One challenge for Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville when it came time to tackle the story of childhood comedy hero Steve Martin? That was keeping his journalist cap on without falling into fandom. “You’re building a relationship, and I’m understanding how he sees his own story and everything else,” Neville told The Hollywood Reporter. “But the fan part of it doesn’t totally go away because occasionally you’re like, ‘Tell me about the first time you were on SNL.’”
Neville avoided the fanboy approach entirely while making Apple’s Emmy-nominated STEVE! (martin) a Documentary in 2 Pieces. Any young comic would have been happy to gush about Martin’s influence. So would the veterans. “Any SNL person, (Jimmy) Kimmel, Conan (O’Brien), (Jimmy) Fallon, (John) Mulaney, they all would have talked,” he said. “Judd Apatow and Patton Oswalt are obsessed with Steve. But I don’t love that kind of doc, where somebody is telling me why somebody’s great.”
Instead, Neville “was trying to get more inside with him.” The comic made it easy by not playing up his prestige. “The person I meet when I start the film is just Steve,” he said. “It’s not ‘Steve Martin,’ the superstar. From the beginning, Steve was like, ‘Okay, if I’m going to do this, I’m really going to do it.’ We started by having these conversations where I went to his house and recorded us talking for hours.”
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Conversations that last for hours? Neville agreed that the whole process is a little like therapy. “Being a documentarian is often a para-therapeutic relationship,” he explained, “where you’re asking people about the most important things in their lives and trying to make sense of them.”
In the ‘90s — as discussed in the second part of STEVE! — Martin spent a lot of time working with therapists. The comedian famously had issues with his father, as comedians famously do, and Martin turned to writing plays as a way of working through the strain with his parents. Sitting down for the documentary was one more way for Martin to find catharsis.
But like reading an old journal full of one’s anguished thoughts, Martin wasn’t nuts about revisiting the conversations once he was done spilling his guts. (Neville actually did go through Martin’s old journals as preparation for the job. Assistants scanned 5,000 pages of Martin’s diary from 1975, the year before he first got wild and crazy on Saturday Night Live.)
Revisit all the pain? Martin said he had no interest in watching the final documentary. But when Neville didn’t send Martin a finished copy, the comedian reached out immediately. “Hey, I never got the link!”
“So I sent it to him,” Neville said. “He wrote me that afternoon and said, ‘I loved it.’” Then Martin gave the greatest compliment one can give to a stand-in therapist. “He wrote back 10 minutes later and said, ‘Can I show it to my shrink?’”