‘Pee-Wee as Himself’ Director Got a Recording From Paul Reubens 24 Hours Before He Died

Over the course of two years, Matt Wolf spent hours interviewing Paul Reubens for his new HBO documentary “Pee-Wee as Himself,” capturing a portrait of a man who could be warm and inviting on some days and pushy and controlling on others.

It was a push-and-pull relationship between the director and his subject right up to the day before his death on July 30, 2023.

“I had no idea that Paul had been battling cancer for six years,” Wolf told senior writer Drew Taylor at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt.

“I did have the sense that Paul was motivated to tell his story in a way he hadn’t been before, that it was going to be challenging for him, but that he threw himself into that process and was fully committed to being himself on camera in a way that was totally uncomfortable and something he had never done,” he continued. “The idea that these would be the last words that he would share publicly with the world was completely off my radar.”

Wolf decided to make his relationship with Reubens over the course of the interviews part of the final cut of “Pee-Wee as Himself,” showing how the famed comedic actor wasn’t always forthcoming on every question.

“On the first day, the whole kind of rebelling against the process, or kind of pushing back on me, or telling jokes as a way to avoid addressing more kind of difficult subject matter. I realized that’s how it was going to go. I certainly didn’t take it personally,” he said. “He was, by his own admission, incredibly controlling, as you can tell in the film, super gregarious, and also very ambivalent about being known publicly.”

Wolf and Reubens had a final interview scheduled in the summer of 2023, but Reubens cancelled it two weeks prior to his death. Wolf says he found out about the actor’s passing via social media and decided to travel to Los Angeles to meet with the people who were closest to Reubens. That led to a meeting with top Hollywood publicist Kelly Bush Novak, who provided Wolf with a recording of Reubens taped the day before his death.

“He made it for the documentary because he wanted to do that final interview, but it was too late,” Wolf recounted. “Every day I woke up saying, ‘You need to rise to the occasion of these extraordinary circumstances,’ and the responsibility you’ve been handed to both live up to the challenge to tell Paul’s story and his full complexity, but also to dramatize what happened, because it’s a very unusual situation and circumstance for telling somebody’s life story.”

Watch the full interview in the embed above.

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