STEVE! (Martin): A Documentary In 2 Pieces is streaming on Apple TV+ now. We sat down with its director, Morgan Neville, to talk all about it…
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #49
As many things do, it all started with a ‘Maybe’… For years, Steve Martin lived in the same building as a film producer. Every six months or so, said producer would get into the same elevator as Martin, and ask him about a documentary. The answer would always be ‘no’, right up until the point it wasn’t. It was around three years ago, in the usual elevator, that the producer asked the regular question. However, that time the answer shifted to that ‘maybe’; something had changed. Now, in March 2024, a three-hour documentary, in two 90-minute films, is debuting on Apple TV+.
Let’s rewind a bit, though. Specifically, to when filmmaker Morgan Neville was, at 12 years old, a huge Steve Martin fan.
“Pretty much every 12-year-old I knew was a giant Steve Martin fan,” he laughs. “I was of that perfect age where every kid was quoting Steve Martin lines.”
This was the late 1970s. Martin’s comedy records were best-sellers. His stand-up tours became legendary. He’d just broken into movies. He was arguably the most famous face in American comedy at that moment in time.
45 years later, Neville – an Oscar-winning documentary maker – has put together two side-by-side films, entitled STEVE! (Martin): A Documentary In 2 Pieces, that already feel like the definitive telling of their subject’s story.
I put to him, then, that he might just have been the worst person to make the film. He knows straight away where I’m coming from.
“As a filmmaker, I actually think approaching it as a fan is a very unhelpful way of approaching a subject.
“I didn’t want it to be a ‘greatest hits’ thing. I wanted it to be the story about this person who I was getting to know. And we spend much more time talking about his failures than his successes.”
Leap of faith
We’re chatting on a cold February day, with the film weeks away from completion. Neville came to it pretty much direct from his acclaimed documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, and he openly admits he was seeking something lighter.
But: Steve Martin? Isn’t he the really private person, who’s very exacting about what he talks about and what he doesn’t? Well, yes. Morgan Neville though is no slouch. He took home Oscar gold for the terrific 20 Feet From Stardom, and the subjects of his films have ranged from Keith Richards and Brian Wilson to Fred Rogers, Orson Welles and Gore Vidal.
Crucially, Steve Martin was interested. A call went into Neville to gauge his interest, and a very quick, positive response was secured. Thus began a process of discovery and exploration of Steve Martin’s story. That, and the ultimate question as to what form that should take.
It’s complicated
It’s a slightly different mechanic, interviewing someone who spends so much time interviewing other people. Given that I’d spent a fair amount of time researching him, watching his work and then jotting down discussion points, I wondered what his process was. “I do a lot of research,” he agrees. “And I think about it. But when I generally begin a film, I go into it with no agenda.”
He’s talked about this before, and his approach is “I don’t really like to call interviews ‘interviews’. I like to call them conversations.”
As such, his first meetings with Steve Martin, once it was clear he was agreeable to making such an extensive documentary of his life, were just that: conversations.
“The first three or four times I talked to him, I brought a tape recorder and set it up. Then he and I would spend the afternoon talking about anything. You know, we could talk about kids or art or film. All part of getting comfortable with each other.”
But there was more to those conversations than just that. Morgan Neville was making a documentary and knew it. “Part of it is me seeing how he thinks, and how he sees his own story. Then we, you know, chip away at it in different ways, and get deeper into it.”
It’s a process that Neville’s employed on his previous films, but unusually in the case of this one, he was working with somebody who had been interviewed a lot. He needed to get past the usual Q&A back and forth, of asking for an anecdote about a certain film or something of that ilk. They just needed to talk.
The big year
It was three months after this process began that Morgan Neville began to see just what the film was. Unusually, he opted for a two-part documentary with each instalment entirely independent of the other.
Different teams worked on each; they weren’t reviewing each other’s work. The commonality between chapter one and chapter two was director and subject, but even then, we don’t actually see modern-day Steve Martin in part one. His voice is heard, but it stops just at the release of his breakthrough film, The Jerk, in 1979.
“The first part of Steve’s life is this very singular narrative that he wrote about in his memoir.”
He very much did: entitled Born Standing Up, the book is a candid exploration of his early years, and how he became the most famous stand-up comedian in America – and why he suddenly decided to walk away from it all.
“I loved his book so much, and that story is so great,” Neville says, and it was a tale he was able to embellish with a lot of unseen archive. The Holy Grail to that period was a diary that Steve Martin kept in 1975, one of the many items discovered when Neville and his team spent time sifting through Martin’s basement. 1975 would prove to be a key year.
All of me
The decision to go for a very different second film is reflective of the very different life that Martin then built for himself once he walked away from stand- up. His films, his love of art, his banjo playing, and– more recently – his tour with his close friend Martin Short.
“Steve was saying ‘you know, I’m going to go on the road with Marty, do you want to film us?”
His hand was duly ripped off, and Short is one of the contributory voices in the second film, alongside members of Martin’s family, Eric Idle, Frank Oz and more. But this is no Wikipedia scrape or playing of the greatest hits.
“The question in the second part is how did the guy I met, this father and husband, this collaborator, become this guy from the totally isolated character in the first film.”
To answer it, his subject – again, a famously guarded man – needed to open up, and he very much does so. “You can definitely tell when somebody’s being defensive, but from the get-go with Steve, he was very willing to let go of things. I didn’t feel like he was self- conscious or self-censoring.”
“I feel like when he decided to do this, he said, okay, I’m going to show up.”
Neville had thought he might from following his more recent work. We see in the film the telling of his movie stories via illustrations, for instance, but there are also the threads in Steve Martin’s plays and novels.
“I never felt like I was trying to crack this nut. I never tricked him into revealing himself. He was kind of willing to open up.”
Trust was the key of course, and that had to be earned. It was that trust that led to Martin allowing Morgan Neville to scour through the more personal entries in that 1975 diary. The level of trust was demonstrated when Neville was finishing the film, and Martin was musing about watching it.
“I could show it you,” he told the star, “or you know, I could show it to somebody else you respect who could kind of be an intermediary.”
He mentioned a film director who might do that, which Martin considered. Martin’s response?
“‘The only opinion I care about is yours.’”
A simple twist of fate
If it was a phone call out of the blue that brought the documentary to Morgan Neville, it’s also something he freely concedes both he and Steve could only make now.
“It was not only the respite I needed in making this film, just emotionally. But I feel like personally, as I’m getting older, it was a chance to think about an artist I respect, dealing with being older.”
Previous living subjects of Neville’s life haven’t been overtly aware that they’re in the November or December of their life, yet Steve Martin is.
“What really matters?” Neville poses. “Does relevance matter? How do you prioritise your life? It was a chance for me to think a lot about that.”
Still, I have to go back to that 12-year-old Steve Martin fan who, decades later, would find himself in a room with Martin Short and Steve Martin, as they spent a day or two working on jokes and enjoying each other’s company.
“It was one of my all-time favourite days,” he beams. “We actually shot for two days, shooting gold. Them just doing joke after joke. Seeing them both cracking each other up, but also them as craftsmen. Not always laughing, but appreciating a joke in a craftsman kind of way.”
In the beginning, when they were shooting that material – which is in the second film, with a lot of it not fitting in the final cut – Neville and his crew were trying not to laugh.
“Then Marty said something like, ‘God, is anybody ever kind to laugh? Are these jokes terrible?’”
They weren’t.
“I said to everybody, if you need to laugh, laugh.” They laughed, and laughed a lot. It proved to be one of the many pinch-yourself moments for a filmmaker who defied the old cliché of never meet your heroes…
STEVE! (Martin): A Documentary In 2 Pieces is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
