‘Pee-Wee As Himself’ Director Had No Idea Paul Reubens Was Dying

“I was scheduled to do a final interview with him the week after Paul Reubens passed away, and we had a conversation a week before he died. I could tell something was up with his health, but I didn’t understand the gravity of it,” recalls Pee-wee as Himself director Matt Wolf. “I had no reason to believe he was terminally ill, but we had a meaningful private conversation that gave me the assurances I needed to move forward with the film.”

“I left that conversation feeling like it was intense but not thinking too much about it. I found out on Instagram that he died, along with the rest of the world; only a very small group of close friends were aware that he was dying.” Reubens passed away from cancer on Sunday, July, 30, 2023. He was 70 years old.

The two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself spotlights the life and career of iconic actor and comedian Paul Reubens, best known for his child-like character Pee-wee Herman. Both parts are now streaming on Max. Wolf and his team transferred, logged, and digitized over 1,000 hours of archival footage, much of it from Reubens’ own private collection.

Despite agreeing to the project, it’s clear that the iconic entertainer is never entirely comfortable with the process.

“As a documentary filmmaker, they always ask you, ‘Who is your dream subject?’ And I would say, ‘Paul Reubens,’ but I didn’t know that much about Paul,” Wolf muses. “I knew he went to CalArts in the heyday of conceptual art and was part of The Groundlings, but that was about it. I knew about his arrest, but that wasn’t really my point of interest in making a film. We were connected by the Safdie Brothers and my producer, Emma Koskoff, through an unexpected convergence.”

“When Paul and I met, he started the conversation the same way the film starts, saying, ‘I want to direct a film myself, but everybody’s advising me against it, and I don’t understand why.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m here to talk to you about directing a film, so why don’t we get to know each other and see if we can conceive of an approach that would appeal to you.’ That began a very long and involved process of communication, but in that initial meeting, I didn’t relate to Paul as a fan.”

Filmmaker Matt Wolf Had To Earn Paul Reubens’ Trust

Pee-wee’s Playhouse served as Wolf’s gateway to Reubens’ creative world, being “transfixed” as a kid.

“Pee-wee’s Playhouse was probably my first encounter with art that I had a visceral, emotional relationship to, and that stuck with me,” Wolf muses. “In retrospect, Playhouse was depicted as this place of radical acceptance where creativity thrived, and it got wrapped up in my DNA. Pee-wee remained a touchstone for me, not as an uber fan, but as something influential that was part of the slate of references that informed who I am and what I do.”

The filmmaker realized Reubens was “very different” from Pee-wee Herman and more “intense and skeptical.”

“Every word I said counted and mattered,” he explains. “It began a long process of building a relationship. Something I always say to people when I start a film is that I don’t think trust should be expected. It has to be earned, and I wanted to earn Paul’s trust. That proved to be a very difficult endeavor.”

At what point did he feel that his subject trusted him?

“It’s a good question, and I don’t fully know, but I know he said, ‘At some point, you just have to take a leap of faith.’ He took a leap of faith with me, and I’m grateful for it,” Wolf, who also produced the documentary, reveals. “That said, it wasn’t because he fully trusted me; it was because he wanted a documentary to be made, and I think he felt I was the right person. He felt I understood how to do something artistic that wasn’t a run-of-the-mill celebrity biopic and that, while I may not have been a pushover who would do as I was told, I was willing to collaborate with him and engage in the hours of conversation that he needed to feel involved and secure that his point of view would be included in the film.”

“I maintained the final cut, and Paul had meaningful consultation, which is an arrangement that’s typical of docs these days, but that’s fairly ambiguous as to what that means. We kept punting the issue of what that meant and doing the kind of precarious dance people do when making a documentary.”

Paul Reubens Was Candid About A High Point In His Career

Among the many anecdotes Reubens shares is how much weed he and his co-writers smoked when creating Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the movie that made the pop culture phenomenon a movie star. However, the revelation didn’t shock Wolf.

“Stoners love Pee-wee, myself included,” he shares with a laugh. “I think that was also part of what was so odd about Pee-wee’s Playhouse. You would have the stoner college kids, get up in the morning, then wake and bake and watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and you’d have little kids. The two could exist side by side.”

“There was nothing tawdry about that; it was just a sensibility that crossed boundaries. There was something psychedelic and out there about the world that Pee-Wee lived in, and the world that Paul and his collaborators built, that I think was transfixing to kids like myself and trippy to adults who found the sweetness in Pee-wee, but also this aversiveness in his wild imagination.”

Now considered a classic, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was a box office hit, grossing $40.9 million despite Warner Bros., the studio behind it, having little faith in it. The screwball caper marked the feature directorial debut of Tim Burton, Reubens’ pick for the job. Securing time with him for the documentary was a coup for Wolf.

“Tim said no initially, and then he said yes, and I was incredibly grateful,” he confirms. “It was a quick and fast interview, but Tim said everything I needed to hear, and it would have been such an oversight not to have him and to hear his point of view because I think it was a magical collaboration. It was a case of right place, right time. The first big work people make, that first foray into the public eye, has something so naive about it. There’s a freedom that I think is on full display in that film, so it was a very kismet collaboration, and I’m glad that Tim took the time to share those memories.”

“There were a fair amount of interviews that were shot after Paul’s death, for instance, his sister, Tim, and artist Gary Panter, and some interviews that were unresolved became possible after Paul died. People wanted to reflect on their relationships with him. We also created a sort of museum of Paul’s collections and props, so we were able to do that after Paul passed away and to film that as well. It was a great representation of his creativity and his mind that we still had access to.” Aside from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Reuben’s other notable movie work includes Batman Returns, Flight of the Navigator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mystery Men, and Blow.

Paul Reubens Has The Last Word

Wolf and Reubens were due to have one last mammoth interview session before his death. Although he had much of what he needed to complete the film, was there a burning question Wolf wanted to answer to but never received?

“It wasn’t that I wanted an answer, but I was working chronologically through Paul’s life in this epic interview, and we stopped before the arrest in Florida,” he laments, referencing the entertainer’s 1991 detention for indecent exposure at an adult movie theatre in Sarasota. “Paul anecdotally discussed that because we had a digressive conversation over 40 hours, but I wanted to go in more detail through his arrest step by step. At the end of the film, I wanted to reflect with him, not only about his late career work, but also about how he felt having gone through the full interview about this process, if he did have all the perspective he thought he had, or if he had learned something about himself through the course of telling his full story. He had also been on the record and in the media discussing his second arrest.”

“There was material that allowed me to give his last words in his own voice, but it was important to me for the film to end in his voice. The day after Paul Reubens died, I started reading the 1,500-page transcript of my interview with him, and I found significance and meaning and all sorts of things that I wouldn’t have understood before. I did encounter what are the last words of Pee-wee as Himself, which were profound and moving to me, and they actually were the last things Paul said in the interview.”