New York filmmaker Matt Wolf’s compelling, poignant and richly nuanced two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself, a portrait of the artist and performer behind Pee-wee Herman, Paul Reubens, premiered opening night of Sundance 2025, went on to win a Gotham Award for Outstanding Original Film, and is now streaming on Max. Driven by a soul-baring interview with Reubens—shot over more than 40 hours before his untimely death in 2023—the film excavates his kaleidoscopic influences, origins in the circus and avant-garde performance theatre; reflects on the severing of his iconic alter ego from his authentic self; and offers a window into his personal life. Among the film’s other interviewees are Paul’s sister Abby Rubenfeld, artists Gary Panter and Wayne White, actors Lynne Stewart, Natasha Lyonne, Laurence Fishburne, Debi Mazar, David Arquette, and Cassandra Peterson, and filmmakers Tim Burton and Judd Apatow.
Wolf’s previous feature documentaries include Wild Combination centered on the cult cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, Teenage exploring early youth culture and the birth of teenagers, Recorder about the activist Marion Stokes, who secretly recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years, and Spaceship Earth about Biosphere 2, a controversial experiment where eight people lived quarantined inside a replica of the planet. Wolf produced the Emmy-nominated, Sundance, Peabody and GLAAD Award-winning The Stroll, co-directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, which chronicles the history of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District from the perspective of trans sex workers. His short films about artists and queer history include Bayard & Me on the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, HBO’s It’s Me, Hilary about the Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight, I Remember about the artist Joe Brainard, The Face of AIDS about a notorious 1992 Benetton advertisement, and Another Hayride about the self-help guru Louise Hay.
With Emmy nominations voting beginning on June 12th and Pee-wee as Himself now streaming on Max, Matt Wolf speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about his approach to telling Paul Reubens’ story, navigating the documentary filmmaker-subject dynamic, and the sense of relief he observed when Reubens came out on camera during their extensive interviews.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: what was your relationship with the character of Pee-wee Herman before you got to know Paul?
Matt Wolf: “I was a big fan of Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a little kid, I was totally transfixed by that show. It was my first relationship to art that I had an emotional connection with, although I wouldn’t have been able to put words to it back then. I had that iconic pull-string Pee-wee doll dangling above my bed as a kid and it stayed there through my adolescence. Pee-wee became a sort of touchstone for me.”
“Years went by and I became a documentary filmmaker. I’ve made films about unconventional visionaries, queer artists and cultural figures and a lot of people who were ripe for reappraisal. In some ways Paul Reubens fit right into that, but in other ways he didn’t because he was such an iconic and well-known person. I had a sense that Paul, who was little known as himself, would be a compelling subject.”
How do you think you being a gay filmmaker factored into him agreeing to do the film or the way that you were able to connect with him?
“I think being gay was both a point of connection and a point of friction between us sometimes. Paul very much wanted to come out in the documentary. That was the decision he had made before I came into the mix. But I think he was also concerned that I would make the film overly focused on his sexuality or tell the story through a queer lens. Paul didn’t want to be depicted as a gay icon, that wasn’t his interest.”
“Obviously, I saw a lot of complexity in his decision to live in the closet for his career and what the long-term repercussions of that were for him and how the arrests and media controversies he experienced, to some extent, were a result of him leading a very anonymous private life. I think Paul felt comfortable coming out and discussing his sexuality with me, but I also felt in other ways he was at odds with me over that issue.”
You include a few exchanges where Paul seems quite barbed with you, although it usually ends up being playful. Was he less tricky with you when you were shooting the part of the interview when he was talking about being gay?
“He was really stressed, he was really squirmy and I told him that I was there to support him. When he did come out, it was like a thousand pounds lifted from his shoulders. I think being able to broach the topic, to discuss it and to stop overthinking it and to just go there was a relief to Paul. It was a very emotional day. He talked about his boyfriend from art school, Guy, and what happened with him and their relationship, and also Guy’s passing from AIDS. Paul met with him several hours before he passed away. So not only was it cathartic for him to discuss his own sexuality, it was intensely emotional for him to discuss that relationship and the death of that partner. I can’t speak for Paul, but he called me afterwards saying that he felt exhausted by it, but he seemed very relieved.”
Could you talk about including that beautiful Super 8 footage shot by Paul of his homelife with Guy?
“Paul had shot a lot of Super 8 from the late 1970s at a particular time in his life that usually isn’t well-documented for someone like Paul. So his private life was well-documented, but the most striking and moving material from that Super 8 archive was footage of his life with Guy in their Echo Park apartment with their cat, Coco. It was revelatory. When I saw that footage for the first time I cried. I was taken aback by the intimacy and the beauty of it. I don’t think Paul had seen it since the period in which it was shot. I wasn’t there when he watched that footage, but I can only imagine what it felt like to see it again.”
That section of the documentary is really resonating with a lot of people. For instance, The AIDS Memorial shared a post about it on their Instagram account.
“Yeah, I saw that. I think a lot of people are moved by that story and are very curious to know more about Guy, who was this radiant and compelling person who we don’t hear from in the documentary, obviously, but who begs to be known in his own right.”
It’s a really touching footnote that Paul did have someone, a romantic partner, there at the end of his life.
“I don’t know much about that relationship. It’s something that I found out about through Allison Berry who was Paul’s assistant for 40 years and is now the executor of his estate. She told me as much as Paul would have told me, or more. That he was in a relationship, he was really happy and surrounded by loving people at the end of his life, even though he died very privately.”
To some extent, this feels like it’s a film about the relationship between documentary subject and filmmaker. How far would you agree with that and how aware of that were you as you were shooting and then assembling the documentary?
“That was something I was interested in exploring, and so was Paul, but only in service of the theme of control. I think Paul was somebody who had an extraordinary sensitivity around control. He wanted to control everything and that’s really because he lost control of his personal narrative in the media. Our dynamic was interesting because we had a lot in common and we had a connection, but we were also often in conflict. There was a power struggle between us, but that power struggle wasn’t so much about me, it was about Paul’s internal wrestling with whether he would be willing to share that much of himself. So I decided to include that in the film to create more psychological depth for the portrait of Paul and to understand both his issues of control, but also his reluctance to share his personal life.”
Having over 40 hours of interview footage with Paul, what were your guiding principles as you went about deciding what to include?
“Well, of course there was the chronological biography of Paul and how that interwove with the story of Pee-wee Herman. When you make a film it’s like you’re braiding. There are different threads and there’s obviously the Pee-wee thread, there was the Paul thread, and then there was the thread of our relationship and his own relationship to being a documentary subject. So I was constantly braiding those back and forth, trying to create some symmetry and logic around it. But the main thread was Paul. With 40 hours, you have the ability to tell the majority of the story in the voice of a subject which is so rare. So I had a sense of the beats of his story that I wanted to cover and it was thoroughly contained within that interview.”
The interview footage with him feels so immediate. Why did you decide to use Errol Morris’ Interrotron method, which means that he was looking directly into the camera lens and therefore at us the viewer, and he was also looking at your face as you were asking the questions?
“It’s interesting, because a trope of Pee-wee’s Playhouse is that Pee-wee would often look directly into the camera and speak to the kids. So I wanted something like that, but a little more conversational. It’s a device that’s used quite a bit, but I think what people are reacting to is how close Paul is to the frame. So you really feel intimately close to him but, in some ways, it also makes you feel like you’re in his head, you’re in his brain. That level of intimacy was something I felt could be achieved with that device.”
You don’t feature that many contributors, why did you want to include Debi Mazar and what interested you about the relationship that she had with Paul?
“It may seem like there aren’t that many, but there are over 15 other people in the film. Paul is such a gravitational force that you don’t notice the rest of them so much. Debi is a really compelling person, period. Debi’s relationship with Paul was really interesting to me because in a lot of ways she saved him. She brought him out of reclusiveness and darkness and brought him back out into the world. Also, some people might say, she was a beard. I don’t think that’s the nicest language to use to discuss that relationship because she was a devoted friend and I think their relationship transcended labels.”
“Debi got him out in public on terms that he was comfortable with. She thought, ‘here is an artist who’s going to perish if he doesn’t create. I’m going to surround him with the love and support that he needs to move beyond the controversies that are overshadowing his life.’ She seemed like an essential figure in his life and while some people may have perceived them as being in a romantic relationship, I think it was always kind of a queer relationship. Debi was somebody from Downtown New York City who was not fazed by that sort of thing and understood the fluidity of those boundaries.”
I love your use of clips from all of Paul’s work, especially the Pee-wee’s Playhouse sequences. What struck you as you revisited that show as an adult, particularly the queer and nonconforming elements?
“Watching Pee-wee’s Playhouse now reinforces how influential it was to me. Seeing it now, I’m like, wow, that really shaped who I am. It shaped my sensibility and my taste and my point of view. I wouldn’t say it’s surprising, it’s delightful, and within that delight is a sense of recognition. I see where my sensibility comes from. It’s an origin point for a lot of things that resonate and reverberate in my brain.”
When it comes to Paul’s legal troubles, to what extent do you see both the arrests and the media coverage as laced with homophobia?
“With the first arrest, not so much, I don’t think homophobia was the case. I think that it was the division between Paul and his alter ego that collapsed and backfired at that moment. Paul was somebody who had had a sex scandal in the media, he had been a children’s entertainer, and he was a closeted gay man, so he was walking around with a target on his back.”
“With regards to his second arrest—that alleged possession of child pornography—without even knowing much, I always suspected that there was a homophobic witch hunt at play. When I examined the facts and went in depth on that case and what happened, that became clear to me. I think it’s best presented as facts in the film, but I’d always had that perception and that perception was confirmed, that he endured a homophobic witch hunt.”
What was it like getting to explore Paul’s amazing archive with all the weird and wonderful things that he’d collected over the years which you filled a warehouse with to show us in the film?
‘It’s extraordinary. He had the most extraordinary sensibility and it’s so unusual that somebody can massively collect all the things that inspire them. It was this amalgam of kitsch and art and ephemera and books and collectibles and junk. It was just beyond. It was like being in Paul’s brain, which was really satisfying.”
Do you know what is happening to any of that right now?
“They’re making plans, but I don’t know exactly what they are or when they’ll be ready to tell everybody what they are.”
At one point, Paul says that he would like a dreamy quality to the documentary and certain sequences do feel beautifully dreamy, why did you take that approach?
“I think that part of why he wanted to work with me as a filmmaker is that he saw aspects of that dreaminess in the way I render portraits of people and he wanted that for his own film. I said, ‘you chose the right guy, that’s my sensibility’. I think we wanted similar things in terms of the making of the film, even though the process was very difficult, we had a similar film in mind.”
By James Kleinmann
Pee-Wee As Himself, a two-part documentary directed by Matt Wolf, is now available to stream on Max.
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