Paul Reubens Was A Dream Subject For Director Matt Wolf, But Making ‘Pee-wee As Himself’ Was Complicated
Paul Reubens, the eccentric performance artist best known as Pee-wee Herman, was an intensely private person. After a number of people had approached him about making a documentary about himself, he realized that he wanted to direct it himself.
Emma Tillinger Koskoff, a producer best known for her work with Martin Scorsese including The Wolf of Wall Street and The Irishman, had worked with Reubens on Johnny Depp’s 2001 film Blow.
“We became friendly and stayed in touch over the years and he called me [in 2020] and was saying ‘I really want to make a documentary and I’m getting all sorts of people wanting to make [one]. I feel like I have to get ahead of this before someone just does one and I want to direct it myself.’
“I said ‘No, I don’t think that’s going to happen’,” Tillinger Koskof revealed during a Deadline Contenders at HBO Max panel, where she was joined by director Matt Wolf and editor Damian Rodriguez.
Watch the conversation here and scroll below for photos from the event.
Reubens told Tillinger Koskoff that the Safdie Brothers – Josh and Benny – wanted to produce it. “Josh called me and said ‘I’ve got the filmmaker, it’s Matt Wolf and we have to just get Paul there and it took convincing.”
Wolf was behind documentaries including Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, about the avant-garde cellist and disco producer, and Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, about a woman who captured 840,000 hours of news footage over the course of 35 years on VHS and Betamax.
Wolf said he had grown up watching Pee-wee Herman and was “transfixed” by Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Reubens’ CBS kids show.
“Paul was my dream subject,” Wolf told Deadline. “I pursued it for many years but Paul was an incredibly private person. People knew Pee-Wee but they knew very little about the creator’s alter ego. I pursued it doggedly for a long time and after a while I convinced Paul to do it. I like to make films about unconventional visionaries and Pee-wee Herman was that, a super avant-garde character that came from a performance art scene in the 1980s that hit the mainstream, and I’m interested when experimental people because mainstream and what happens.”
He added that he had a sense that Reubens would be a “compelling” and “complex” subject.
Reubens was certainly that as seen in Pee-wee As Himself, HBO Max documentary that was released in May. The two-part series contains 40 hours of interview footage filmed before Reubens’ death in 2023 as well 1,000 hours of archival footage and tens of thousands of personal photos. It covers his early life in the circus town of Sarasota, FL, to his avant-garde theater training at the California Institute of the Arts.
It then explores the creation of his alter-ego, as a member of Los Angeles improv group The Groundlings, turning a cult live late-night show and tour into the 1985 smash hit film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which was directed by Tim Burton.
In the documentary, Reubens, who hid his private life, talks about his fame as well as rumors and vilification from the media before reemerging as a cult figure with a Broadway revival of his Pee-wee stage show, and a final Pee-wee film.
The project, which featured interviews with the likes of his sister Abby Rubenfeld, artists Gary Panter and Wayne White, actors Lynne Stewart, John Moody, Alison Mork, Natasha Lyonne, S. Epatha Merkerson, Laurence Fishburne, Debi Mazar, David Arquette, Laraine Newman, and Cassandra Peterson, and filmmakers Tim Burton and Judd Apatow, recently scored five Emmy nominations including Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Special.
Wolf said developing his relationship with Reubens was a “process.” “That began literally hundreds of hours of conversation. During the pandemic, we talked three times a week for multiple hours, sometimes just shooting the sh*t, getting to know each other, and other times [having] more heated conversations about to what extent Paul might be able to influence the story. We were getting to know each other and bonding, but also feeling each other out. Paul, by his own admission, was not a very trusting person, and he had real reasons to feel that way. He had lost control of his personal narrative in the media. I also am somebody who really takes creative control seriously in my own work. I want to maintain that editorial independence and integrity, and I think Paul respected that, but it was power struggle between us, and our relationship continued to develop over the course of over a year before he sat down in that interview chair, and that became the most epic, involved, intimate and intense and sometimes combative interview of my career,” he added.
Some of this was related to Reubens’ run-ins with the law. He was arrested in 1991 in Florida for indecent exposure while watching a film at an adult movie theater. He was also charged with misdemeanor possession of obscene material improperly depicting a child under the age of 18 in sexual conduct in 2002 after a raid of his house.
The latter charges were dropped in exchange for Reubens pleading guilt to a lesser misdemeanor obscenity charge, with Reubens claiming he was a collector of vintage erotica, which he deemed art.
Tillinger Koskoff said Reubens wanted to be vindicated. “He wanted to set the record straight on these things and it was deeply troubling and hard for him to talk about, he was terrified to confront it and talk about it [but] he wanted his story out there in his own words,” she said.
(L-R) Damian Rodriguez, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Matt Wolf and moderator Jeff Hiller
Michael Buckner
(L-R) Matt Wolf, Emma Tillinger Koskoff and Damian Rodriguez
Gilbert Flores
Matt Wolf
Michael Buckner
Emma Tillinger Koskoff
Michael Buckner
Damian Rodriguez
Michael Buckner
(L-R) Damian Rodriguez, Emma Tillinger Koskoff and Matt Wolf
Michael Buckner
Wolf told him that this would be the “easy part.” “I said to Paul, ‘You were clearly wronged. It seems provincial what you were attacked for back then. The harder part is to share aspects of who you are that have been hidden.’ That was the fact that he was gay. Paul confided to me personally that he wanted to come out in the film, that he didn’t really know how. As a gay filmmaker from a different generation, I wanted to support him in the process of doing that, because Paul made a lot of personal sacrifices to bring us artwork that really championed non-conformity and self-acceptance,” he added.
Towards the end of the second episode, a card on the screen reads, “After a year of filming, Paul stopped cooperating with the production. He delayed completing a final interview about his arrests.”
Reubens then freaks about control. “Is it worth quitting the movie over? I don’t know,” he says in a recorded call with Wolf, before another card says Reubens never completed the interview.
The day before he died, he recorded his own audio, addressing how it felt to be labeled a “pedophile.”
He hadn’t told many people he was sick, including the filmmakers.
“I was certainly in shock when he died,” Wolf said. “I had no idea that Paul had been privately battling cancer for six years. I found out that he died [along] with the rest of the world. I had to reconsider a lot of stuff. When you make a film about somebody who recently passed away, it’s very tricky to figure out how to calibrate that.”
Wolf had inserted these challenges between himself and Reubens into the project. He said collaborators, including editor Damian Rodriguez, had encouraged him to highlight this conflict.
“I always thought it was narcissistic when people put themselves into their documentaries. Then somebody said, ‘Isn’t it more narcissistic to have that rule instead of to do what’s best for the film?’ That day, we went back to the edit room and started to thread these interactions, and it brought the film into a space that’s different than your typical celebrity biopics,” he added.
Editing such a project was a challenge for a number of reasons.
One was Reubens’ vast archive. Tillinger Koskoff joked his “entire house was his archive.”
“His tapes were in his bedroom, in a temperature-controled closet,” added Wolf.
Rodriguez said that this meant there was “tons” to work with. “It was like a dream as far as that, because the palette that we had to work from was great. He would record his own performances on TV and stuff that wouldn’t exist today if he had not done that,” the editor added.
Jeff Hiller, the Emmy-nominated star of HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, who was moderating the panel, noted that Reubens’ archive sounded impressive. “A lot of it was squirrels and deer in his backyard,” Wolf joked.
The other editing challenge was Reubens’ death. Rodriguez said, “We had obvious holes in the story after he passed because he didn’t do his final interview, which he was scheduled to do a week after he passed. We had to navigate what we tell the audience and what happened behind the scenes. People really responded to the back and forth with Matt and Paul. It was kind of like Frost/Nixon, a battle to get these answers.”
Wolf added, “Paul chose not to tell me that he was dying. He didn’t want the film to be viewed through the lens of mortality. Because of Paul’s media controversies and arrests, I think he was very adamant about not being seen as a victim. I wanted the film to be in the present tense because his energy and presence is so visceral.”
Pee-wee As Himself is produced by Elara & First Love Films for HBO Documentary Films. Wolf directed and exec produced alongside Tillinger Koskoff, Reubens, Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie, Candace Tomarken and Kyle Martin as well as HBO’s Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller and Sara Rodriguez.
