Pee-wee doc director talks about navigating Paul Reubens power struggles

Of the various projects rolling out at the Sundance Film Festival right now, few are more intriguing to our aging Brains Of A Certain Generation than Matt Wolf’s new docuseries Pee-wee As Himself. As the title implies, the series—set to eventually debut on HBO—is built first and foremost from interviews with Pee-wee Herman creator Paul Reubens, many of them recorded not long before his death in July of 2023. (Reubens, who’d been diagnosed with cancer six years earlier, presumably had a sense that if he was going to tell his story, now was the time—although, pointedly, he never told Wolf he had cancer, or addressed his health in the series.) From reviews of the series, which premiered at the festival earlier this week, the documentary also doesn’t shy away from Reubens’ desire to keep control of his story and his privacy, something that produced conflicts with Wolf throughout filming.

The director addressed those conflicts (which sometimes included his subject outright refusing to participate in the two-part series) in a panel at Sundance this weekend. Per Deadline, Wolf said he understood Reubens’ antipathy toward the documentary process: “There was certainly a power struggle between Paul and I,” he said during the panel. “And the relationship was thrilling, and it could also be very contentious, but I empathized with Paul and I understood where he was coming from.” Referencing the public scandals that derailed Reubens’ mainstream reputation, and which are one of several aspects of his career covered in the series, Wolf noted, “He’s somebody who lost control of his personal narrative in the media. And of course, he would be suspicious of the documentary process or confounded that a filmmaker like myself would have final cut or the agency to tell his story.”

Among other things, Pee-wee As Himself serves as Reubens’ formal (and, of course, posthumous) decision to come out as gay in public. “I think he had decided that he wanted to come out in the documentary,” Wolf said during the panel, “And I wanted to help him do that. And I was proud of him for doing that on his own terms. We’re of different generations — I’m gay and I’ve made a lot of films about Queer history, and I empathize with and really respect generational differences around that. And it was at once a source of connection and tension between Paul and I, but I thought that he did a beautiful job coming out in the film.”

Wolf has also talked about his relationship with Reubens elsewhere this week, including an interview with Variety in which he discussed the difficulties of engendering trust with a notably private subject. “It was a process of trying to earn Paul’s trust, but at a certain point, I had to accept that Paul, by his own admission, was not necessarily a trusting person,” Wolf said. He also revealed that Reubens had seen 40 minutes of the finished product at the time of his death, and that, shortly after, they’d had a final phone conversation about the project:

I spoke to Paul about two weeks before he died. He gave me his blessing to proceed with the project. I could tell something was off or affecting his health, but I had no idea about the gravity. But we had a private and meaningful conversation in which I felt confident proceeding on the film, and he expressed that he felt confident that I would make the kind of film that we discussed. And then he died.