Davis Guggenheim has spent his career crafting documentaries about serious – and potentially world-changing — subjects. From An Inconvenient Truth to Waiting for “Superman” to his profiles of influential people like Bill Gates, the arc of his career as a filmmaker is connected by a sense of important urgency. So it was interesting when he arrived at Sundance with Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, a sensitive and intimate portrait [read the Vanyaland review] of the ‘80s biggest box-office draw. It documents his successes, rising from the wilds of Canadian television to become one of the most famous actors in Hollywood, as well as his struggles with alcoholism and anger in the aftermath of his Parkinson’s diagnosis. It’s a very sweet and clear-eyed film, much of it defined by the conversations – and emergent bond – between the filmmaker and his subject.
In advance of its IFFBoston screening last month and of its release in theaters and on Apple TV+ on May 12, Vanyaland sat down with Guggenheim at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Boston’s Back Bay to discuss the project’s origins, his innovative approach to blending recreations and archival footage, and why Guggenheim believes the film’s production changed his life for the better.
Nick Johnston: How did this project specifically come about?
Davis Guggenheim: I was in Martha’s Vineyard during the pandemic, and I was lost and depressed for a lot of personal reasons. I felt like I hadn’t made a film that was exciting to me in a while. Then I read an interview with him and I was like, “Oh, I wouldn’t do a Michael J. Fox movie, would I?” It was a challenge because my films have been more serious, but then I read his books and the writing in the books was so good, as was the storytelling. Sometimes writers write really pretty words, but then sometimes writers tell good stories, which is a different thing. He’s a good storyteller. I was like, “Oh, there’s stuff in here. There’s raw material in this that…”
I mean, the film takes so much out of them for the narration, especially from the recording sessions for his audiobook.
It makes my job a lot easier. When he’s done, he’s like, he’s fashioned some of these key scenes, not everything, but he’s fashioned a lot of the scenes.
Yeah, absolutely. I think what I was really, really impressed by, in addition to everything else that’s in the film, is how wonderfully you recreated the pace and tenor of a Michael J. Fox film. I mean, the style goes through various changes over his career, but I’m thinking specifically of the scenes where he’s doing double days on Family Ties during the day and then doing Back to the Future at night. You really nailed that Zemeckis feel. So what went into the construction and development of those hybrid recreations? Because you blend that archival footage really smartly and cleanly with the recreations you shot.
So Michael Hart, the editor, should be in this conversation. Because he was integral and a true partner and my solution… So when you make a documentary, there are these scenes that don’t exist in footage. So sometimes there’s a great archive, and we found some great archives that are little pockets, but a lot of him, we called it moonlighting, him working two jobs on Family Ties and Back to the Future. That footage doesn’t exist other than him on camera on those shows. My solution was to shoot recreations. So I would storyboard them. We had Michael’s voiceover, and so we would cut it to that. So there’d be audio in the picture, so I would storyboard it, so crude storyboards. Then Michael Hart, the editor, would put in footage from his movies [around the recreations]. So then suddenly you’re like, “Well, what? You can’t do that.”
So a good example in that regard was it’s a scene from Secret of My Success, and he’s going to meet his boss in Secret of My Success. He’s walking in and Michael’s taken all the reverse shots of Michael J. Fox and made it seem like he’s talking to Gary David Goldberg, the writer of Family Ties, and he’s saying, “Steven Spielberg sent the script. I didn’t show it to you before because you were too busy,” and you see the actor, Michael J. Fox, from Secret of My Success, reacting like he just got a job on a Zemeckis movie. Then you cut to recreations that I shot of the character running down the stairs with his coffee in his hand, getting into a car. Then you cut to him backstage walking, putting on his wardrobe for Family Ties. Then you cut to [actual footage from] Family Ties. Then so suddenly, it’s a mashup of his movies, my recreations, the TV shows, all blended to be the experience of Michael J. Fox moonlighting these two jobs.
Absolutely. It definitely felt unlike pretty much anything you’ve ever done. I mean, I walked out of the theater and went, “My God, that was the same guy who made An Inconvenient Truth,” and…
What happened? Did he find new cocaine? [laughs]
Yeah, exactly. Was he hanging with Michael and Woody [Harrelson] back in the day? [both laugh] But yeah, It was just so interesting. Because again, you did a good job of capturing that energy so well.
Thank you.
What I noticed over the long arc of your career is that you have an extraordinary sensitivity towards your subjects. You make movies about complex things, and you explain them in a clear way to people who may not know anything about them. I think what makes this feel so different in comparison to a lot of your other works is how much of a relationship we’ve had culturally with Michael J. Fox.
Yeah.
Were there ever times you worried that you were getting into a territory that was too alienating for either your subject or the audience?
Alienating how?
Well, I’m just thinking, for instance, when I was like, one, I opened my review back at Sundance with this, but I’m 32 and whatnot. I remember when Michael J. Fox was doing a Back to the Future reunion or something in like 2010, and he filmed a little clip for it. I remember thinking, “Oh man, everyone’s going to be so excited if I go into the comments section on this article about it,” but it was just an outpouring of grief at what they remembered the man looking like and what he was like…
What he looked like now. Yeah.
Yeah, and I just wondered, I think about that. Was there ever a difficulty, were you thinking to yourself, “Oh, if we showed this, they’re going to think something, they’re going to feel like we’re violating his privacy or…”
Not as much, but we did think about, first of all, I think every audience comes in with some expectations. I think it’s really important that you don’t have to subvert them, but you have to deal with them. Like, “Oh, I’m going to go see Al Gore give a slideshow about climate change.”
Yeah.
Maybe we didn’t subvert this expectation. It actually, it remained that movie. But you immediately go, “Oh, he just cracked a joke about losing the presidential election. So he’s got a sense of humor, and I’m in good hands.” In this case, I think people expect, “Oh, this is going to be a sad movie about this guy who used to be healthy, and now he is falling apart.” Right away, I try to subvert that.
The scene with him on the street [falling over and then immediately popping up to say hello to a passerby], that’s an incredible bit of footage.
It was the hardest scene, one of the hardest scenes to score. So we used John Powell, who’s never done a documentary before. John Powell did How to Train Your Dragon and Bourne Identity. He’s like, “What do you want here? This is complicated.” What a documentary traditionally would do is do something super neutral. Because documentaries, the tone of documentaries is not to comment. The tone of a documentary is to let the material speak for itself. The audience then draws their conclusions. I didn’t want to do that, but I also didn’t want to say, “This is… Look, poor Michael, and look how sad it is.” So we tried many different versions, but what John Powell did eventually was this, it’s a pizzicato. It’s very upbeat, but the biggest part was momentum.
Yes.
Because Michael’s always been moving. So that was important. I think the moment right before that, directly before that, where he gets out of, he’s getting out of bed and you see his feet are tight. You see he has a hard time getting his shoes on. He goes to the sink and his hand is shaking and you see the toothpaste. He’s like, “How’s the toothpaste ever going to go?” You go, “Oh, shit. This is going to be that movie I thought it was going to be,” which is a guy with a handicap, and, “Oh, here I am feeling sorry for the guy.” Then my question comes on camera and it’s like, “Is this the story of a sad sack guy who gets Parkinson’s and it crushes him?” He looks back and he is like, he goes, “That’s boring.” That goes right before the walk that you just talked about. So the point is, minutes into the movie, we take people’s expectations and subvert them.
Yeah.
You go, “Oh, okay.” Then the next thing you guys, you see, “I’m a cockroach. I’ve been through a lot of stuff. You can’t kill a cockroach because you can’t kill a cockroach.” So immediately, you’re like… I asked the question, people see you walk, they’re like, “Fuck.” He’s like, “Yeah.” So what I’m saying is, “Okay, we’re looking at this guy walk. He’s struggling, but don’t pity him.” Michael says this wonderful thing. “Pity is a benign form of abuse.” So you can say, “Oh,” you’re walking by someone who’s not doing well, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s so sad. Moving on. I’m putting that guy in a box. You’re not a real human being. You’re just a guy who walks funny.”
Exactly. I think one of the cool things about that perspective that you bring and that you’ve crafted with the film is that it’s really not so much pity or anything that you walk away with. You walk away with it, I think feeling like someone who’s gotten really that much closer to someone you already thought you already knew. So I’m thinking, because in discussing that quote about pity being a benign form of abuse, I’m thinking of the relationship that one might have with an ailing grandparent or something like that, where you’re never going to, you don’t want to focus on the condition that’s there and defines it. But I think the best way of approaching that is how you weave that into the other threads of his life. I think this movie is just as much a drinking movie compared to anything else.
A drinking movie?
Yeah.
DG: What do you mean?
Well, it’s a movie about him struggling with those demons, like alcoholism, and he’s forced to confront him because of his illness. But the problems in his life necessarily are there beforehand.
Yes.
Getting too drunk, getting too mad, and all that sort of stuff.
DG: We compressed that section. There’s a whole, and we had mapped it out. There’s a whole long section of him confronting his alcoholism. He took, there’s a line in there. It’s really quick. It’s like, “The sobriety was a hard one” He was sober, but not enlightened in that. That’s my bad way of saying it. But he was a really dark and important part of his journey that we just didn’t have time to talk about. He went to a dark place.
That’s the cool thing, I think, about this documentary. You’ve structured the arc of the film in such a way that you paint this portrait of a person who [becomes] whole. I think rather than a lot of the ways that we perceived it over time, like if we only ever see it through his personal appearances and clips of him testifying in front of Congress or whatever, you never get the chance to see the other things that define this person’s story.
I benefit from being in long form. Because I think what happens is a quick photo shoot and something in People Magazine, you just don’t [get that depth]. I think our world is really bad at complexity. We tag something as something, we put it in a box. How diminishing is that, for that person and for our experience?
So the film hit Sundance back in January and has been screening since. What has surprised you, I think, the most about the response to it over the course of the past month? Because you’ve dealt with some pretty highly charged subjects in the past and…
Well, I’m not used to having so much laughter in the film. There’s an episode of Inside Bill’s Brain that’s about toilets. There’s not a lot of laughter in toilets. There’s not a lot of laughter in climate change or public education. Some, maybe, but laughter is super important.
But you usually have a Futurama clip to go with that.
Usually. That was fun. Al Gore knew that, that humor is important. But I had lost, I think, my own sense of joy in my own filmmaking. I don’t know why. Maybe I was ambitious. Maybe I wanted to tackle the next big thing. To do that, I had to be really serious. Michael J. Fox reminded me, not only is laughter uplifting, but sometimes humor points to something complex or hidden they can’t be spoken about. I mean, his family’s laughter over him not being able to do his text. Maybe not the best example of that point, but it’s another thing which is that his family doesn’t pity him. He says, “My family doesn’t pity me. If they said, ‘Poor me,’ I’d hate it.” He’s got Parkinson’s and it makes it really hard for him to send a text. So it garbles things and he gets a website in China, and they’re all just like, they think it’s fucking hilarious. There’s a deeper truth in there, which is that we’re all frail and isn’t life incredible that we’re sharing this thing, even the hardships. That’s like, that’s the kind of love that I would want from my own family, rather than, “How are you, Dad? Poor dad. You’re an old man now.”
Exactly. No, I think that’s really true. One thing I’ve noticed from the way you’ve described it, the doc really parallels, I think, your own emotional arc is the way you’ve described it. You’ve got him frustrated with his life in all these different ways and slowly giving rise to this zen-like not acceptance, because he’s still working, he’s still trying to beat this thing and cope with it. But you watch a person make lemonade out of his lemons.
I think it is acceptance, actually. I think through that acceptance, it becomes liberation. The most interesting part of the film is when he is running [away from his issues], he doesn’t tell anybody he’s running away. But then when he decides to talk about it, it’s liberation. He’s on Curb Your Enthusiasm, he’s got Parkinson’s. He can be funnier than ever. He can be on Good Wife and play a character who’s got a disability but is using it to make money in the most despicable way ever. As an actor, that’s just more, and he’s liberated and he’s himself. I think that’s why I didn’t want to make a film [without that], because I think we’re all running away from something.
Exactly.
“I’m running away… Right now, I’m running away from everything.”
Yeah, I mean, it’s remarkable how the film never even comes close to the idea of exploitation. It’s just you just presenting him as he is.
Thank you.
You stay out a lot of the traps, I think, that comes with that. I think that’s one of the reasons why people seem to be connecting with it so much. I mean, everyone has someone in their life who has a chronic illness or something like that. I think what you get at really good is, I guess, as we mentioned earlier, the ability one has to look past that. That’s such a, I think, an essential perspective in an era where we’re trying to overcome so many negative associations, I guess.
It’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to write about without sounding cliche, without saying, “You know…” But there is something, there’s something that he offered me as a person. There’s something that this guy who — I liked his movies, they’re good, but I didn’t think he had anything to offer me. And this guy changed my life. The gift of spending three years telling his story was profound for me. It wasn’t just a movie. It changed my life.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.