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Paul Reubens was a beloved and important entertainer, but he was also a complicated, sensitive, and, at times, quite difficult man. Viewers of Matt Wolf’s new documentary, Pee-wee As Himself, will know that, but none so much as Wolf, who worked with Reubens for years to create the portrait that just aired on HBO. “When I approach someone to make a documentary about them, I write a love letter,” Wolf opens a touching new essay, titled “Pee-wee And Me” for Vulture. Wolf’s writing is just that—a love letter to Reubens, despite the many times the two butted heads throughout the long filmmaking process.
Wolf writes that Reubens was his “dream documentary subject” years before he reached out to set up an interview. “The film I made, Pee-wee As Himself, was four years in the making, and it almost broke me,” Wolf wrote. “Paul never fully ceded control. He refused to complete a final interview about the arrests that destroyed his reputation and held up our production for long stretches of time. For a while, he stopped talking to me, and I feared the project would never be completed.” The essay goes into Reubens’ hesitance to tell the world he was gay on camera, as well as his intense fear around giving up the reins of his own story after so many years of living a relatively private life.
“It would be Paul’s last private act, however, that allowed me to finish telling his story,” the documentarian continued. Wolf explains that he didn’t know Reubens was living with cancer until he got the notification that his subject—and a man he had come to consider a friend—had died. While the documentary had been stalled for months at that point, Wolf writes that Reubens left him a “devastating” deathbed recording, “but there was no time to grieve. The project I thought would never see the light of day now had an ending.”
“Now that Paul is gone, I recognize he was right. Through my film, I was able to express that I loved him,” Wolf concludes. You can read the full essay at Vulture.
