Matt Wolf had spent about 40 hours interviewing Paul Reubens when the actor and artist passed suddenly. His final interview for what would become Pee-wee as Himself was scheduled for the following week. Wolf says it was immediately evident to him that Reubens’ death (he’d kept his battle with cancer hidden from Wolf and the documentary crew) would become integral to the story he was telling.
“I didn’t want to make Paul’s film into a tragedy, but there was an intense amount of joy and humor and deep sadness associated with his death and some of the disappointments he faced, which have sometimes overshadowed his accomplishments,” Wolf tells PAPER. “I wanted to make a film that had a big range of feelings and emotions, and Paul’s death was a part of that.”
Pee-wee as Himself, out now via HBO, is a documentary in two parts that braids together Reubens’ private life — much of it unknown to the public until now — with the creation of Reubens’ artistry. It’s a stunningly intimate portrait of a complex artist, with an incredible amount of archival footage dating back to Reubens’ childhood and college years. Wolf’s deft hand weaves his own “combative and thrilling” relationship with Reubens throughout the film as well.
Ahead of the documentary’s release, PAPER caught up with Wolf to discuss the push and pull of trust, Reubens’ meticulous archive and Wolf’s decision to include aspects of his own relationship with Reubens in the film.
You’ve been working on this a long time now. How are you feeling leading up to its wide release?
I feel good. I’m excited about it. I was nervous when it premiered at Sundance, but the response has been positive, and I’ve wrapped my head around the whole experience of making the film since then, so I’m just excited now for people to see it.
How long has it been since you started working on it?
Probably four years it took all together. I had started it in 2020, and a lot of time went into convincing Paul to do the documentary. Then there was a long period of production and preparation and a long gap before we were able to complete it. And then Paul passed away, and I went to work right away on editing.
What was your connection to Paul and Pee-wee before all this?
I had a connection to Pee-wee when I grew up. It was all about Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I could necessarily explain it at the time, but I think Pee-wee’s Playhouse was really my first encounter with art that I had an emotion and a visceral relationship to. Now I can look back as an adult and see Pee-wee as a world-builder, and the Playhouse as a space of radical acceptance where creativity thrived. Pee-wee became tangled up in my DNA as a constant touchstone for me.
People used to ask all the time, “Who would you make a documentary about if it could be about anyone?” And I would always say, “Paul Reubens.” I had reached out several times without success. Then finally I was connected with him. My first Zoom with Paul was not unlike the opening of the film. He said, “You know, I want to direct a film myself. Everybody’s advising me against it and I don’t know why.” And I said, “Well, I’m talk to you about directing a film.” And that started a very, very involved dialogue between us before Paul agreed to proceed with the project.
There’s a lot of tension in the film about what Paul wants out of it and what you want out of it. What was your goal with the documentary?
I wanted to make a complex portrait of a generation-defining artist. I often make films about unconventional visionaries who beg for reappraisal or whose careers were cut too short. Paul fit into that, except that, unlike my other subjects, he was virtually unknown. He was an incon and a cult figure but in many ways he was hidden in plain sight. Nobody knew anything about Paul Reubens. I wanted to unpack the constellation of inspirations that led to his best-known work and reconsider the artistry and the tragedy associated with his takedowns. And what Paul wanted was, in his own words, to set the record straight.
Paul told me from the onset that he wanted to come out in a documentary, but he was very ambivalent and anxious about me being a gay filmmaker, as a point of connection and a point of friction. I think he was concerned I might overly focus on his sexuality or try to depict him as a gay icon, which was not how he saw himself. It was a dance between us.
Was there anything in the process of putting the documentary together that really surprised you?
The intensity of my relationship with Paul. It shouldn’t have necessarily surprised me, but it was endlessly unexpected. Paul was both combative and thrilling. He was without a doubt the funniest and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he was also very vulnerable and sensitive. As time went on, I came to understand that Paul, by his own admission, was not a trusting person. I realized at some point that Paul might not trust me, and that that had to be okay, that we could still do this project and he could put himself out there in a vulnerable way without ever fully trusting me.
I got very close to Paul, and he shared quite a bit of his inner life with me. But as you know, there was a very significant thing he didn’t share, which was that he was battling cancer and facing mortality. So after Paul passed away, it was revelatory for me to read the 1500-page transcript from our 40-hour interview and to find meaning and significance in things I might not have understood before. It was a constant process of discovery and reassessing my own relationship to the work I do.
I did want to talk about that trust, because it’s such an intriguing part of the film. Do you feel like Paul did trust you, by the end?
I can’t speak for Paul — I’m pretty hypervigilant about that — but I do think that Paul didn’t have to allow the film to be finished after he passed, but he did so with a lot of clarity. He made it clear that he believed I would make the film we’d discussed, and I’m grateful for that. I think I did right by Paul and honored my word to him. I always told Paul that being simple was beneath him, that people expected that he, as an artist, would be complex, and that it’s okay to be complicated and embrace that complexity. I feel that Paul had some element in trust in letting me see him in his full complexity, both personally and on-camera.
How did Paul’s death change the project, or your conception of it?
It quickly became clear that his death — neither me nor the team knowing about it — had to be part of the story. This was a significant element of Paul, that there were things about him that were intensely private. His ability to compartmentalize played out in various ways through the choices he made, creatively, personally, professionally. So the surprise of his death had to be part of the story.
Of course, we weren’t able to finish the final interview with Paul, it was scheduled to be done the week after he passed away. Paul recorded something for the documentary the day before he died, unbeknownst to me. I felt it was necessary to use that, so Paul could finish saying what he had to say. I didn’t want to make Paul’s film into a tragedy, but there was an intense amount of joy and humor and deep sadness associated with his death and some of the disappointments he faced, which have sometimes overshadowed his accomplishments. I wanted to make a film that had a big range of feelings and emotions, and Paul’s death was a part of that.
I really appreciated that the film ends in his own words. There’s so much archival footage in the documentary; that early footage of Paul especially stuck with me. What was it like going through all that footage?
I was totally astonished by the scope and quality of material that Paul had saved, material nobody had ever seen, some of which he hadn’t seen. Paul had one of the first home camcorders and diligently filmed home movies for decades. He had tapes of every single appearance he ever made on television. It was extraordinary. It was thrilling to go through all that material. His material from his college years was particularly exciting to me — this pre-history of Pee-wee Herman. It’s so rare that someone from the 1970s particularly would be so well-documented, that this material would exist. It was a unique and special opportunity to work with that.
Some of my favorite material was photographs shot by Paul’s friends and high school Girlfriend. They really looked like shots from Warhol’s factory, but these were queer youth in Sarasota, Florida. I almost cried when I saw those images for the first time. The material was an embarrassment of riches. It was revelatory not only for us, but I think for Paul, to see some of it digitized and brought back to life.
I wanted to talk a bit more about Paul’s on-and-off unwillingness to talk in the film. How did you navigate that, as a filmmaker?
I knew Paul would want to go into granular detail about his childhood. You know, Paul talked for 30 minutes to the camera about his childhood bedroom. I expected this interview would be incredibly long, and on the first day when Paul was procrastinating, blowing steam, taunting me or making jokes, I was initially very frustrated. I was like, How will I ever keep him on track to do this? But I quickly realized that this was the portraiture of Paul in real-time, showing us aspects of who he was and how squeamish he was to be participating in the interview process, and it was also how he warmed up to become himself.
We also talked for a while about incorporating our own relationship. We had a two-way dialogue about how strange our relationship was and the tension within it. It was cathartic for him to say those things in front of the camera and in front of the crew. When he was being resistant, we would return to that, talk in a meta way about the filmmaking process or our relationship.
When Paul died, I was reticent to use that material. I thought, Nobody wants to know about a filmmaker, they want to know about Paul. But I came to understand that the rule I made about not including myself in the film was not serving my goal of creating a three-dimensional portrait of Paul. The way he engaged with me was a reflection of how he dealt with issues around control and being known. So I incorporated it, and it’s something people strongly connected to. To me, it’s just a small little thread in the film, but I’m seeing that people see it as a unique aspect of the film.
I see three main parts of the film: the making of Paul, the making of Pee-wee as a character, and the making of the Pee-wee shows and movies. How did you balance the portrait of Paul with those other big aspects?
It’s a braid. I think about films as having threads, and I’m threading the needle across the full canvas as a film. A very long film like this needs to ebb and flow. You follow the trajectory of Paul and then have these interludes in which Paul grapples with the premise of the documentary and his issues about control. My goal is to weave that into something that’s at once seamless and also a hand-off between those different dimensions. Ultimately, what I was asking Paul to do was integrate different parts of himself that may not have been understood together.
Photos courtesy of HBO, Getty