Matt Wolf

EO

Before NYU film school, what was already in motion? You were curious and very active as a teen: activism, storytelling, and documentary were all essential to your becoming. How did it all eventually lead you to New York?

MW

I had a pretty unusual experience as a teenager in that I was this sort of public gay teen activist. At the same time, I got really into going to the independent movie theater and immersing myself in what is now called New Queer Cinema, the heyday of queer independent film that was mostly coming out of New York then. I was also very into music, and I think I learned about art primarily at the record store, by looking at album covers. I was into punk and a lot of British music, and I learned that there was an alternative version of gay culture that revolved around artists, much of which originated in New York. The city was a place where those kinds of communities percolated.

Between the record store, weekly visits to the art-house movie theater, Blockbuster, the public library, and early internet communities, I developed a vision for what my life could become that was very different from my peers. I was making personal websites and connecting with people who would later become established artists. My generation—what people now call Xennials—had the benefit of discovering alternative culture through both the emerging internet and analog institutions like record stores and cinemas. I very much feel like a product of that technological transition.

EO

But you weren’t just involved in activism. You became a public figure within it at a very young age. What did that attention do to your relationship with activism?

MW

I was a gay teen activist around the time Matthew Shepard was murdered and Ellen DeGeneres came out. Being a gay teenager became one of the defining public conversations of that moment, much in the way that trans youth have unfortunately become the focus of political debates today. Gay youth became something people wanted to discuss, and by the time I graduated from high school I had already received a fair amount of media attention. I won a scholarship from Parade magazine, they flew me to New York, I had a shopping spree at Nike, and Ananda Lewis—rest in peace—presented me with an award. There were also two short documentaries made about me.

I felt very alienated by all of that. I was working alongside other teen activists from communities throughout the Bay Area, many of whom were people of color or came from backgrounds that were less privileged than mine. I was this articulate white gay teenager who was easier for the media to package, and not surprisingly, I became the person who received attention. The other activists I was working with were critical of that in a way that was actually really helpful for me. We were thinking intersectionally about social justice before that language was widely used, and I became increasingly skeptical of the attention I was receiving.

EO

Was that when filmmaking started to feel like another way forward?

MW

For a while, I thought I’d grow up to work in nonprofits and remain involved in gay activism. This was before gay marriage became the central focus of that movement. But I think receiving that attention and being singled out ultimately made me want to move away from activism and focus on filmmaking instead. I applied early to NYU’s film school, received a scholarship, and went there. I’d been fantasizing about moving to New York since I was a kid. I used to ask my mom how people managed to get a couch up the stairs in New York apartment buildings. I was completely fixated on the city, and once I became interested in film, I realized that so many of the filmmakers I admired had come from New York.

Before I left for NYU, I wrote a kind of manifesto about what I wanted to do with my life and how filmmaking related to the activism I was involved with. It was a little over the top, but this was the beginning of a ritual I still do. I write a letter to myself every New Year’s Eve and reread every letter from previous years before drafting the next one. I started when I was eighteen with the manifesto, and now I’m forty-four, so I’ve been doing it for more than half my life.

EO

Are they long?

MW

They’re usually two or three pages, and vary in terms of content, depending when they were written. Reading them all together becomes a kind of time capsule that allows me to watch myself growing up in real time. I always begin with that manifesto I wrote when I was eighteen, and it really does reflect what I ended up doing with my life.

EO

So what happens when you get to NYU?

MW

I went into NYU with a lot of skepticism. I had a sense that the kind of independent filmmaking I was drawn to was already coming to an end. The landscape was changing. I also didn’t like NYU very much. Most of the students were obsessed with Fight Club. Everybody was straight, the boys grabbed the camera from the girls, and the whole environment just didn’t align with what I wanted to do. So I began developing my own education.

EO

When do you actually walk into New York?

MW

2000.

EO

What did you walk into?

MW

I can describe the first week I arrived in New York. I went to the Knitting Factory alone and saw a show where Thurston Moore was in the audience. Later that week, I went to a night called Queercore at CBGB, where Rufus Wainwright was performing. I looked around at all the gay people and thought, “How will I ever meet these people? I’m so lonely.” Shortly after that, I joined an old school video activist collective called Paper Tiger Television. When I was a teenager, I had started making my own videos, and had been invited to the Walker Art Center to participate in a conference about youth media. That’s where I met the artist Tara Mateik, and he invited me to join Paper Tiger.

I should also say that, in high school, I had an internship on a documentary about Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society—the first gay rights organization. During my activism, we would often have meetings at a queer youth center in San Francisco called LYRIC, and one day I saw a flyer looking for interns for the Harry Hay project. I called the number and became the novelty teenage volunteer. I met Harry, and the producer of the film, Jack Walsh, would take me out for burritos, and answer my questions about what it was like to be a filmmaker.

When I say I was privileged, I mean that I sought these opportunities out and I had access. I was experimenting with the kinds of things I would eventually grow up to do while I was very young. I initially pursued it through a mainstream model at NYU. When that no longer appealed to me, I found a path in New York where I could develop friendships and mentorships outside of school, and those relationships have continued. I try to do that now for younger filmmakers too.

EO

I think what I’m really asking about is the bridge between those worlds. You were training in one context but living in another. Your friends were visual artists, and that’s such a specific way of moving through New York while you were thinking through film. Did you feel part of a generation of young filmmakers asking similar questions, or was your community really elsewhere?

MW

Early on I found my community through MIX, the experimental queer film festival at Anthology Film Archives. My first month in New York, I went to MIX and came into contact with a bunch of experimental filmmakers, who were older than me. I was the teenage kid in a circle of older lesbian artists for a long time. Some of those friends—Every Ocean Hughes, K8 Hardy, and Ginger Brooks Takahashi—started a journal called LTTR, which became very influential in queer-feminist circles. Around it grew a scene, and I met many of my peers through their exhibitions, parties, screenings, performances.

It was important to me to think about film while being in conversation with people who weren’t filmmakers. I had good friends at film school whom I collaborated with, but my creative community extended beyond that. Then, during my senior year, I had Kelly Reichardt as a professor. She has since become a celebrated filmmaker, but at the time she’d made one feature and, like many women of her generation and beyond, she was struggling to get another one made.

Kelly became my mentor and she was the first person I encountered who showed me a viable model for being both an artist and a feature filmmaker. I also had mentors and friends from the experimental film world, including the programmer and writer Ed Halter, who ran the New York Underground Film Festival at the time, and the filmmaker and video artist Elisabeth Subrin. They took me under their wing, and I had a formative experience attending the Robert Flaherty Seminar, which brings together documentary filmmakers and scholars every summer. There were a lot of generous people older than me, shaping how I think.

EO

What eventually led you to a subject like Paul Reubens. Why him, and was it intuitive?

MW

Paul was my dream subject. I’d always wanted to make a film about him, even though there wasn’t actually much out there about him. I first encountered him as a kid watching Pee-wee’s Playhouse. That became a touchstone for me, and as I’ve recognized through releasing this film, Pee-wee was a touchstone for so many people, particularly artists and weirdos.

The way I gravitate toward subjects used to be much more tortured. Now it’s totally intuitive. I just know when I want to dive into something. With Pee-wee there was never any question. After I met Paul, it became even clearer. I thought,“I’m the person who can do this. I see you in a way that other people don’t, and you see aspects of yourself in me.” That became both a source of affinity and a source of tension. We had a very intense relationship—a deep connection—and a gnarly conflict.

During the film, Paul says he doesn’t like any of my films, except one. People often ask which film, and it was my first film, Wild Combination, about the musician Arthur Russell. That film was made with such naivety when I was twenty-four, and people connected to it on an emotional level. I think that’s why it’s had such a nice afterlife. When making Pee-wee as Himself, I knew it was going to be an emotional experience for me, and I sensed it would be emotional for other people, but the response was overwhelming. I downloaded TikTok when the film came out because I was told there were videos of people crying watching the movie.

You were asking about commercialism, and if anyone represents the blueprint of being both an avant-garde artist and reaching a mainstream audience, it was Paul. I don’t aspire to achieve the level of mainstream success Paul did—he was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon—and I don’t personally want to be a celebrity in the way he very much did. But he offered a model of uncompromising artistic integrity and populism that resonated with me.

EO

I think that’s actually what I’ve been circling this whole time. I don’t think that model really exists anymore. What interests me isn’t just that Paul became famous and defined comedy for a generation—it’s the intellectual life, process, and curiosity behind the work that makes him a compelling figure and presence. His relationship to performance art, to design, to comedy, and to CalArts. It feels like a way of making culture that has largely disappeared.

MW

He created this kaleidoscope of references and influences, building an imaginative, radical world that championed creativity as its primary value. The world-building is probably the most ambitious part of what Paul accomplished with Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but underneath it was this childlike curiosity, this brattiness, this total celebration of difference. In this conversation, we’re talking about how the kernels of what you’ll eventually become begin early. They emerge through lived experience, but also through formative encounters with culture. Pee-wee’s Playhouse was one of those formative encounters for me. A major one.

EO

Now that you’ve made this film, what do you want? Or maybe a better question is: what do you understand your project to be now? To me, it doesn’t really feel like documentary filmmaking. What you did with Wild Combination and what you've done with this film feels very singular. They’re not archetypal documentaries.

MW

My films are all over the place in terms of subject matter, but to me they have a clear throughline. I’ve just finished a new film about the world of soap operas, and for a while I didn’t understand how it connects to my other work, but that feels clear to me now. Unconventional visionaries, an unusual subculture, personal sacrifices for art, deep archives.

I struggle to make commissioned films because I think my personal curiosity is what leads to the most compelling work. Sometimes I connect with subjects because I see myself in them, and other times I learn something about myself by observing them. That happened in the soap opera film, which is ultimately a film about work and family. My films are all personal, even though I’m speaking through other people’s voices.

EO

I mean it a little differently. Earlier you talked about resisting narrative—almost resisting conceptual packaging. You said you didn’t think of yourself as a storyteller. So what did you think you were doing?

MW

No, I do think of myself as a storyteller now. I just didn’t get into filmmaking because I wanted to tell stories. Storytelling has become my primary craft, but it wasn’t my original attraction to the medium. I understand now why storytelling matters. It’s what engages people emotionally and intellectually, allowing viewers to leave a film with feelings and ideas that continue reverberating long after it’s over. Things become meaningful when people have an emotional connection to them, and for me the most direct way to create that emotional experience has been through storytelling.

Everything I do is emotionally driven. All I really want is to give people feelings that are connected to ideas—ideas about history, about human nature, and about the way people live. A huge part of my process is calibrating a film until it achieves the deepest, most nuanced emotional impact possible.

EO

Has your mission or project changed as you’ve matured in age? How do you create the conditions to continue to sustain yourself and maintain your practice?

MW

I still have strong emotional reactions to cultural material, and it’s invigorating that I continue to feel that way. As you get older, you sometimes wonder whether you’ve already seen everything you’ll ever really care about. The answer, at least for me, has been no. If you’re really curious about art, you’ll continue experiencing those lightning-bolt moments. It might be a person, an artwork, a history, but something suddenly feels alive. When that happens, I don’t just want to appreciate it from afar. I want it to become part of my life.

The way I do that is by forming relationships with the people surrounding whatever fascinates me. Those relationships become complex, and they’re ultimately at the center of the stories I tell. I move from cultural material to people, and then through those relationships the cultural material itself becomes personal. I no longer just admire something intellectually; it becomes part of who I am. There’s probably something a little cannibalistic about that, but ultimately, it’s an expression of love.

EO

Can you talk about the social world that surrounded all of this? Earlier you mentioned Index magazine. What was it like crossing that threshold—moving from California, reading these magazines from afar, and then suddenly living inside the city that had produced them? Where did you even live? Were you part of that Williamsburg generation?

MW

Yeah, I lived in Williamsburg. When I moved to New York, I wanted to absorb everything. I wanted to see every exhibition, every film, meet everyone I thought was interesting, and build friendships with them. I think that’s true of a lot of people who move here when they’re young. Over time, though, I realized that while making my own work I also needed to lower my cultural intake.

EO

Did that mean going to places like The Kitchen? Where were you getting that education?

MW

I was actually one of the videographers at The Kitchen for several years, documenting lots of performance art from the early 2000s. It meant spending time at the Fales Library’s Downtown Collection. It meant going to performances, screenings at microcinemas like the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, or for me going to Le Tigre shows. I met my partner of twenty-two years at a Le Tigre party. The LTTR scene I mentioned was especially significant. A lot of people find that community through nightlife when they move to New York. I’ve always gone to bed early, so that wasn’t really my route.

EO

What I think you’re underselling, though, is the rigor. There was the education you received at NYU, but then there was this parallel knowledge production that you built out for yourself. I’ve been thinking more and more about why New York mattered, why it worked, and how we continue to produce those kinds of environments.

MW

This was before social media, so it was fundamentally different. The only way to discover interesting things was to go see them or to meet people who already knew about them. It was about transmission, and transmission was interpersonal. I don’t have an issue with parasocial experiences. They create access for people, especially those who can’t afford to live in a big city. But there wasn’t a parasocial dimension to my early experience of New York. It was social and in person. I learned about things from other people, who were excited about the same things.

The internet was certainly part of the equation, but it wasn’t the experience itself. In some ways, my parasocial access to New York was Index magazine. I’d go to Barnes & Noble in San Jose, California, see this oversized newspaper-format magazine with incredible photographs, subscribe to it, and suddenly I had this window into a downtown world that felt incredibly exciting. I wanted to be part of that world.

EO

What was it specifically about Index? There was Purple. There were other magazines.

MW

It wasn’t fashion. It was interdisciplinary. It wasn’t as rarefied as Artforum. It was just cool. I’m in high school reading an interview between Will Oldham and Diamanda Galás. How else would I have encountered something like that? Everybody receives a subcultural education differently, and now so much of that education happens online. I don’t want to romanticize a time before the internet, but there was just less information available. Because there was less information, what you did find became more precious.

EO

I actually think that’s the key. Index feels like the missing piece. It’s funny because that magazine almost feels like Interview—

MW

—but more underground.

EO

Exactly. But that’s what I wanted you to articulate. I understand the broader point you’re making, but “indie” doesn’t or subculture in the way it was once known. What did indie mean to you?

MW

Right. I came into culture through indie rock and discovered everything through the record store and hanging around with friends. That’s what indie meant to me, and that world doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. Indie represented an alternative to mainstream corporate culture. There were underground systems of distribution, and both things were often tied to queer communities. You had to seek those things out.

EO

When you say indie doesn’t really exist anymore, why? And while we’re at it, can you define three things for me: mainstream, subculture, and indie.

MW

Mainstream, to me, is corporate. It’s assimilated. It’s pandering. It’s risk averse. It’s conformist. As for subculture—I honestly don’t think subculture exists in quite the same way anymore. When I was a teenager, subculture meant communities that were transmitting ideas through networks of people who cared about the same things.

EO

How did that happen historically? Through zines? Through gathering in real life?

MW

It happened through zines, yes, but also through record stores and shows, activism, and if you were underage, hanging out at coffee shops. I worked at a gay goth coffee shop called Café Leviticus in San Jose, and that place was a hub. That’s where I first heard New Order. Then I went to Streetlight Records and found Joy Division. Then I saw a Mike Mills record cover for Sonic Youth. It was this rhizomatic network where one discovery naturally led to another through real people inhabiting real spaces. Those places attracted people with particular sensibilities, and that, to me, was subculture. For me it was also inseparable from being a gay teenager. It was political.

EO

That’s precisely the vibe. It wasn’t about fitting in.

MW

No. It wasn’t about saying, “I was born gay and I’m no different than you.” It was almost the opposite. I’d tell people, “Maybe I wasn’t born gay. Maybe I choose to be gay because it’s better.” That was the conversation at the time. My position was that I didn’t want to be mainstream in the first place. I’d much rather be gay than straight.

EO

And yet your work has always had an instinct for reaching people. That’s what I mean when I say you possess a kind of commercial sensibility.

MW

I was a little separatist in high school. If I had the choice, I generally wouldn’t spend time with straight people. When you don’t have friends, you go to the independent movie theater. On prom night I skipped prom and went to see Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols documentary at the indie theater in San Jose. Afterwards I had a chai latte out of a bowl at Café Leviticus, where I worked. That’s indie. It was a choice. I didn’t want to go to prom.

EO

It’s funny—I was just talking the other day about how much I miss the role coffee shops used to play socially.

MW

I completely understand. Café Leviticus was really my first access point into gay culture, along with the activist circles I belonged to. These were all-ages spaces, but you had to know they existed. Usually you learned about them through a friend.

EO

So then how would you define indie?

MW

It’s something that isn’t right in front of you. It isn’t obvious. You have to seek it out. It’s built around circles of people with shared sensibilities introducing one another to things that aren’t mainstream. Indie has always been defined by what it isn’t. For Gen X, that meant being explicitly anti-corporate. For older millennials like me, it meant something slightly different, because we’re maybe less suspicious of “selling out.”

EO

I want to stay with that because you’re in such a particular moment in your career. Earlier you said there isn’t really an indie anymore, and now you’re making work that reaches a much broader audience. How do you think about that?

MW

Do you mean becoming mainstream?

EO

Yeah.

MW

Yeah, I guess I am more mainstream now. I’m a little Hollywood-adjacent, I suppose. A few years ago, I produced a film for HBO called The Stroll, which tells the history of New York’s Meatpacking District from the perspective of trans sex workers. Kristen Lovell directed it alongside Zackary Drucker, and Kristen had been a sex worker in the neighborhood. It was her first film.

I always told Kristen that my role was to be the bridge between community and corporation. I can do that. In many ways, that’s an extension of my experience as a gay teen activist. I’m palatable enough to move through these more commercial and mainstream spaces while remaining connected to the alternative or anti-corporate communities the work comes from.

EO

That’s what I’m trying to get at. Independence gets framed as being anti-establishment, but that’s not really how it works. You still have to survive, literally and figuratively.

MW

I don’t think of myself as entirely independent anymore. I’m beholden to commercial interests, and frankly anyone working in film today is. It’s a fight to survive. You have to find the you-shaped opening inside an industry that’s increasingly narrow and adverse to trying new things that don’t fit into established categories.

EO

When did that change? These films are all extensions of you, but what’s fascinating is the distance between Wild Combination—both formally and emotionally—and the Pee-wee film. This isn’t just another documentary. It became something much bigger than that.

MW

I guess it’s fair to say the Pee-wee film was a thing much bigger than me. I’m a little self-conscious saying that, but I also know it’s true. It’s my first experience with something on that scale, and maybe it’ll be my last. Those opportunities don’t come along very often.

EO

Ha, I don’t think it’ll be your last. I keep finding these people who seem to occupy a similar space: Matthew Barney, Arthur Russell, and Pee-wee. They’re these strange unicorns—public and private at the same time. Hyper-commercial, but deeply idiosyncratic. That’s what I mean when I talk about commercial sensibility.

MW

I think it’s really just an interest in the audience that I’m prioritizing. I have that instinct. A lot of artists don’t, and they don’t need to. But I genuinely care about the audience. I want to reach people, and I want to reach them broadly. I guess my sensibility has evolved to some extent in order to survive within the contracting film industry, but it’s all still in service of that original mission of connecting with people emotionally. I’m trying to reach a broad audience, while still delving into figures or histories that are decidedly not mainstream. Not the easiest path.

EO

But when did that evolution happen?

MW

It didn't suddenly change. It evolved. With Pee-wee, I knew that Paul fit into my wheelhouse of subjects, but would inevitably reach a broader audience. Then the production imploded for a while, and by the time it came back together it had become so emotionally complicated that I didn't really have the luxury of thinking about reception. I thought about the audience, of course, but I wasn't thinking about distribution or how people would respond. That part completely caught me off guard.

EO

From a production standpoint, though, there were so many moving parts. Elara. Josh and Benny Safdie. How did all of those pieces actually come together?

MW

I gained access to Paul through an introduction from Josh Safdie. Elara then came on as producers, but creatively I still made the film the way I've always made films. The difference was that I had more resources, and the project was connected to a platform that could reach a much larger audience.

The reason the Pee-wee film still feels connected to Wild Combination is that my approach hadn’t changed. I just happened to be doing it under a bigger umbrella with a built-in audience. It was still a secret history or hidden figure because Paul was not known separate from his alter ego Pee-wee.

EO

When did the project actually happen? I understand the relationship was the foundation, but I’m asking more literally. Over what period of time was the film actually made?

MW

It took four years from our first meeting to the completion of the film: about a year and a half of filming, a year and a half of turmoil, and roughly a year of editing before it was released.

EO

I’m especially interested in the conditions that produced the edit. By that point Paul had passed away. How did that change the work?

MW

Paul died, and I went back to work two days later. We had already begun editing before he died, but the fate of the project was uncertain. I was editing furiously because I wanted to show him something that would instill confidence and earn his trust. He did see an early version and liked it. Things briefly improved, then they deteriorated again. Two weeks before he died, Paul finally gave me permission to continue with the film.

I had no idea he was dying. It was an incredibly confusing moment because we were scheduled to do another interview the following week. His death was a complete shock. Two days later, we reopened the edit and went back to work.

EO

How did that change the structure of the film?

MW

In some ways it changed nothing. In other ways it changed everything. The obvious difference was that Paul was gone. Suddenly I had complete creative freedom to shape his portrait without his direct collaboration. I wanted to acknowledge the irony that I hadn’t realized he was dying because it imbued his words with an entirely different weight. But I also didn’t want the film to be defined primarily through the lens of mortality. I wanted that knowledge to give the story gravitas without becoming its organizing principle.

Paul never completed a final interview addressing his arrest, and I worried the film would ultimately feel lopsided. Instead, his absence becomes part of the experience, and then he returns in an incredibly powerful way at the end through his final words and his reflections on what he hoped to leave behind. Within two days of his death, I already knew where I wanted the film to end. It took another year of editing to arrive there, but the ending is remarkably close to what I imagined while attending his funeral.

EO

The line, “Where there’s smoke, there isn’t always fire…”

MW

He used to say that all the time, so hearing it wasn’t surprising. The day he died, I started rereading the transcript of our interview. It was twelve hundred pages long. That experience was beyond intense.

The line that still makes me emotional is when he says “I was a vessel.” I knew I wanted the film to end there. He’s essentially saying, “I made sacrifices. I didn’t allow myself to fully be myself because I wanted to give you this.” That felt both profoundly generous and deeply sad. Once I knew that was the destination, the rest became the work of getting there.

EO

Contemplating the conditions of this film made me wonder what being queer even means today. You begin in queer activism, and Paul almost becomes the culmination of that history.

MW

It’s interesting because I never thought of the film as being about identity until I read someone else describe it that way. I suppose it's an unusual story about identity, about an alter ego, about someone’s complicated relationship to sexuality. My identity as a gay person is both what connected me to Paul and what alienated him from me. We shared that experience while belonging to completely different generations.

To be queer today means inheriting the struggles of previous generations while also being liberated from certain forms of oppression they experienced. But more than anything, I still think being queer means being a nonconformist.

EO

It feels less like an identity than a mode of thinking—a critical framework.

MW

It is. One of the biggest things I took away from revisiting Pee-wee’s Playhouse was the idea of nonconformity. Paul told me the first time he heard the word nonconformist it completely cracked open his brain. He wanted Pee-wee to embody those values always and from the beginning.

I’ve come to think nonconformity is a much more useful way of talking about resistance. You don’t have to conform to the status quo. Just refusing to conform pushes back against all sorts of values that are actively eroding our social fabric.

EO

That’s what I was getting at earlier when we were talking about masculinity. Even his discussion of passing was remarkable.

MW

The possibilities feel much more expansive for younger generations now, but that’s only because earlier generations struggled. To be queer, I hope, means remaining conscious of that inheritance—of where you came from culturally. That’s always been important to me. I’m especially interested in history, but I think there are many young queer people who genuinely care about understanding that lineage.

EO

That relationship to history runs through so much of your work. I think about Recorder and Marion Stokes, too. Is preservation itself a political act for you?

MW

Yes, absolutely. If there’s anything political about the work I do, it’s resisting the erasure of history. I am drawn to other people, who share that sense of urgency to save things, and I have been the beneficiary of their preservation. Marion Stokes recorded television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years, and my film Recorder is an examination of her project, and also an exploration of the depth and value of her unprecedented archive. Paul was similar—almost all the footage in the film comes from the tapes he recorded and stored in his temperature-controlled bedroom. While going through one of his many storage units, I remember Paul saying, “I have to save this stuff, otherwise it’ll just be forgotten.” I don’t want things to be forgotten. That’s something me and my film subjects usually have in common.

EO

And more broadly, what do you think the project of a documentary originally was, and what has it become now? In terms of it being an organizing or orienting tool—and a way of making sense of people, histories, archives, or worlds.

MW

It’s true that documentaries for a time were anthropological, political organizing tools, or educational resources. But all along there have been non-fiction films that are cinematic and personal. They can and should be movies, not just topical presentations of information. I am interested in worlds and people who should not be forgotten, or that beg to be reappraised and preserved. I’m attracted to hidden histories, and the unsung heroes behind them. Those preoccupations have always been a part of documentary, and that’s why I’m proud to be part of that tradition.

EO

What the Pee-wee film does is complicate all of that in a way I don’t think we've really seen before.

MW

That film is ultimately about someone who created a framework for self-acceptance while never fully accepting himself. It’s about being uncompromising and being mainstream. And it’s about building a world for non-conformists and then losing it.

EO

Right. Steve Martin built a world. Matthew Barney built a world. Arthur Russell built a world. Most artists have that impulse, but only a handful ever have the resources to fully realize it, let alone create language that others can borrow and inhabit. The ones whose work lasts create complete worlds around themselves, for others.

MW

Those worlds might be highly visible like Pee-wee’s Playhouse or totally private, like Marion Stokes’ apartment filled with VHS tapes or Arthur Russell’s East Village apartment with mountains of cassette tape surrounding a fish tank.

EO

And that feels increasingly difficult now.

MW

I’m not sure world building was ever easy, but resources are scarce, and people are increasingly scared to take risks. Decision-makers don’t want to lose their jobs. When opportunities become limited, people become less willing to try things that haven’t been done before.

But through my experiences making films, and connecting with uncompromising thinkers and artists, I am confident that we will continue trying things that haven’t been done before, and we will still attempt to remodel the world. I’m here for that.