A few years ago, feeling himself stuck in a creative rut, Davis Guggenheim made a list of what he was looking for from any potential new directing project. After entries like ‘adventurous’ and ‘form-breaking,’ the last item on the list specified ‘no famous people.’
Still: A Michael J Fox Movie may not have met that last requirement but in every other respect it fitted the bill, according to its director-producer. “I got so lucky,” says Guggenheim, “because this film brought the joy back in my work.”
The Apple Original film – nominated in seven Emmy categories, including best documentary or nonfiction special and documentary/nonfiction programme directing – recounts Fox’s rise to Hollywood superstardom in the 1980s, the difficult years that followed his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease at age 29 and his life today as he deals with the degenerative and incurable condition.
Guggenheim – best known for his 2007 Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth, as well as It Might Get Loud, Waiting For Superman and other non-fiction features – got interested after reading Fox’s four autobiographical books and realising that “there’s a story in this; this isn’t just another celebrity documentary.”
The filmmaker ticked one item on his list by telling the story in an unusual form: as a hybrid documentary, combining specially-created scripted elements with clips from Fox’s long resume of films and TV shows, excerpts from the audio versions of his books, verite sequences and contemporary interviews with the now-retired actor.
The clips do an uncanny job of illustrating Fox’s descriptions of events in his real life and were gathered by the film’s London-based Irish editor Michael Harte (also Emmy-nominated for his work on the project). Harte, according to his director, is “an obsessive fan” of Fox classics like the Back To The Future films and the Family Ties TV series and “watched everything” to find scenes that matched Fox’s recollections.
The verite scenes of Fox consulting with his doctor and working with his physical therapist were shot with a tripod-mounted camera, rather than in a traditional verite style with a hand-held camera.
“I decided that because Michael has Parkinson’s and is always moving, it would be interesting to have the frame locked off,” Guggenheim explains. “The idea was to have a wide frame, so that Michael could move within the frame.”
Interview sessions were conducted over a six-month span and each day’s work had to be timed to allow for Fox’s symptom-suppressing medications to take effect. But the intimate footage that resulted, shot with Fox appearing to look straight into the camera, gives the film a unique quality, Guggenheim suggests.
“I’ve never encountered someone so completely open as the subject for a documentary,” he says of Fox. “I asked everything and he was a completely open book.”
State of play for docs
With Still completed – it had its premiere at January’s Sundance festival and launched on Apple TV+ in May – Guggenheim is staying busy in his executive producer role with Concordia, the Los Angeles-based company he founded five years ago with producer Jonathan King.
As the studio behind such notable recent documentaries as Time, Boys State and 2022 Oscar-winner Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) – as well as Still - Concordia is an important player in the rapidly-evolving documentary sector.
“People are scared,” says Guggenheim of the current documentary climate, which has lately seen changing conditions among major buyers including CNN Films, HBO and Netflix. “They’ve been feeling change for a while, and the rate of change is accelerating. There’s a feeling that the market is shrinking. For five or so years, people were buying a lot of films and paying a lot of money, and that’s slowing down.”
That said, he adds, “There’s still an incredible amount of great work being done. There are more filmmakers than ever, the creative energy is as strong as ever. The reinvention of the documentary form is still strong.”
On his own behalf, Guggenheim is now once again searching for a new project to direct, a process that leaves him, he admits, “miserable. I’m out of my element not being able to work. I want to be in the editing room, I want to be on set.”
“My focus and my energy and my joy is all around directing,” he says. “I just want to keep this new feeling of joy and adventure in my work.”
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