Sasha Weiss
Appearances
The Daily
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When I heard his like sort of yelps and his cries, I always thought it was about sexuality, you know, and sexual yearning, romantic yearning. But I was able to hear it in a different way. And partly because one of his bandmates is telling me, I hear her voice on the film telling me, this was the central problem of his life, this problem of abandonment. Do you want me?
The Daily
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And you could hear the pure pain in it. And then suddenly Prince's screaming feels also like grief. It's not just sexuality. It's also grief. It's also pain. And it's authentic. And I understand that the song contains all of it. So it's this richness. And you sort of understand what's feeding the performance and that when he's there on stage, like, yes, he's...
The Daily
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You know, it's kind of a funny thing. I didn't come to this as a huge Prince fan. I came to it as a person who's deeply interested in him as a symbol. He was part of the wallpaper of my childhood. He is this kind of... Literally or figuratively? Figuratively. But, you know, you hear him, you see him.
The Daily
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I'm sure aware of what he's doing and in control of what he's doing, but he's also possessed and kind of channeling all of this complexity through his body and through his voice. And I just hear his music completely differently now. The layers are so much deeper.
The Daily
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So the movie is an answer to a cultural question that I think has been vexing us for a decade or more, which is what do we do with great artists who are extremely flawed human beings? And the answer that the movie offers is that we basically sit with their contradictions, right? And Prince was, on the one hand, a genius, an original of a generation, an original of a century.
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I mean, he's a Mozart of American pop. And with a mind that was teeming with music and ideas, he was also... controlling he could be abusive towards his lovers he was deeply vulnerable he was a person who crossed boundaries and contained multiplicities and edelman is asking us to sit with that for nine hours
The Daily
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and take it all in and allow ourselves to pity him sometimes, allow ourselves to adore him and worship him, and allow ourselves to criticize him and to sit with the wild brew of who Prince was. And also to make the argument that knowing this enriches our understanding of the art he made. It deepens our understanding of the art he made.
The Daily
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It deepens our love of it because we know where it comes from or we know something about where it comes from and how he transforms the raw material of his selfhood into something transcendent.
The Daily
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So, as part of the original agreement that Netflix struck with the Prince estate for access to the vault, the estate was going to have an opportunity to review the film for factual accuracy.
The Daily
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Ezra Edelman welcomed this. He's a journalist. Nobody wants to get anything wrong. Nobody wants to get anything wrong. You can review the film for factual error. Now, in the years that Ezra spent working on the film, there were these ongoing complicated legal battles over Prince's estate, in part because Prince left no will. So the estate changed hands.
The Daily
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It changes from being overseen by a bank and courts in Minnesota to now being overseen by a lawyer who used to work for Prince in the 90s, members of his family, and a music company. And the new people in charge watch the film. And they submit this list that's 17 pages long with all kinds of quibbles and queries and objections. almost none of which have to do with facts.
The Daily
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He's kind of this, like, in the cultural imagination, he is an avatar of gender-bending dreaminess, boundary-pushingness, breaking categories. Sensuality personified. Sensuality, sexiness, but a kind of uncategorizable sexiness. And I think for a lot of people, you know, he's at the top of the cultural pantheon. He's the icon of American pop music.
The Daily
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They have to do with things about Prince that they don't want included in this documentary. And Edelman, you know, makes a few changes to try to kind of compromise with them, but he's not going to change, for instance, one of Prince's collaborators talking about how when he became devout and extremely religious, he asked her to renounce her homosexuality before he would collaborate with her again.
The Daily
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He's not going to take out an assessment of his album, The Rainbow Children, which was kind of widely shared at the time that there were anti-Semitic lyrics. He's not going to take out elements of the story that are sad or unfortunate or portray Prince in a negative light because they're part of the story and they're part of the arc.
The Daily
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And he's not going to allow extra journalistic facts to determine the shape of his film. So this back and forth continues for many months, and the estate manages to hold up the film on questions of length. They claim that they had agreed to license music for a six-hour film and no more. And this was no simple thing.
The Daily
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Like, to cut this film by three hours would be... Like, the metaphor that I keep thinking of is like... unknotting a hand-woven Persian carpet. Extremely difficult to disassemble. It would be like starting all over. But also, it wasn't ever clear that this would satisfy the estate anyway, because they had made their strong objections to the project very clear.
The Daily
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So the project seemed to be at an impasse. And ultimately, last month, Netflix comes out with the following statement. The Prince estate and Netflix have come to a mutual agreement that will allow the estate to develop and produce a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince's archive. Translation, Ezra Edelman's film is dead. He's cut out. It's thrown away.
The Daily
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And if there's ever going to be a film, it's going to be a film made by the estate.
The Daily
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Well, all of the parties have been tight-lipped about the situation for contractual reasons, but that's my sense of it. Yeah. So the day after this news came out, I was able to talk to Ezra. Well, it's kind of a grim day.
The Daily
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And, you know, we were talking a little bit about the state's rationale or what we perceive as the state's rationale. And he thinks it's absurd.
The Daily
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The lawyer for the estate said to Ezra at one point in this process, he fears the film will do generational harm to Prince.
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Yes. I think the fear is, in a cross way, this will get Prince canceled.
The Daily
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He was a jerk. He was a difficult boss. You know, he was mean. Right? That it would demystify this icon. You know, fundamentally, they're concerned about their bottom line.
The Daily
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But I think, you know, Ezra sees it the opposite way.
The Daily
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He was a beautiful singer. He could play a million instruments. I mean, his music is just transcendently great. Hits like... Kiss.
The Daily
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She thinks that a complex, meaningful engagement with Prince just deepens our relationship with him and kind of revives his legacy. And, I mean, I totally agree. Like, Prince is present, but it's not like he's a vital figure in the culture right now. And I bet anything that if this film had come out, there would have been a whole huge...
The Daily
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discourse around Prince and a complex one and an interesting one. And I think it would have brought him again to the fore of the cultural conversation. And I mean, when Ezra did show a very small group of people an early cut of the film as he was working on it, he saw that kind of reaction.
The Daily
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Well, Ezra declines to discuss Netflix, but in my own reporting around the unraveling of the deal, I think Netflix bears a lot of responsibility for what happened. I think that when Ezra started making this film, it was a kind of heyday of prestige documentary, and Netflix was producing...
The Daily
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high-profile, really rigorous documentaries that were kind of in the mold of some of the things that Ezra does, really intense investigations, journalistically important. They made the film Icarus, which is about the Russian doping scandal during the Olympics that won the Academy Award. And in the years since, documentaries have been transformed and Netflix has been transformed.
The Daily
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You know, the executive who originally hired Ezra has been let go and new leadership was brought in and they've leaned further and further into certain kinds of documentaries that were skirting away from journalism much more toward entertainment, right? True crime. Celebrity documentary where celebrities began to be producing partners.
The Daily
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Megan Markle comes to mind. David Beckham. I mean, there are lots of them now, you know? So they're becoming a global empire. They're one of the largest and most important players in the documentary world. They're the arbiters in some sense of what documentary films are, the direction that they're going in. And now they're just generating tons of content quickly, cheaply, kind of formulaically.
The Daily
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And the kind of painstaking, long gestating project like Ezra's is not the currency anymore. I mean, they still make some really good things, but they're able to make a lot more things that aren't that good, but that a lot of people watch. And meanwhile, Ezra's film is all tied up in this complex legal battle.
The Daily
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That's my sense. I mean, I interviewed one person familiar with the company who said, you know, why would they want to be tied up with this legal fight when they could just go make 10 more movies? you know, reality shows about real estate, and they can make 10 more celebrity documentaries where they're partnering with the estate.
The Daily
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So I think for them, the great art versus making a whole bunch of stuff more readily, cost-benefit analysis, you know, my sense is that ultimately they didn't stand by the film.
The Daily
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Yeah. I mean, I think it's possible that that's their calculation, that they're making a kind of pure, you know, look at the numbers business decision. I think that's possible. We'll never know because the film just isn't being given a chance to be put in front of an audience. But I think Ezra would totally disagree with that idea.
The Daily
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So, you know, one argument that was aired when I was talking to people who had seen the film, talking to some people who hadn't seen the film, about even the idea of the film. You know, one thing that was said was essentially an argument about black genius left to stand as celebrated. You know, like white rock stars of similar stature are not...
The Daily
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He was a world-eating genius. So it's like no subject could be as big, as mysterious, as fascinating as Prince. Say a word about mysterious. Well, I think Prince cultivated a kind of mystery, right? I mean, he seemed kind of saintly. He seemed spiritual. You know, he was someone who changed his name to a symbol without explanation. There was a performance of a kind of... Unknowability.
The Daily
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I think Ezra believes that for audiences to be given this like rich, chewy thing to engage with about this major icon would be satisfying for them.
The Daily
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Yeah, I mean, I did often feel reporting this piece haunted by the presiding spirit of Prince and feeling like he was messing with all of us. So I think, yes, there's a kind of, you know, cruel poetry to it all. On the other hand, you know, Prince, at the end of his life, was opening up a little bit more. And the last hours of the film actually are about this.
The Daily
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They're about a series of concerts that he gave, lo-fi, piano and a microphone, natural hair, where he was singing and talking and starting to talk about some of his pain, his childhood, his regrets, his loves. And it's still kind of veiled and perfumed, but it's more raw. And the style of performance is more raw. And he also was undertaking the writing of an autobiography.
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And there was something happening. I think he was changing.
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I think in some sense. I mean, look, probably on his own terms. But there's the question of what Prince would have wanted. And then there's also the question of like what's good for the culture in some way and what's good for the legacy of a person like Prince.
The Daily
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And actually, after the news of the film being finally killed broke, Jill Jones, who's the girlfriend that I was talking about before, who was one of the people who appears in the film talking about Prince's abuse of her was a lot of pain. Right. posted something that I thought was incredibly moving about what's wrong with this film not coming out. She was very in favor of the film coming out.
The Daily
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Well, let me read you a little bit of it because I think she says it really beautifully. So she says, "...Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him." He built a persona so larger than life that it became a prison, a gilded cage, one he could never fully step out of.
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He knew that revealing his true self, stripped of the carefully crafted persona, would lead to rejection. And in a way, he was right. The recent choices made by Netflix and his estate only reinforced this truth. The world is unwilling to accept Prince as a man, only as a myth. Without the elaborate stagecraft, without the veil of mystery, his raw humanity is deemed insufficient.
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His struggles, his journey, his sacrifices, all the elements that shaped him will remain obscured. Instead, the world will most likely receive a sanitized, polished version of Prince, in quotation marks, a carefully curated illusion that erases the depth of his reality.
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I thought that was something really extraordinary coming from someone who had been hurt by Prince, who saw some of the worst of Prince. But she can hold that against, A, his greatness, but B, these sort of layers of pain that prevented him from being known. And she's saying, like, let's look at the whole thing because that's the way to really appreciate who this man was.
The Daily
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Unknowability. And then that was part of the allure and part of the mystique. Also, he was extremely elusive. So that was my interest in Prince. And the other thing that drew me to the film was the person making it. Ezra Edelman, who I really admired as a filmmaker. I think he's a once-in-a-generation talent. And I was really curious what it would be to see his mind tangling with Prince.
The Daily
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I think that's exactly right. And I think, humanly, not only artistically, We have to make room for what's broken in us. And that's part of the story. Sometimes it's the center of the story. And that's what Edelman has done here.
The Daily
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And yeah, I find it really like bitterly ironic what Jill Jones is saying that like maybe in some way, one of Prince's deepest fears was that he would be seen and people would run away scared. And that's what's happened. So this leaves Ezra in a kind of existential limbo. And I know he's thinking a lot about his future as a filmmaker.
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A question in people's minds may be like, where is the film? Like, where does it exist? Like, is the film itself in a vault? Like, it's in a hard drive somewhere?
The Daily
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So I've gotten to know Ezra pretty well over the years of reporting this story, and we've talked a lot. He is extremely dogged and rigorous. He is extremely focused.
The Daily
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So Ezra started out in TV journalism and sports journalism especially. And eventually he started directing his own documentary films.
The Daily
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And he brings a lot of rigor and I would say also a lot of emotion and storytelling chops to these huge canvases that he takes on.
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But maybe the best way to talk about his work is to talk about his best-known film on O.J. Simpson, O.J. Made in America, which comes out in 2016 to great acclaim on ESPN. It wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film that year.
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Big deal. Got a ton of attention, and deservedly so, because... Part of its magic is that it takes an event that we all thought we knew. We had been over it a million times. And it gives it... We watched CNN.
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We knew that many of us watched it, you know, as kids and watched the car chase and remember it and remember the polarization around it. The way that I would say black America and white America viewed the case very differently. And what Ezra manages to do in the film is to give a familiar recent historical event a much broader context.
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And not only do you understand O.J., how huge he was, how beloved he was, how deep his downfall was, you also understand the context of race relations in California from the 1960s into the 90s and even the early 2000s. And you understand how many of the racial pathologies of our country run through this case.
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So it's this incredibly layered document where all of these different energies are drawn together to tell a new story. And Ezra works on an enormous scale. The film is eight hours and I think is widely thought of as one of the greatest American documentaries, one of the greatest American films that has been made in the last decade.
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Well, it may be worth saying, for one thing, that this film was not Ezra's idea originally. Huh. What do you mean? So after the success of O.J., I mean, he's like the toast of the film world. He could do anything. He could do anything. And thinking about his next project, he gets a call from Netflix, and they have a very enticing proposition.
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So they tell him that they have made a deal with Prince's estate that gave them exclusive access to Prince's vault. Now, the vault, which is how it's known among Princeologists, is his personal archive, which was housed in Paisley Park, which was his kind of... home studio fortress in Minnesota where he lived and recorded and performed. And it had who knows what.
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I mean, it was a treasure trove of archival material.
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So tantalizing. It's his vault. And people knew of its existence. And it was the kind of proposition that it would be very hard for a filmmaker like Ezra Edelman to say no to.
The Daily
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So they find beautiful concert footage, some of which has never been seen before. They find band rehearsals, which at first seem like really exciting, but there's hours and hours of it, just music, just him playing music. They find some unfinished films that Prince made, but it's basically all performance. What they didn't find is almost anything that was candid or spontaneous. Mm-hmm.
The Daily
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Prince kind of hanging out with his friends. Prince on the off hours. Prince, you know, talking shit with the band. Prince writing music, composing music. I mean, he was a great songwriter. His process, nothing. And when they would find, like, the beginning of something or the suggestion of something, there was a little bit of footage of Prince horsing around with his girlfriends, for example.
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But the footage was scratched. It seemed like someone had tampered with the tape. So they came to the conclusion that it might have been deliberate, that anything that was candid, that was still around, had been damaged.
The Daily
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So he does what he always does, which is to start to interview people intensively. And he wants to talk to all the people who knew Prince well to try to understand what was driving him. What was he thinking about? What were his torments? What were his successes?
The Daily
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And he seeks out kind of everybody in Prince's world from, you know, bodyguards to family members to dear friends to many, many collaborators over the years.
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And what he and his team begin to find is basically another locked door, another wall.
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People are very reluctant to speak candidly about Prince. They're protective. Some people seem scared.
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I mean, it's not that unusual in a way for a world famous celebrity, you know, for people not to want to talk about them. But it was very intense. And, you know, it seemed across the board universal, this reluctance. And Ezra and his team started to wonder like, what's the big secret here? Is there some secret that people won't tell us?
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At a certain point, he had interviewed enough people, over 75 people. To start to get a clearer picture of Prince and to be able to marry a narrative of Prince's life from the beginning really to the end where he died in a very mysterious way with this footage that was in the vault.
The Daily
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And it's not that there's a secret, but there's a complex, tortured, deeply traumatized person alongside the musical genius. And eventually, Ezra had what he felt was a solid cut of the film, and I was able to watch it.
The Daily
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Well, one of the things the film does so well is tell the story of Prince's childhood. And it's maybe worth saying that it doesn't unfold the story in a linear way. It accumulates through the interviews, through all of the different people he speaks to, his lovers, his sister, his friends. And what you see is a picture of a boy.
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First of all, he had, according to several testimonies in the film, a troubled relationship with his parents. There was violence in the home. His parents split when he was a kid. First, he was living with his mother. She then remarried. And two people in the film say that Prince told them that when he was a kid, his stepfather shut him in a room or a closet for six weeks. Wow.
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How could he not? And then when he was 12, his mother kicked him out of the house and sent him to live with his father. He was very close to his father. His father was a musician. And he was a very religious man. He was a strict man, kind of an authoritarian parent. And he found Prince in a room with a girl a couple times. And he, too, kicked Prince out when Prince was 14 years old. So...
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he was an abandoned person. And that abandonment and the dissolution of his family and the feeling of neglect, according to the many people who knew him, was a real through line in his life. This drove Prince to his own unstable sort of familial and love relationships. And one pattern that you see in the film over the course of Prince's life is that he would kind of
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assemble families around himself in the form of collaborators and bandmates, but he would always really challenge those relationships to the point of breaking. He was distrustful. He was demanding. A couple of his close collaborators say that when they asked for a raise, Prince said to them, if you really loved me, you wouldn't ask me for a raise. He was really controlling with his girlfriends.
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With one girlfriend, he tried to prevent her from seeing her family and from making phone calls at a certain point.
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Yes, and I think, you know, what you see unfolding in the film is someone also at war with himself. You know, on the one hand, just this overwhelming creativity that was pouring out of him and a desire to have people participate in that, but a constant pushing people away. You know, he was a great elevator of women, for example.
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He had many famous female collaborators, but many of those collaborators testify to the fact that he could be
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you know not only controlling but kind of put them down and diminish them and make them feel worthless and he could also be physically abusive so you hear from a girlfriend of his a collaborator jill jones who talks about a moment when she flew into a jealous rage and prince hit her and never apologized and her anguish many years later is just totally vivid for the viewer
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Well, there's a great moment in the film where he's singing the beautiful ones. You can find performances like this one online. And, you know, one of the refrains is... Do you want him or do you want me? Because I want you. It's the song of yearning. And he is just giving a wild performance of a kind of screaming and keening and, you know, falling. And...