For any documentary that hinges on access in order to be produced, the collaboration between director and subject takes on a fraught and delicate dynamic, defined by continuous negotiation between creative intentions in conflict as often as they overlap. The documentarian prizes honesty above all else, even and especially when it’s unflattering to the parties on camera, while those with the ability to shut down the whole operation by rescinding their permissions might wield it in order to promote an agreeable image of themselves. If the talent calls the shots, you get point-and-shoot exercises in hagiographic brand management, and if the director lacks that diplomatic touch, the film doesn’t get made.
Very shortly after the film-maker Matt Wolf began work on Pee-wee as Himself, a three-and-a-half-hour portrait of the artist Paul Reubens airing on Friday night on HBO, he started to wonder if he had met his match in the “dream subject” he had pursued for years. Reubens finally agreed to participate in the project because his desire to set his own record straight dovetailed with Wolf’s cardinal rules of “nuance, complexity and integrity”, but the two nonetheless jockeyed for authorial control over a multiyear process. As their interview sessions stretched on and on to a total of 40 hours, the comedian famed for decentering himself behind his stage-and-screen persona Pee-wee Herman proved a formidable sparring partner in turns playful and distractible, sly and evasive, “taunting and rebelling and procrastinating and blowing off steam”, as Wolf remembers him.
