The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman Speaks (PTFO Vault)

Summary

Pablo Torre Finds Out – “The Banned Prince Documentary: Director Ezra Edelman Speaks”

Podcast: Pablo Torre Finds Out
Host: Pablo Torre (Le Batard & Friends)
Guest: Ezra Edelman (Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker)
Date: August 28, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode is a rare and deeply personal conversation with Oscar-winning documentarian Ezra Edelman about the making—and mysterious demise—of The Book of Prince, his unreleased, nine-hour Netflix documentary on the iconic musician Prince. The episode delves into both the years-long creative process and the subsequent legal and ethical controversies that led to the film being permanently shelved. Throughout, Pablo and Ezra critique the current state of celebrity documentaries, debate the power of estates versus artistic truth, and wrestle with what it means to document the life of a legend who remains unwilling—or unable—to be fully known.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Lost Prince Documentary: Genesis & Fallout

• The Opportunity & The Challenge
  • Ezra received unprecedented access to Prince’s vault and the charge to tell his story.
    • “I also know Prince is basically this mysterious figure, and I know that his story in some ways hasn't really ever been told.” — Ezra (11:21)
  • Ezra devoted nearly five years to crafting the film, describing an almost “sadomasochistic” level of immersion. (10:42–11:16)
• The Film’s Fate
  • Despite years of effort, Netflix and Prince’s estate ultimately blocked the release, citing purported “dramatic factual inaccuracies” and “sensationalized renderings” (17:17).
  • Netflix and the estate “came to a mutual agreement that will allow the estate to develop and produce a new documentary.” (Variety, quoted at 34:43)
  • The documentary is now metaphorically and literally “in a box in a huge warehouse, like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.” — Ezra (5:49)

Crafting Prince’s Story: Intention vs. Reception

• Prince’s Complexity
  • Ezra set out to map Prince’s creative genius, contradictions, and humanity—including the trauma, addiction, artistic growth, and the impact of intense fame.
    • “He was a shapeshifter…there's so many eras…I was trying to find a through-line for that person who evolved through all these styles, why he did what was going on underneath.” — Ezra (13:14)
  • The film explored difficult issues: Prince’s isolation, an emotionally fraught relationship with his child and wife, and allegations of emotional and physical abusiveness. (16:21–16:34)
• Resistance from the Estate
  • The estate’s legal review yielded only “editorial, not factual issues.” Ezra argues their motivation was to protect Prince’s myth more than his legacy.
    • “They came back with a 17-page document full of editorial issues, not factual issues. Do you think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate?” — Ezra (17:44)
    • “They're afraid of his humanity.” — Ezra (19:50)

Art, Truth, and Editorial Authority

• Who Gets to Tell the Story?
  • Pablo and Ezra question whether powerful estates should control narratives about public figures, especially when it comes to presenting uncomfortable truths.
    • “Right now we live in a culture…where the subject gets to dictate who they are to everybody. And that is not the way the fourth estate was set up.” — Ezra (30:23)
• Commercialization vs. Complexity
  • There is increasing commercial pressure to produce “sanitized” documentaries, or “slop,” as Ezra calls them, which lack rigor or critical depth.
    • “The public doesn't seem to…even know the difference. That's the sad thing. They're being served slop, and they're getting used to it.” — Ezra (31:53)
    • By contrast, The Book of Prince was “a full meal,” not deliverable in algorithm-friendly clips. (32:24)
• Editorial Integrity
  • Ezra refuses to make films in which subjects, or their representatives, get editorial veto or paid producer status:
    • “There are movies being made with subjects that have some say in how the story is told or are getting paid for their access, which to me is a no-no.” (31:50)

The Human Toll of Unmade Art

• Personal Cost
  • Ezra describes existential frustration: “It's an indescribable feeling. That one I've been wrestling with for a while... it's a big zero, it's a negative space.” (33:08–33:27, 41:51)
  • He reflects on the impact to the creative team, who won’t even have IMDb credits for their work. (41:51–42:36)
• No Regrets, but No Repeats
  • Asked if he’d do it again knowing the outcome, Ezra is clear:
    • “No. Absolutely not. For what's happened, no. Would I have done anything differently in the process that led to this result? No.” (47:09)

The Politics of Legacy: Sanitized Narratives

• Upcoming Estate-Produced Projects
  • The Prince Estate is producing its own Broadway version of Purple Rain and a new documentary, both expected to be “polished” for mass appeal, with troubling or “complicating” details omitted.
    • “Are you going to learn anything about Prince? I doubt it. Are you going to learn anything dark about Prince? I doubt it. Anything complicating about Prince? I doubt it.” (44:08)
    • “That is up. I’m sorry.” (40:06)
• Social Role of Documentary
  • Ezra maintains it’s “part of how we go through the world and improve as humans” to examine major figures honestly—flaws and all. (35:29)
  • Jill Jones’s letter (22:22–24:48) argues the world wants Prince as a myth, not a man, ensuring the true depth of his humanity will remain obscured.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the film’s disappearance:
  • “The image I’ve had in my head is the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, of just a huge warehouse somewhere in Netflix, a crate and just, like, put away.” — Ezra (5:49)
• On documentary ethics vs. hagiography:
  • “The irony being that Prince…who fought for artistic freedom, who didn’t want to be held down by Warner Brothers…now in this case…it’s like, I worked really hard making something and now my art’s being stifled and thrown away.” — Ezra (18:14)
• On the futility of seeking closure:
  • “If I allow this thing to consume me and eat me up from the inside, in a way, then that’s kind of on me. So I’ve had to figure out a way to get sort of beyond those feelings because I can’t win, that I lose.” — Ezra (47:09–48:49)
• Jill Jones (Prince’s muse/protégé):
  • “Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him… The world is unwilling to accept Prince as a man, only as a myth. Without the elaborate stagecraft, without the veil of mystery, his raw humanity is deemed insufficient… The recent choices made by Netflix and his estate only reinforced this truth.” (22:22–24:48)
• On modern documentary culture:
  • “Right now, we live in a documentary universe where the subject gets to dictate who they are to everybody. And that is not the way the fourth estate was set up.” — Ezra (30:23)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:47 – Ezra and Pablo begin conversation about the documentary’s cancellation.
• 05:49 – Ezra’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” metaphor.
• 10:42–14:33 – The grueling filmmaking process and motivation for doing a Prince documentary.
• 17:17–18:46 – Why Netflix and the estate killed the film; “editorial vs. factual” concerns.
• 19:50 – Ezra critiques the estate’s fear of Prince’s humanity.
• 22:22–24:48 – Jill Jones’s letter: Prince as myth vs. reality.
• 30:23 – Who should tell these stories, artist or journalist?
• 31:53 – “Slop” vs. “full meal:” the problem with sanitized documentaries.
• 32:41–33:27 – The existential loss of shelved art.
• 34:43–35:29 – Netflix/estate statement and the “invasion of privacy” debate.
• 40:06–42:36 – Purple Rain’s Broadway adaptation and the problem of “tidied up” history.
• 43:55–45:42 – The payoff of mixing pain with celebration in documentary storytelling.
• 47:09 – Would Ezra do it all again? “No—absolutely not.”
• 49:11 – The sound of closure (Pablo’s rhetorical conclusion).

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Final Thoughts & Takeaways

• Ezra Edelman’s The Book of Prince remains lost to the public, a singular work exploring Prince’s humanity, contradictions, and genius—perhaps too honestly for the gatekeepers who guard his legacy.
• The episode frames a vital debate for contemporary documentary and journalism: Who gets to define the “official” story—especially when history’s most dazzling public figures are, as Ezra puts it, “deliberately complicated people”?
• For all those who value fearless, challenging, deeply sourced stories over sanitized legend, Edelman’s ordeal is both a cautionary tale and a rallying cry.

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Transcript

[Pablo Torre]

Okay, so hello, it is me, Pablo, entering, invading even your ears. Because I have done something I have not done before, which is take the advice of someone who once told me that if people wish to support you financially, if they wish to support your journalism, your very strange future of journalism, meaning your newsroom, your ambitions, your desire to investigate things people don't want you to investigate, you should let them. And so I am on Substack, my [e-mail]. we'll put a link in the show notes of this episode. I have turned on paid subscriptions and if you didn't know I have a substack, guess what? It's free. And that's still there for you. And it's worth it. But the paid subscribers who support this show and us will get legitimately cool personalized benefits. We will make it worth your while. Pablo. Show is where you sign up. Click the link in the show notes. Help support us, please. Thank you, thank you, thank you on that front. And this. This episode today is a handpicked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're going to find out what this sound is.

[Ezra Edelman]

I'm like, this is a gift. A nine hour treatment about an artist that like, was, by the way, brilliant. Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. Yeah, and yet you also have to confront his humanity right after this ad.

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[Ezra Edelman]

There.

[Pablo Torre]

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[Ezra Edelman]

Are we starting?

[Pablo Torre]

Of course, of course we're in it.

[Ezra Edelman]

I know, I. Maybe I need a shot at the kill.

[Pablo Torre]

Ezra Edelman. You want to explain why you're here?

[Ezra Edelman]

No, you can explain.

[Pablo Torre]

I, I, I want.

[Ezra Edelman]

Why am I here? Yeah, why am I here?

[Pablo Torre]

Well, there's a Variety headline that I just want to read.

[Ezra Edelman]

That's why I'm here.

[Pablo Torre]

Quote Controversial Prince NETFLIX documentary will not be released. Estate is free to create new project. This from February 6, 2025.

[Ezra Edelman]

Oh, that's why I'm here, right?

[Pablo Torre]

Yes.

[Ezra Edelman]

Yeah, fun.

[Pablo Torre]

So when Ezra and I sat down in our studio to record this episode, nobody had ever heard him talking about his controversial Prince Netflix documentary, as Variety put it into a microphone. Which is also completely unsurprising to anybody who knows Ezra. Because the guy who won the best documentary Oscar for O.J. made in America does not love talking in public in general. His whole thing is letting his work, his reporting in all of its tonnage, speak for itself. And so the OJ doc made for ESPN was eight hours long, you may recall. It was so long actually, and so unfairly good that it inspired the Academy Awards themselves to ban multi part series from the best documentary Oscar category altogether. And the Book of Prince, which Ezra made for Netflix, was gonna be nine hours long. But this time, Ezra's work cannot speak for itself because there is, I am told, reliably, a 0.000 repeating percent chance that any of you out there will ever be allowed to watch it.

[Ezra Edelman]

The image I've had in my head is the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, of just a huge warehouse somewhere in Netflix, a crate and just, like, put away.

[Pablo Torre]

And yes, Hollywood is a graveyard of all sorts of passion projects, several of which, incidentally, we have loved chronicling here on PTFO in the past. But the story behind the Book of Prince does feel different to me. It feels different because Ezra, who. Who turned 50 last year, devoted almost five years of his life to very quietly perfecting this film.

[Ezra Edelman]

So then you're caught in a space of, like, this is weird. I've been working really hard, and there's something that's really good, but no one even knows it exists.

[Pablo Torre]

But then a story about this entire saga appeared on the COVID of the New York Times Magazine last September, and the writer, who had been following the production process for a year and a half behind the scenes, declared it a, quote, cursed masterpiece, end quote, citing the more than 70 interviews that Ezra had conducted. And so, a month after that, with that seal broken, now, you may recall that Pulitzer Prize winning critic Wesley Morris and I did an episode of this very show in which we described our own experiences seeing Ezra's movie at an early screening ourselves, long before the documentary became, you know, the Lost Ark. And if you just want to know what's in the movie, I do recommend that you go watch that episode that Wesley and I did. But if you're like most other people in Ezra's life, here's just a fair warning. You're probably gonna have the same cursed reaction.

[Ezra Edelman]

Oh, my God, this is like, when can I see this? Is this coming out? And I'm like, mother, like, this isn't going away. And like, that was the life I've been living for the last six months. And I'm like, no, you can't see it. I don't feel like getting sued.

[Pablo Torre]

Nor did the best documentarian in America feel like opening up about any of this across from me in front of a microphone in this studio until now.

[Ezra Edelman]

Like, what do you do with the experience of putting everything of yourself into something? And there's this sort of, like, pattern of addiction that comes from, like, taking on something big, taking on something bigger, working really hard, seeing if you can figure it out, and you get some sort of dopamine hit from the world, how they respond to it. So what do you do when you have all that? But it's five years, and it was the most painful thing and the most.

[Pablo Torre]

Difficult thing, but you ultimately agreed to sit here across from me, your friend. And why. Why did you say yes?

[Ezra Edelman]

In the end, it's somewhere between. You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. Having dealt with the mishigos that has come with the fighting to try to get the film out into the world, the way that the story has been framed in the world by certain people. And then ultimately now the finality of the news of. Oh. The rights to this now are in the hands of the estate. But yes, maybe the whole saga has officially concluded and I lost. And this happens to be such a sort of extreme high profile episode in documentary filmmaking.

[Pablo Torre]

Yes.

[Ezra Edelman]

That I'm like, okay, well, let's just get this out. Because I. I am after some catharsis, if not closure, to move the on. I'm like, dude, just get over yourself and get back to work.

[Pablo Torre]

Right. You might have won a second Academy Award.

[Ezra Edelman]

No, I couldn't have, and no, I wouldn't have. And that was never the intention.

[Pablo Torre]

I believe that this would have been.

[Ezra Edelman]

Worthy of Pablo if you followed the news. You should.

[Pablo Torre]

I know. It's serialized, it's episodic. Instead of. The point being, you made something worthy of.

[Ezra Edelman]

To you.

[Pablo Torre]

To me. Correct.

[Ezra Edelman]

Instead, please don't make me tell you all the flaws that exist in the film, because I can do that too.

[Pablo Torre]

But instead, what you got is the eighth stage of grief, which is podcasting.

[Ezra Edelman]

Is that the eighth? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah, I think that's right. Correct. This is. This is my reward. This is my consolation prize. Sitting across from you and your cardigan.

[Pablo Torre]

I think people need to be caught up on what the you spent that time doing. Like, what does it take to make something that leaves you feeling like this?

[Ezra Edelman]

There was a pretty consistent immersion in this that really did take this long. I mean, it's. It's a little bit.

[Pablo Torre]

A bit sadomasochistic.

[Ezra Edelman]

Yeah. But there's a sense of like, I like challenges. And, you know, if someone calls you up and says, hey, what do you think about Prince? We have his entire vault that's never been accessed or seen. And then I'm like, I also know Prince is basically this mysterious figure, and I know that his story in some ways hasn't really ever been told.

[Pablo Torre]

Here's the puzzle. And this is the puzzle solver that we're gonna pay to do this.

[Ezra Edelman]

There's a reason why Prince's stories that were been told. Prince was not someone in life that was interested in sharing. And he cultivated an air of mystery and he did it in a pretty impressively consistent domineering and ironclad way. He famously, if not notoriously, lived a life that was sort of marked by pretty dramatic sort of severing of relationships and separations. And by the way, there have been plenty of books written about Prince, but none have really connected the dots of his life to really sort of go, how did we get from a teenage virtuoso genius who was the youngest artist signed by Warner Brothers and given complete creative control to a guy who died of a drug overdose in an elevator in Paisley Park? In essence, died in a box within a box that he built himself. Especially the guy who, in much the public's consciousness, didn't do drugs.

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[Ezra Edelman]

Look, there's a responsibility and obligation to me as a filmmaker, as a documentarian to answer the question, well, how did that happen?

[Pablo Torre]

So is that the question that you set out to craft this map to answer?

[Ezra Edelman]

I was trying to answer a question of someone who. He is an artist that has really helped people go through the world feeling seen themselves.

[Pablo Torre]

Yes.

[Ezra Edelman]

His androgyny and his sort of being able to tap into his female side, his racial sort of ambiguity at times, and his message that sort of comes from being, let's just say, open to all things. By nature of him being 5 foot 2, he's like, he looks like the underdog and he is this sort of like pixie fairy, purple genius. But like, the guy never stopped working and really worked in service of the fans. So he lived as a mystery and he died as a mystery. But like the guy, he was a shapeshifter and so he morphed, he changed lives. And so the guy who became a Jehovah's Witness in, you know, the early aughts and, you know, all of a sudden was like, under the guidance of Larry Graham. That's a different dude than the dude who did the Dirty mind album in 1980 and was singing about, you know, that's also part of his evolution. And so in a lot of ways, because there's so many eras, I think there's a lot of people who like, love different parts of Prince. But I was really interested in trying to like find a through line for that person who evolved through all These styles, why he did what was going on underneath, and trying to sort of find a roadmap and trying to shed light on who this person was.

[Pablo Torre]

Once you realize the degree of difficulty here, I want to get to your decision then to not just roll up your sleeves, but to spend almost five years digging.

[Ezra Edelman]

It's just more like no one knows who this dude was. I'm going to try to figure it out. I'm not professing to know everything that happened with this person. It's the best I could do. This isn't, by the way, like, R. Kelly, and like, it's like, we already know what he's guilty of, and you're just like, exposing sort of really horrid truths. And that people need to know because this guy's got to go down. This isn't that. But people sort of were defensive in terms of, like, as if he were that the relationship to how much people love Prince. And it's like, so who wants this? Like, who wants sort of a microscopic sort of accounting of someone's life when some of it is going to be a little scummy at times? But the whole point of it is the journey. And the whole point of it was actually reflecting a journey that he went through. Prince's whole thing was that he's a Gemini. And so this sort of push pull of who he was and in all these facets, male, female, black, white, artist, businessman, it goes on and on in terms of this binary. In his head was this idea of, like, good and evil, which, sorry, God and sex. And that was another basic dichotomy of his art. And he was always sort of weighing his own moral account of how he was going through the world. And he believed in karma in terms of, like, how he treated people. And I think one of the things that was fascinating is that Prince had a baby with his wife, Maite Garcia.

[Pablo Torre]

Maite was pregnant.

[Ezra Edelman]

There was something wrong. She claims Prince declined medical intervention. The faith that he had just.

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It just made me believe that everything was going to be okay.

[Ezra Edelman]

Who tragically, was born with Pfeiffer syndrome. And they made the decision to take the baby off a respirator after eight days. There's multiple people who told me that based on Prince's brain, he basically almost felt that he was being punished for his sins. People had issues with how he treated people. He was emotionally abusive. He was physically abusive. You know, in very specific, I'll say for how it was reported. One instance. The point is, like, this all weighed on him. And so this sort of dramatic life event. He thought partially he was responsible. But like the way that certain people. Maybe the estate is characterizing sort of, oh, the film's bad. Or the film's this. It's negative. Or it has me to. I'm like, it's. There's a point.

[Pablo Torre]

Well, allow me to quote, just for the record here, what the estate said in that Variety article. Because the line from the article says that representatives for the late artist's estate previously claimed a first cut of the film was filled with, quote, dramatic factual inaccuracies. And quote, sensationalized renderings of certain events from his life, according to sources close to the situation.

[Ezra Edelman]

I mean, whatever, it's a joke. I mean, the whole idea is like, wait. So the estate had. Here's the one thing they're allowed to do. Check the film for factual and accuracies. Guess what? They came back with a 17 page document full of editorial issues, not factual issues. Do you think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate?

[Pablo Torre]

It is a question of who gets to claim that they have what feels like editorial authority. Or less, less high. Who has the truth on their side.

[Ezra Edelman]

Well, that it's more like who has control. I mean, again, this is reflective of Prince himself. Who was notoriously most famous control freaks in the history of artists. The irony being that Prince was somebody who fought for artistic freedom, who didn't want to be held down by Warner Brothers, who he believed was stifling sort of his output. And now in this case, it's like, by the way, I'm not Prince, but like, I worked really hard making something and now my art's being stifled and thrown away.

[Pablo Torre]

But the underlying tension here is what does it mean when one of the greatest and most influential and significant Americans in pop cultural history is being cast as their estate would have it, as the victim of a documentarian, posthumously a posthumous victim of a story that is being told for the benefit of said director.

[Ezra Edelman]

How old are you, Pablo?

[Pablo Torre]

I am 39.

[Ezra Edelman]

What was your relationship to Prince before you saw this movie?

[Pablo Torre]

Extraordinarily minimal. He was represented in cartoons. He was the guy performing with Slave written on his cheek. He was a symbol. The artist formerly known as.

[Ezra Edelman]

Were you a fan?

[Pablo Torre]

I wouldn't self identify as a fan, but certainly I knew that this guy is really good at what he does.

[Ezra Edelman]

What was your relationship to Prince after having seen this movie?

[Pablo Torre]

My main sensation watching it was, this is one of the most impressive artists that has ever lived.

[Ezra Edelman]

This is the thing I just find galling. I mean, I can't get past this of like the shortsightedness of a group of people who. Whose interest is their own bottom line. They're afraid of his humanity. The lawyer runs the estate essentially said he believed that this would do generational harm to Prince. In essence, that the portrayal of Prince in this film, what people learn about him, would deter younger viewers and fans potentially from loving Prince. They would be turned off. This is, I think, the big issue here. I'm like, this is a gift. A nine hour treatment about an artist that, like, was, by the way, brilliant. Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. Yeah. And yet you also have to confront his humanity, which he, by the way, in some ways was trapped in not being able to expose because he got trapped in his own myth about who he was, the world. And he, like, had to maintain it.

[Pablo Torre]

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[Ezra Edelman]

Can I read something to you?

[Pablo Torre]

I was wondering why your phone is out.

[Ezra Edelman]

Jill Jones, who was a Prince protege, a muse who spent essentially the 80s with him and was someone who was a girlfriend of Prince's, was in the film and to me one of the most truthful voices in the film and was someone who discussed in detail an instance where she was abused by Prince physically and by the way that's not the totality of the story of her with Prince, but like, you still see how much she loves him, even though she went through an experience with him that was hard, like a decade of her life, wanting more, wanting to be an artist that was got to do her own album, wanting to be his exclusive girlfriend or the girlfriend when she always was sort of like, not that it was almost someone again, when you talk about what it means to be a kept woman or she even, you know, she refers to him as like a pimp in the movie. And like, by the way, this is one side, but this is what she wrote after the news came out about the film being canceled. Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him. He built a Persona so larger than life that it became a prison, a gilded cage, one he could never fully step out of. Prince's struggle with drug addiction was deeply intertwined with his relentless pursuit of perfection. An impossible standard he imposed on himself to satisfy a fan base that craved his mystique, his eccentricity and his ever evolving artistry. At his core, he was a consummate people pleaser, trapped in the expectation to remain an enigma, always surprising, always beyond reach. The tragedy lies in the fact that so many refused to acknowledge the truth of who he really was. He understood this better than anyone. He knew that revealing his true self, stripped of the carefully crafted Persona, would lead to rejection. And in a way, he was right. The recent choices made by Netflix and his estate only reinforced this truth. The world is unwilling to accept Prince as a man, only as a myth. Without the elaborate stagecraft, without the veil of mystery, his raw humanity is deemed insufficient. His struggles, his journey, his sacrifices, all the elements that shaped him will remain obscured. Instead, the world will likely receive a sanitized, polished version of Prince, A carefully curated illusion that erases the depth of his reality.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, I should have interviewed her.

[Ezra Edelman]

Yeah, you should have, but I mean this.

[Pablo Torre]

I want to address what she's saying there, which is an argument on behalf of not merely this film coming out, but of how we should approach people with the aforementioned significance that is both cultural and also profound. How do we tell the story that same idol does not want to be told about themselves? With OJ Simpson and with Prince, it's been here is the best attempt that I have, I Ezra Edelman at cracking a safe. How have those two safes, O.J. and Prince, for people who will never see the Prince film, How are they different?

[Ezra Edelman]

I don't Think these are similar exercises. OJ By Dent of what he had gone through had been one of the more picked over Americans in our recent cultural history. So, like, I didn't expect there to be that much revelatory intimately that I was going to find about O.J. that hasn't already in some ways been reported on. I was more interested in taking a larger view of a story that sort of ended up being so fixated around, you know, a year period and a night and what happened and all this stuff that I didn't frankly care about to understand the greater sort of sociological, historical context that led us to this moment and why everyone sort of lost their minds in this the way they did.

[Pablo Torre]

I want to point out, by the way, that when O.J. died, I, I think, bothered you more than I ever have in my life.

[Ezra Edelman]

Yeah, so did a lot of people.

[Pablo Torre]

You did zero interviews.

[Ezra Edelman]

Like, I already did it in my mind. So the other thing is, this is. By the way, this first time I ever thought about this is. I guess I'm a little like Prince in that way. I just want to move on. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm not interested in being a person who gets on TV and all of a sudden, like, adds my two cents about O.J. i don't care.

[Pablo Torre]

But with Prince, it felt like you were drilling into something as opposed to zooming out.

[Ezra Edelman]

That's correct. I had this conversation with a couple people, saw the film and they thought it was going to be more like O.J. the thought of this, what Prince means to people and all this stuff, and I'm like, no, this is about this person who no one ever knew about. I was after the truth about this person's existence. Some of which, by the way, is his effect on others in terms of him as an artist and his popularity. But a lot of it was trying to be ironically told from his perspective of what he was doing and his own thrust going through his life.

[Pablo Torre]

I also want to establish that there are lots of films, lots of documentaries categorized as such in which access is integral to the task at hand. And they can be excellent and they.

[Ezra Edelman]

Also could be fraught with issues.

[Pablo Torre]

And you are taking an approach that is deliberately different. And now I just wonder if it also feels like it's endangered because when the question of who wants this is.

[Ezra Edelman]

A good one, I do believe a lot of people want this. Look, I've gone through the journey with. However few people seen this movie in six chapters, and their relationship to who Prince is like, changes throughout the course of it by. By the end of it. You know, everyone loves him or everyone's more curious about him and his music than, for instance, before, even if they didn't know anything about him.

[Pablo Torre]

It's what the Estate, to me, has always gotten backwards, which is that we live in a time at which it's harder than ever to cancel, quote, unquote, somebody. And this is not a film that your takeaway ends up being as a viewer. Get this guy the out of here.

[Ezra Edelman]

No, it's like, the problem is, it's kind of what Jill said. It's like, man, he struggled so much. He was so, like, insecure, and he had so many. So much trauma. And his unwillingness and his insecurity prevented him from being open about said trauma because he had to present himself as this perfect genius. And his inability to share his truth, you know, was one of the reasons why he suffered his addiction in silence. And you would argue that, but for the way he was. Other people in his position might have been more able to get help. And I think that's one of the tragedies about his story. But it's connected to who he always was. He created a mystery. He obfuscated the truth of who he was to become famous as an artist. And then we were complicit in how we absorbed said artist, and we loved it. But then you get trapped in that. You keep having to change, you keep having to evolve, but your true self is always hidden. And so when the true self is then laid bare, you know, having died of an overdose, it's like, what do you do with that? That can't be hidden. That's stark. That's the truth.

[Pablo Torre]

There is a thing on Prince's Twitter account that the Estate seems to have posted when that Variety story came out. And it was kind of like a mini trailer for a forthcoming other project that is deliberately not the Ezra ET Development Project. But the quote from Prince posthumously is, despite everything, no one can dictate who you are to other people.

[Ezra Edelman]

By the way, I don't disagree with that.

[Pablo Torre]

But I think the question we are left with as a media industry is what are we trying to do when it comes to people who don't want their own story to told?

[Ezra Edelman]

Right now we live in a culture and in a documentary universe, and in some ways in a journalistic universe where the subject gets to dictate who they are to everybody.

[Pablo Torre]

Correct.

[Ezra Edelman]

And that is not the way that the fourth Estate was set up. So my issue is that in trading for access, you now have a lot of companies and filmmakers making deals with the subject sanitizing their story and. Or their image. That to me it's like, of course it serves them. You don't have to put in what you don't want put in. But it is truthful.

[Pablo Torre]

But that editorial power of decision making, what deserves to be in what feels like an authoritative treatment of someone's story. Why should it be you?

[Ezra Edelman]

Well, I'm not saying it should be me. I'm just saying because I take the responsibility seriously and I try very hard and I have integrity as a person, as a filmmaker. I'm not here, by the way, to give you, like, to prove why I should be worthy of doing anything. I think the exercise is very hard. I think the danger and the problem I'm. I'm finding is that what's the compromise? Of course, there are movies being made with subjects that, like, have some say in how the story is told or are getting paid for the access, which to me is a no, no. And gets to be a producer of their own story. And in what happens that these streamers or whoever the distributors are, they get a film about whomever you know.

[Pablo Torre]

Oh, and you're like, the incentives align.

[Ezra Edelman]

Right. So no. And by the way. And at this point, the public doesn't seem to. Somewhere between care or know the difference. And that's the. That's the sad thing. Yeah, it's like this. They're. They're being served slop. And they're getting used to the fact that this is like, oh, I guess this is like. Like short rib. And I'm like, it's not. It's slop. And I think that's the bigger issue. This film about Prince, to me, it's a full meal. And it's not something you can just like, tear through. It's tough at times.

[Pablo Torre]

It's not meant to be clipped. It's not meant for the algorithm.

[Ezra Edelman]

Well, it's in the sum. It's greater than its parts. That's the point. There's hopefully an experience you've gone through. By the way, I'm talking about this as if anyone is going to see it. They won't. So it's like. It's amazing.

[Pablo Torre]

What does it feel like to catch yourself doing that, though?

[Ezra Edelman]

I mean, because it's still. But that's. You know, we've talked about this. It's the tree falling in the forest thing. It's like it still exists.

[Pablo Torre]

But look, part of the whole thing with Prince, right, is that his genius was validated over and over again by his output. And you are somebody in a very different way whose swings are so big recently that when no one gets to.

[Ezra Edelman]

See it, it's an indescribable feeling. That one I've been wrestling with and dealing with for a while. I mean, like, I don't want to make this, like, you know, this. The reason I don't want to do this, because I don't. This is not like, woe is me. It's like people's films get shelved all.

[Pablo Torre]

The time, all the time.

[Ezra Edelman]

And like, there have been examples of this in the feature space and the documentary space. There's no guarantee of anything ever. This is just unique because of the subject, the time, the high profile nature, all of these things. The public interest in some ways, but.

[Pablo Torre]

The genre in which a documentarian is holding to account a celebrity in service of what feels like the public interest.

[Ezra Edelman]

But yet the way you just described that, or holding our public figures to account. I'm like, I wasn't making a film about Richard Nixon after Watergate. I was telling someone's story. And it's more like once you see certain things, you can't unsee them. There are things I might be interested as topics to pursue that those come from me. But when someone tells me about a harrowing incident that she experienced, here are my two choices. Oh, why did this happen? Was this something consistent within this man's behavior? Can I contextualize what that meant to him in his head? Where did this come from? Or I can just be like, oh, that's. They're not gonna like that. That might change people's image of Prince, so I better not put that in. Those are my choices. And then I am committing documentary malpractice.

[Pablo Torre]

I should point out that the Variety story does have a quote from Netflix which says that the Prince estate and Netflix have come to a mutual agreement that will allow the estate to develop and produce a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince's archive. As a result, the Netflix documentary will not be released.

[Ezra Edelman]

I read something, there was some article that had, I think it was the Times London and said, like, some fans are happy with the decision because they believe that this film would have been an invasion of his privacy. And I'm like, okay. And of course it's an invasion of his privacy. Like, I don't know what to do with that argument. That's not an argument.

[Pablo Torre]

But isn't that the fundamental disconnect when.

[Ezra Edelman]

It comes to he's a public figure.

[Pablo Torre]

But what that means, right?

[Ezra Edelman]

What it means, a public figure. I don't earn like, what's that like? He's an historical and historically important subject. He's one of the great artists of the last hundred years. We need to understand who these people are, how they made their art, what drove them, how they lived, how they died. It's part of how we go through the world and improve as humans. How we it's like, what are we talking about here?

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[Pablo Torre]

There are Richard Nixons and then there are our favorite musicians, the people who bring us comfort because they're in the toy department of music or sports, as opposed to what legislation did Prince pass?

[Ezra Edelman]

Woody Allen, Picasso, Michael Jackson, all of these people. R. Kelly I think it's up to everyone's personal code about how they choose to be affected by the understanding of who that person was and their ability to still revel in and enjoy said person's art. For me, and I'm just like, I'm not even gonna like go deep with this, but like, I think it'd be a little weird if, like when you know what R. Kelly was doing and what he's singing about, it's a little like, I can't do this. It's just like you're, it's like right in front of me. That's a little different for me than Michael Jackson, which I'm not. Like, again, I'm not, I'm not talking in any way on a moral level, but like I can listen to Michael Jackson's music and have an under certain understanding about. And yet I could also go to the Michael Jackson Broadway show and by the way, the estate's working on a Broadway show about Purple Rain. And, like, everyone's seen Purple Rain. And this is a movie that, while Prince didn't officially get a screenplay credit and write it, it's a fictionalized but sort of veiled, fictionalized story of Prince's life. Prince in his first motion picture, before he created the music, he lived every bit of it. And in it, Morris Day throws a woman into a dumpster, and he slaps Apollonia. Who Prince is in that movie, you know, in some ways is revealed, though it was always couched as fiction. And now they're doing this adaptation of Purple Rain for Broadway. And from my understanding, it's like they're changing Prince's character to make him more palatable or to at least tidy up the gender politics. And I think that's literally a phrase I read in the New Yorker piece about the playwright about who the character is to ostensibly make it more palatable for an audience in 2025. This is exactly my issue. The guy made a movie that's about himself. And, by the way, warts and all, in many ways, he could always hide behind the fact that it was, quote, fiction, but it wasn't fiction. And in our film, by the way, we use that to basically sort of play with the truthiness of his existence. There's so much in that that is real. And now the fact that we've arrived 40 years later, and rather than just like, oh, it's the 40th anniversary of Purple Rain, which was last year, and celebrating that. No, we're going to revisit it and revamp it and sanitize it and in turn, sanitize Prince's image for current audiences, for younger audiences, to make him a less troubling figure. That is up. I'm sorry.

[Pablo Torre]

Removing the complexity from a deliberately complicated person.

[Ezra Edelman]

I mean, it's not surprising. It's Broadway, but, like, again, this is what we're dealing with. I don't think my documentary stood much of a chance, if this is what's happening. It's just sad.

[Pablo Torre]

That seems like an exercise that can make someone not want to try and take a swing like this again.

[Ezra Edelman]

Well, I mean, again, it was a tenth of my life, if you look at it that way.

[Pablo Torre]

I hadn't until now.

[Ezra Edelman]

Like, why? Why would I. I think probably affects you differently physically, mentally, when you get older. And, like, it affected me so, like, I don't think I need to do that anymore.

[Pablo Torre]

But the reason I say that is because the reason that you deserve to have Swings like this. The reason you deserve to take these swings, the reason you deserve to have this editorial authority in which I want that guy trying to crack this safe, I want that guy making the decisions, is because what the media, broadly speaking, what journalists really need more than ever, are people who take that task so seriously that it makes them unhappy. Because we're going to test it, right? We're going to. We're going to throw estates at that. We're going to throw cease and desist letters at that. We're going to throw the business, the money at other people. If it's this painful, it tells me I want that guy to try.

[Ezra Edelman]

But I also. It is that painful. Look, here's the thing. I'm sitting here doing your podcast, but like, you know, Caroline Waterlow, Tamara Rosenberg, Nina Christic, Brett Granado, Gabe Rhodes, Ben.

[Pablo Torre]

Spencer, people who made the film with.

[Ezra Edelman]

You, Marley Kogan, Dan and Hinton, you know, Jenny Troyer, Deja Lee Carroll, they made the film. They were also putting themselves on the line and investing so much in themselves to make this thing as a PA or, you know, an archival assistant or as a producer or as an editor. And the way you go through the world is to amass credits. People see what you do and they go, oh, wow, that was really good. You worked on that. And right now, this doesn't exist in the world. It's a big zero. It's a negative space. I mean, why can't there be as. As Brett Cardano, one of my editors said, be nice if there were something on IMDb that said the book of Prince unreleased, and then the people who worked on it. Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

And. And I don't think it is changing anytime soon.

[Ezra Edelman]

No. I think the problem is this is a runaway train. Or has it already hit us and we don't know it?

[Pablo Torre]

Well, that's the most depressing thought in a very depressing series of thoughts that have been uttered.

[Ezra Edelman]

Okay. Do you feel right now, though, that, like, one of the things I love about you is your. Your earnest ambition to create a podcast that is trying to find out, to tell the truth, to be journalistically rigorous, and you have found an audience for that. And so I think you should feel good about that.

[Pablo Torre]

The whole trick of what you do, what I do, what anybody who wants to do, this thing that is not being incentivized by the algorithm, the whole trick of it is, hey, guess what? It's surprising how many people want this delicious piece of broccoli with cheese melted on it.

[Ezra Edelman]

I agree. Right. It's. It's still entertaining. It's still tasty.

[Pablo Torre]

That is what I want people to remember when they are deciding whether. Whether this is just vegetables, whether this is the thing that people did not ask for but they got because some guy feels like morally scolding them into caring about journalism. The whole point is that it can still be entertainment if you do it right.

[Ezra Edelman]

And that gets back to the general breakdown that's always been between, like, there are documentaries and there's a Hollywood movie. And so, in essence, that's what we're talking about here. There's a Hollywood movie which is a play on Broadway. Yes.

[Pablo Torre]

Inspired by true events.

[Ezra Edelman]

And so the issue is that now the estate is going to put out its own documentary, but that's not a documentary by definition. By definition, it's going to be a hagiographic, like, propaganda love letter to Prince, the artist. Are you going to learn anything about Prince? I doubt it. Are you going to learn anything dark about Prince? I doubt it. Anything complicating about Prince? I doubt it.

[Pablo Torre]

The troubling thing, of course, is that it may very well be wildly popular.

[Ezra Edelman]

Oh, it will be wildly popular. You know why? Because people want to see Prince, and deservedly so. The guy was one of the great entertainers, performers, musicians of all time. And that's what's really sad. You know, like, you see him perform in our film, you're like, I mean, I cried watching him, you know, in his 1982 performance, like during the Controversy tour when he was singing When We Were Mine. He is a magnetic performer.

[Pablo Torre]

There are scenes in your film that feel like great scenes in sports movies where the music is a payoff because you went through the journey of pain and suffering and you do tear up and you are in awe, as you would be with a great athlete. The difference here is that that pain and that suffering really only pays off if you actually depict the pain and the suffering. Man, I wish someone made a movie that had all that stuff in it.

[Ezra Edelman]

Yeah, well. Well, it's been fun talking to you, Pablo. Welp, in some ways, that's like, what are you gonna do? Well, I mean, at a certain point. Well, I don't know.

[Pablo Torre]

Welp, Welp.

[Ezra Edelman]

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Ezra Edelman]

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[Pablo Torre]

So what I'm left thinking at the end here, what I want to find out is now, with the benefit of hindsight, would you do this over.

[Ezra Edelman]

Again and have it turn out the same way?

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah.

[Ezra Edelman]

No. Absolutely not. For what's happened, no. Would I have done anything differently in the process that led to this result? No. I feel like I honestly, earnestly tried my hardest to make the best film and reacted to the circumstances I was presented with as truthfully and honestly to who I am and my belief system as possible. And at no point did I ever think it was okay if this were going to be the result. So it wasn't like, well, I'm going to do this and if this what happens, I'm going to live with it. It's just more like in the same way you just, like, you make the choices that are in front of you based on who you are, and I think based on the circumstances I was presented with at every point, I did what I believe to be the correct thing and that I'll live with. There's nothing about this that I won't get over. So it's just not really possible. So I actually, in a way that won't surprise you, but I mean, it's like when you end up with circumstances that are sort of so dramatic and so in sort of an unforeseen way, the basic need for vengeance and the basic desire to channel your anger. I have had those impulses and things, but I'm like, this is it. This happened. It's like if I allow this thing to consume me and eat me up from the inside, in a way, then that's kind of on me. So I've had to figure out a way to get sort of beyond those feelings because I can't win, that I lose. So why it happened, I don't know. And I just feel like I comported myself correctly throughout the entire exercise. That's the only thing I can control.

[Pablo Torre]

I think I have good news for you at the end here.

[Ezra Edelman]

What?

[Pablo Torre]

I just found out what closure sounds like for Ezra Adelman.

[Ezra Edelman]

Anything for you, Pablo.

[Pablo Torre]

This has been Pablo Torre. Finds out. A Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

[Ezra Edelman]

Sam.