I’ve been speaking to Robbie Williams and he’s got 30,000 hours of unseen archive.” This tip-off, imparted to director Joe Pearlman by a former colleague during a catch-up meeting, immediately made the filmmaker “wake up”. Three decades’ worth of behind-the-scenes footage capturing life as one of the most famous people in Britain. It’d be an intriguing prospect for any director, not least one like Pearlman, who has spent the past few years chronicling the idiosyncrasies and inner lives of musicians, from the squabbling Goss twins in 2018’s Bros: After the Screaming Stops to Lewis Capaldi in How I’m Feeling Now, released earlier this year. “I traipsed out to go and see some of the archive and was immediately floored by the depth and breadth,” the director recalls. “It was obviously gigs and those kinds of things, but equally, you had him on holiday, behind the scenes, drug-taking and some of the abuse [he faced].”
That stack of footage, he says, “felt like an amazing opportunity”, so he “jumped at the chance to meet Rob” after he’d finished editing his Capaldi project. We’re speaking over Zoom shortly before the end result of their collaboration, a four-part series looking back across Williams’s life in often painful detail, arrives on Netflix. Pearlman is genial, easy company – it’s not hard to see how his subjects might open up or drop their guard in his presence. “I never go into the shows trying to make a film at you. I’m always trying to make it with you,” he says. “These people get to know a huge amount about me as well, whether they want to or not. I’m a talker, I’m a sharer, because this isn’t just a job … This is a huge amount of responsibility that’s placed on your lap.”
