and I thought it was a really good idea, and I was like, "Well, who could
04:43 I get to direct this?"
04:44 And after a while, I was like, "Wait a minute.
04:46 No, I can't give this away.
04:48 It's so good."
04:49 That's funny.
04:50 I didn't actually think, "Okay, it was gonna go deep enough."
04:54 Even the superficial instinct was, "Oh, it's a celebrity.
04:59 It can't go deep."
05:01 And little did I know that Michael J. Fox could go as deep as I could ever have imagined.
05:08 That's what's so great about it, too.
05:10 And I love the title.
05:11 I wasn't sure of the title when I saw the movie.
05:13 I was telling you before, I saw it before it went to festivals, before anything.
05:18 They showed it to me, Apple did.
05:21 And I'd go, "Okay," and then I actually reviewed it, and I'm going, "Still a Michael J. Fox
05:26 movie."
05:27 Or, "Still this."
05:28 And I'm going, "What's this movie called?"
05:30 But all of that worked so well in the title.
05:32 I didn't love the title.
05:34 I remember we were locking picture last year, and I like a kind of clever title that has
05:40 a little hook.
05:41 Like, "What is Waiting for Superman?
05:42 What is Incoming Truth?"
05:44 Even if they're complicated, they make you wonder.
05:47 And "Still" has sort of a quiet, passive thing.
05:51 It doesn't kind of say, "Wow, this is going to be fun."
05:55 "Still" is kind of a quiet word.
05:57 But it turned out to be resonance.
06:00 Like, there's a, "He is never, Michael is never still."
06:03 That's what I was going to say.
06:04 It's the opposite of "Still," really, when you're looking at Michael J. Fox and everything
06:09 he's doing in his life with his foundation and still acting and still doing this and
06:15 dealing with Parkinson's so publicly.
06:19 He is obviously the center of this in so many ways, but also as an interview subject.
06:23 And what was that like to have him do that?
06:27 Because you had all the books, like you say, and the audio books and things where he's
06:30 sort of narrating his own life.
06:32 But here, he's talking in the camera, and you've got very visibly somebody with Parkinson's
06:39 that you're talking to.
06:40 So, my first plan was to do no interviews.
06:42 Like, there are no other interviews in the movie, and I wasn't going to interview him.
06:46 And my teacher, you mentioned television.
06:48 I worked a lot with David Milt.
06:50 She was sort of my mentor and teacher.
06:51 And he always said, "The best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans."
06:57 My plan was no interviews.
07:00 But I was shooting this commercial, and this cinematographer, Claire Popkin, who did "Free
07:08 Willow," that great movie, did this one shot that I'd never, in all these years, in 30
07:13 years of directing, I'd never seen this one shot which makes it look like the subject
07:16 is looking right into the lens, even though you're like this.
07:19 But you have to be super close.
07:20 And I go, "This could be really interesting.
07:22 Let me try it.
07:23 Let me just go to Michael J. Fox's apartment building where he has an office downstairs.
07:28 Let me just try it once."
07:30 And I went and shot, did a three-hour interview, and I brought it back, and Michael Hart, the
07:34 editor, and I was like, "Oh, my gosh.
07:37 This is incredible."
07:39 We didn't know, because of his Parkinson's, whether you could understand him, whether
07:44 he could tell his own story.
07:47 And he was so good.
07:48 I mean, you see it in the movie.
07:51 He's just that same guy with that twinkle in his eye.
07:54 Whether it would be so distracting, it would take away from what you're trying to do there,
07:58 which it didn't.
07:59 I mean, at first, you're going, "Okay."
08:02 And you accept it right away.
08:04 And then it's just part of this movie that works.
08:08 Sometimes his hand is banging on the table.
08:10 Sometimes he's like, "We gotta stop.
08:11 I'm getting tired."
08:12 Sometimes, you know, you could feel his...
08:16 There's a Parkinsonian mask that he talks about where his face could have frozen.
08:23 But being with him and seeing his spark, you forgive it all.
08:28 And in telling his story visually, I just thought this was the most brilliant idea,
08:35 to take all those movies that we've all seen, take footage from that, and make that almost
08:41 like documentary footage.
08:43 Cut it in with recreations and other stuff.
08:48 It was really...
08:49 It really works.
08:50 Thank you.
08:51 Thank you.
08:52 People have done it a little bit before.
08:55 Brett Morgan did it in Kids' Days in the Picture, in one sequence where he shows Bob's films,
09:02 and they sort of indirectly connect to Bob's biography.
09:07 And then Ethan Hawke did it this year with Paul Newman in some of Paul's movies, and
09:13 they do it in a gentle way.
09:15 But to Michael Hart's credit, the editor, who's this brilliant editor, he did Don't
09:20 Fuck with Cats.
09:21 He did Three Identical Strangers.
09:22 He's great.
09:23 And also nominated for an Emmy.
09:25 Nominated for this.
09:26 And he started to show me things that I couldn't have imagined.
09:29 Like when Michael J. Fox gets a script for Back to the Future.
09:35 Yeah.
09:36 That's brilliant.
09:37 And it's amazing, because we didn't have footage of him getting that script from Gary D. Goebel.
09:44 And my instinct always was to storyboard those scenes.
09:48 So the reenactments would be shot at the end, and I would storyboard them, and we'd cut
09:52 them in, and we'd finish the film with storyboards.
09:54 And a big portion of the film was done that way.
09:57 But Michael would come in in the morning, and he'd be in London editing, and I'd see
10:02 this footage.
10:03 And it's Secret of My Success.
10:06 And Michael J. Fox comes in, and you hear Gary David Goldberg off camera, and Michael
10:11 J. Fox is talking.
10:12 And you believe it.
10:13 But it's Secret of My Success.
10:14 The movie.
10:15 Yes, yes.
10:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:17 And the gift of it is that Michael was about that age when that happened, when he shot
10:21 that movie.
10:22 And you're like, "I'm not sure, but you really feel like it's him."
10:23 And the audience is like, "Fine."
10:26 And there was a moment when we were editing it, going, "Well, people go for this."
10:30 And we do it a lot.
10:31 Like, there's a date with Michael and Tracy Pollan, and they kiss for the first time.
10:39 And it plays like their first date.
10:43 And those are things I never...
10:47 My directive for the movie was be wild, be adventurous.
10:50 But I didn't know that we could do what we did.
10:54 And that's tribute to Michael Hart.
10:56 And what you did in that sequence where he starts to get back to the future, but he's
11:00 shooting Family Ties, a sitcom, and he had to get the permission of Gary David Goldberg
11:05 and all that, and they had to move the schedules around, and he was exhausted, all night shooting.
11:10 And then back on the set of the sitcom, he's shot almost like that movie.
11:15 It's manic, it's crazy.
11:17 It's like...
11:18 And it's the ultimate expression of what we learned, which is that, "Oh, you don't have
11:24 to be all reenactment or all using archival."
11:29 We just said, "Let's toss this salad."
11:31 And put all these different pieces together.
11:35 And so when you watch that, it's reenactment shots, it's shots from Family Ties, it's shots
11:40 from Back to the Future, it's shots from behind the scenes, and it's shots from other movies.
11:46 And because I think it's an actor, and it's a Hollywood story, you don't care.
11:52 You go for it.
11:53 And it feels...
11:54 And it's a wild ride.
11:56 It really is.
11:57 It really is.
11:58 And it just shows...
11:59 Movies, we see movies and we know them so well from movies that we accept that.
12:02 I think that's why we accept it.
12:04 Right.
12:05 If it was maybe a historical figure...
12:07 Yeah, be harder.
12:08 You'd be like, "Lyndon Johnson didn't..."
12:11 Whatever, I don't know.
12:13 Then that goes too much into the recreation thing for me.
12:17 You balanced it perfectly in this.
12:19 How did Michael like the finished product?
12:21 He loved it.
12:22 Yeah.
12:23 He loved it.
12:24 I mean, when you make a documentary, there's this...
12:26 I mean, I'm starting to think about my next documentary, and there's this dance between
12:30 you and the person you make the story about.
12:33 It's sort of a...
12:34 You start to date seriously, and you start to see what does this other person want?
12:40 How do you trust each other?
12:42 You give them faith?
12:43 You give them love?
12:44 All that kind of stuff.
12:45 And you never know.
12:48 And especially with people whose reputations are pretty big and who want their reputations
12:55 to be the way they want it to be.
12:56 They want to be known.
12:58 And for someone like Michael J. Fox, this is gonna be his legacy.
13:02 Yeah.
13:03 You don't know what they're gonna do.
13:05 And Michael was from the very beginning.
13:08 He's like...
13:09 I had a Zoom with him that first time, and he's like, "I'm in."
13:14 And he was open and wonderful.
13:16 And I asked him everything.
13:17 I pushed him really hard in many areas, and he was an open book.
13:21 And you don't always get that when you're making a documentary.
13:24 There are things that are kind of off.
13:27 They're not allowed, or I won't talk about it, or I'll pretend I'm talking about it,
13:32 but I'm not.
13:33 Yeah.
13:34 No, he was totally open.
13:35 I mean, you're dealing with a guy who fell into some bad times, personally and everything.
13:42 He's such an inspiration that you walk away from this movie and see that.
13:48 Well, yeah, there's these scenes when you see him in "Family Ties."
13:53 There's these scenes where he's Back to the Future and Teen Wolf are number one and number
14:00 two.
14:01 And we know what that was like, but there's nothing like that back in the '80s, right?
14:07 The two number one films of the year.
14:09 That kind of mega celebrity is crazy, but he's still doing "Family Ties."
14:14 And there's this footage of him sort of talking to Gary David Goldberg in a kind of intense,
14:22 jerky way.
14:23 And I show that to Michael, and he goes, "God, I was a jerk."
14:28 Thank you for finding...
14:29 A lot of people would say, "God, I'm a jerk.
14:31 Please don't use that."
14:32 But he was like, "God, I was a jerk."
14:34 That's incredible.
14:35 Oh, that's so funny.
14:36 Because he's taken that ride, man.
14:37 He's found himself.
14:38 He did.
14:39 He's amazing.
14:40 I used to work at Paramount Studios on "Entertainment Tonight" and Arsenio, and I'd go to the commissary.
14:45 I'd see him all the time.
14:47 That guy just running through so short and with that hair, the mop, and just going up
14:54 like everybody else in the cafeteria.
14:56 No pretense at all about him.
14:59 But yeah, it's so well done.
15:04 So you said, "What are you going to do next?"
15:05 What are you going to do next?
15:06 You don't know?
15:07 I'm looking.
15:08 Yeah, you're back to that mode.
15:09 That's how you work.
15:10 You just go, "What's going to inspire me for two years, three years to be on the planet?"
15:14 I'm turned 60 in November, and you think, "Well, how many do I have left?
15:18 Maybe I have one, maybe I have two, maybe I have three."
15:22 And so those decisions become more loaded, and you realize it's like when you're dating
15:30 and you're young, you're like, "Oh, this sounds great."
15:32 But now you meet someone and you're like, "Ugh."
15:35 You start thinking through all the ways it could go wrong.
15:39 You look at something, there's a high bar that you have set for yourself.
15:43 So you look at something like "Inconvenient Truth," which you did obviously with the vice
15:47 president Al Gore, and it was a life-changing movie for many people, and for the world,
15:56 actually, to see that played out now in particular.
16:00 What we're going through that movie was prescient.
16:02 I wish it was dated and not relevant.
16:07 Not for my career, but for the planet.
16:09 Yeah, but all those things in it are coming true outside as we walk out to our cars.
16:15 This is by far the hottest summer we will ever have on this planet.
16:20 It's kind of stunning.
16:22 I wish it was old news, but it's unfortunately as relevant as ever.
16:27 And "Waiting for Superman," about the educational system.
16:32 And you took some slack.
16:35 People really took shots at you on that.
16:37 I never understood that.
16:38 But what you were doing was something really good about education now.
16:44 It's tough, particularly in this town, to not take the most liberal stance.
16:49 I'm a card-carrying Democrat.
16:52 I'm a very liberal guy, politically.
16:55 But I criticized the teachers' unions, which is almost like a third rail.
17:00 Don't do that.
17:01 But I felt compelled to do it.
17:04 And I loved that movie.
17:08 That was a really hard one, a hard puzzle to solve.
17:11 That was really good.
17:12 We were talking to you about that in a restaurant in Venice one time, when that was coming out.
17:16 And one thing, when I was looking at your filmography and things, there's so many shorts
17:22 done for the conventions, for Obama, for Biden, all of that.
17:27 You do all those kind of films they show at the conventions and on ads and things.
17:32 Two for Obama for 2008, 2012.
17:35 One for Obama when Hillary was nominated as a retrospective, and one for Biden.
17:40 And then a lot of films for Biden, short films.
17:43 My father made documentaries.
17:44 Charles Guggenheim, of course, is a legend.
17:45 I think he only went to win four Oscars.
17:50 Four Oscars.
17:52 And he did a lot of political work.
17:54 And I grew up watching him do that.
17:56 And I have behind in my sweater drawer, I hide them, his Oscar for a film he made on
18:07 Robert Kennedy called Robert Kennedy, remember?
18:09 I know that film well.
18:10 From 1960, I'm sorry, from 1968.
18:13 And then, I think it was 2008.
18:15 I'm sorry, Obama was running in 2008, so it's exactly 40 years later.
18:20 Wow.
18:21 And so I made the convention film for Obama, and my father made films, sorry, that '68
18:27 film played at the '68 convention after Robert Kennedy had been assassinated.
18:33 So the parallels there were great.
18:35 And so when I do those films, I feel very connected to my father and his work.
18:40 It's an homage in a lot of ways.
18:43 My father taught me everything.
18:45 Is that why you became a documentarian?
18:47 I mean, it's a family business, obviously, but...
18:50 When I was driving my Volkswagen Jetta from Washington, DC to LA in 1987, I was like,
19:01 I don't know what I'm going to do, but whatever I'm going to do, I'm never making documentaries.
19:04 Ever.
19:05 Really?
19:06 Yeah.
19:07 I was like, my father was like...
19:08 He was at the top, yeah.
19:11 He was...
19:12 It's interesting to think about it, because he wasn't a famous guy.
19:16 He rode his bike to work.
19:19 No one would recognize him, but he made great film after great film.
19:22 And I just felt like, I could never be like him.
19:24 And so I was a television director for a long time, made some films.
19:27 And then I got fired off the movie Training Day.
19:30 Really?
19:31 Yeah.
19:32 And I was going to direct it at Warner Brothers, and then Denzel Washington fired me.
19:36 And I was like, screw this.
19:39 I was so mad that I was like...
19:41 I never met Denzel.
19:43 I still haven't met him.
19:45 It was Antoine...
19:46 So yeah, we...
19:47 Duqua.
19:48 I fought for Denzel.
19:52 We offered it to him.
19:53 And the next three days later, he fired me.
19:55 He wanted his...
19:56 He wanted Antoine to direct it.
19:57 Anyway, so that sent me into documentaries.
19:59 I was like, screw this.
20:01 Screw Hollywood.
20:02 Screw Warner Brothers.
20:03 I'm going to go make a film about teachers.
20:04 And that was my first.
20:05 That wasn't Waiting for Superman.
20:06 It was my very first film.
20:08 Wow.
20:09 That's amazing.
20:10 You mentioned you did all this episodic.
20:11 I mean, the really impressive shows that you did.
20:13 I was just curious.
20:14 It looked like you were going in a whole different direction.
20:17 Melrose Place, Deadwood, ER, NYPD, Blue, 24, all these big shows.
20:23 It was...
20:24 Yeah.
20:25 I would say I was pretty good at television directing.
20:29 There are people who are the David Nutters, the Brad Silberlings.
20:33 They were the greats.
20:35 And Greg Hoblet.
20:38 It was going in those...
20:41 You go into NYPD, Blue.
20:46 You go into ER.
20:47 You go into...
20:48 I did Alias.
20:49 You're just like, these are incredible, incredible dream factories.
20:57 Each one of them.
20:58 And I was pretty good.
20:59 But I learned...
21:00 It was like meatball surgery.
21:02 I just learned all this technique, which if I had just gone to documentaries, I would
21:07 never have learned.
21:09 So the kind of things that I did for this movie, still, all that recreations, all those
21:15 shots.
21:16 I have a lot of those things that I learned having done all those different TV shows,
21:22 which each had different cameras, different styles, different languages.
21:27 So it was like a 10-year graduate school, directing all those different things.
21:31 That's amazing, too.
21:32 And you have to go into all those different kind of shows and adapt to whatever template
21:36 they've set for that show, I guess.
21:38 ER was all SteadyCam wide lens.
21:41 And NYPD, Blue was all on a DALI long lens.
21:45 And on and on and on.
21:46 And the writing styles of David Milch is different from John Wells, which is different from J.J.
21:51 Abrams.
21:52 So you kind of...
21:53 And in some, I completely screwed up.
21:55 Like I did one episode of ER and it didn't go well.
21:58 Like I just, for some reason, we didn't fit.
22:02 And so then you go to the next one and you learn.
22:04 So it was seminal for me.
22:06 So what happens when you screw it up?
22:08 Does John Wells come in and just take over?
22:10 He was very nice.
22:11 No, no.
22:12 I delivered a show.
22:13 It was fine.
22:14 But it clearly wasn't...
22:17 You go in and it's like, they have a way of...
22:20 The other thing about television is like the writer, as it should be, the writer is king.
22:26 So David Milch, and I learned the most, I would say, from David Milch.
22:29 We did NYPD Blue and I loved that.
22:33 And I was a producer director on the first season of Deadwood.
22:36 And he and I were tight.
22:37 And he taught me everything about character and tone, really.
22:43 How is it, before we wrap, how is it working with streamers now?
22:46 I mean, this movie, you can see on Apple, and it was made for Apple and all of that.
22:53 To me, it felt like it could be very much a theatrical film.
22:57 We could be talking about Oscar nominations instead of Emmy nominations even right now.
23:01 It could have gone that direction.
23:04 I'm just wondering what the attraction here is, the streamer thing for you.
23:09 Well, the first thing is as a creative, if you don't adapt, you're going to die.
23:14 And I looked for the next opportunity, and the next opportunity to tell my story really
23:18 well.
23:19 And when I pitched this idea, I was like, I want to take you on a wild ride.
23:23 I want to go big.
23:24 I want to have a big score.
23:25 I want a Hollywood score.
23:28 John Powell never did a documentary.
23:30 He had a Dragon and Born Identity.
23:32 I like soundtracks.
23:33 I have John Powell on two shelves of my soundtrack collection.
23:37 That guy was prolific, amazing.
23:39 And I called him and I was like, so anyway, I pitched a big wild ride.
23:43 And Apple didn't flinch.
23:45 So there you go.
23:47 And it was a great experience.
23:49 We're going to have our premiere.
23:52 The one thing that I regret is we're going to have our premiere at the Universal backlot
23:59 under the clock tower where they shot Back to the Future.
24:02 And it was the Tuesday before the writer's check was announced.
24:09 And Michael J. Fox just said, I can't walk onto a studio lot for a strike.
24:16 Testimony to him.
24:17 And it was good and right.
24:19 But it meant we didn't have our premiere.
24:22 But that's not a streamer issue.
24:23 That's just unfortunate from the strike.
24:25 But we didn't have that moment where the film could be seen in our crowd on a big screen.
24:32 But they're doing a lot of great stuff on Apple.
24:37 I've seen a lot of really big movies and Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese.
24:41 It's great.
24:42 They have a very high bar.
24:44 My company has a deal with them.
24:45 They have a very high bar.
24:47 But when you work with them, they're all in.
24:49 And they want, they're like, we're picking you.
24:53 Go do something great.
24:54 And that's what as a creator, as a creative person, that's what you want.
25:01 Still still a Michael J. Fox film.
25:04 Anything you want to call it is on Apple, nominated for seven Emmys.
25:08 Thank you so much, Davis.
25:09 Thank you very much.
25:10 This is really fun.
25:11 Thank you.
25:16 [MUSIC]