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.”