Would adding that bit have opened up a can of worms? You kind of can’t just glance over Michael Jackson.
I mean everybody from Beyoncé to Kanye [West], even though he’s worked with all these people, and it’s like you can’t just, if you dip your toe into them, then it’s both unsatisfying and kind of brings up more like, “Well, what about that? Let’s get deeper into that story.” And I always look at those things as narrative quicksand.
Is that something you just had to make a call about?
It wasn’t like I was ever going to interview Kanye.
It wasn’t like Kanye had any—or Puff, another controversial person—Pharrell never had a deep relationship with any of them.
It’s wild that this movie is coming out at a time when a lot of the people involved are part of an industry that’s going through some turmoil right now.
The kind of reckoning that’s happening in the hip-hop world is long overdue.
Pharrell’s almost the opposite. He’s been married to the same woman for, been with her for 20 years. He’s never done drugs. He doesn’t drink. He is like a health nut.
Not the stuff that normally gets into music docs.
It’s more like, where’s the friction in his life?
So in that way, from the kind of traditional rock-and-roll type of story, it’s not that kind of story. He doesn’t have that kind of story.
How do you work around that? Stories need tension, something to overcome, some deep, dark truth.
You need tension, but to me, there was all this dramatic tension around creativity, which I think is real.
My mentor, Peter Guralnick, a fantastic writer, told me early on that the least interesting things in stories about musicians are sex, drugs, and getting ripped off by your record label, because everybody has the exact same story. So, what’s interesting after those things?
If you look at every film I’ve done, it’s always been the things beyond those things … My Steve Martin documentary, the last one I did, is very similar. It’s not about fame or drugs or anything. Steve is squeaky clean. But it’s about how do you wrestle with your voice, how do you stay inspired?
Well, you mentioned a second ago that you felt like you might be done with music documentaries, but your next one is about Paul McCartney. How did you put yourself on that path?
I couldn’t say no. I’ve been a Beatles fanatic my whole life.
But this is a movie about the period after they broke up, right?