The Big Picture - Morgan Neville’s Mister Rogers Documentary Reminds Us to Be a Good Neighbor | The Big Picture (Ep. 70)

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey chats with the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville about his new film, ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor,’ about one of the world’s foremost champions of kindness and decency, Mister Rogers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

it's not even that Mr. Rogers is a hero in Pittsburgh. He's a god in Pittsburgh. For instance, the first cab I got into, they said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm going to work on a documentary about Mr. Rogers. And he turned around and he pointed at me and he said, don't screw this up. Wow.

Okay. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most interesting filmmakers in the world. Morgan Neville makes movies about intimacy. His Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom is about the close distance between pop music fame and background anonymity. In Best of Enemies, it's the wide chasm between two men sitting across from each other.

In his new movie, Won't You Be My Neighbor, Neville shows just how near we could get to a man on our TV screen. That man is Fred Rogers, better known to children around the world as Mr. Rogers. Neville's movie is neither hagiography nor history lesson. It's more of a presentation of philosophy. Rogers, a Republican pastor, was one of the world's foremost champions of kindness and decency. He treated children like peers and made a public television show that spanned decades. Won't You Be My Neighbor is one of the year's best and most open-minded movies. I talked with Morgan Neville about why Mr. Rogers' message resonates today

and why he makes documentaries. Here's Morgan Neville. so delighted to be joined by one of the nicest guys in the world morgan neville talking about one of the nicest guys in the history of time mr rogers morgan thanks for joining us thanks for having me you made a film about mr rogers i said to you, I have not spoken to a single person who's seen this movie that hasn't felt differently about how they want to treat the world and see the world. It's been a common reaction. Yeah. Why is that? And why did you make the movie? Well, I made the movie because of that reaction. A lot of people were saying things to me about Mr. Rogers. I knew a couple of people that knew him and there are all these little clues that have been going on for years that were making me feel like, hmm, maybe there's a re-evaluation of Mr. Rogers out there. You know, like I – everything people told me about him surprised me.

And one night I somehow ended up on a YouTube deep dive of Mr. Rogers' speeches. It was like one of these epiphanal moments where I was like, I want more of that voice. I don't hear that voice anywhere in our culture right now. And it wasn't that I wanted to go back and kind of revisit the nostalgia of Mr. Rogers. It was like, I need Mr. Rogers in 2018. Who's the grownup in our society? So part of it was me just wanting to spend time with that message, which, you know, I've thought a lot about what it is and there were many things to what he was saying, but when I kind of digested everything down, it was an idea of radical kindness. That's how I describe it.

And if there's anything we need more of right now, it's some kindness. Yeah. Did you grow up with Mr. Rogers? Were you a vast consumer of his show? I was. I was born in 1967 and he went on in 1968. So I was like Gen 1 Mr. Rogers fanatic. I loved it as a kid. And a lot of my memories of it are really more like images and feelings than specific memories because if I was watching it when I was probably

one and two and three, I don't even remember that. My relationship with him predates my memory. Yeah, it's interesting. It totally imprinted on me too in that way. But there's something interesting

about flashing images that you know are inside you even if they have escaped you somehow. And it's the same thing with the feeling and the theme of the movie that you're trying to tell to be reminded that this is actually a way that you can treat people, basically meant for two to six-year-olds, two to six-year-olds don't even know that they're people. They don't have any sense of identity or tribe or anything. And so I feel like he's explaining to them, this is what it means to be a moral person in the world and how we should treat other people and how we should think about ourselves. And I feel like maybe all of us could use a good dose of being reminded what it's like to be a good neighbor. Yeah. It's a beautiful idea. How do you make a movie like this? It's a subject who is no longer alive. Where do you start? Pittsburgh.

That's where you start. Good, beautiful, lovely town. I've come to really love Pittsburgh. But Pittsburgh was, I mean, he grew up, Fred Rogers grew up in Latrobe, which is down the road from Pittsburgh. But the show was based out of Pittsburgh. He stayed there. And I didn't realize until I really went to Pittsburgh and started spending time there that it's not even that Mr. Rogers is a hero in Pittsburgh. He's a god in Pittsburgh. How does that manifest? How do you know that?

Well, for instance, the first cab I got into in Pittsburgh, they said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm going to work on a documentary about Mr. Rogers. And he turned around and he pointed at me and he said, don't screw this up. Wow. That's pressure. That was the first clue. There were many clues. And virtually everybody I met in Pittsburgh had a personal story about him too. Another guy I met randomly said, I was in high school and we were hitchhiking one day and a car pulled over. We looked inside and Mr. Rogers was there.

And he leaned over and said, I'll drive you anywhere you want to go as long as you promise never to hitchhike again. So that's a really interesting thing. I mean, I'm curious about when you have a subject who seems so angelic, like how do you build a tension around a movie like that? And we thought a lot about it.

And there are a couple of things. I mean, really, the first thing was we said, we're not going to make a biography. This is not a biography in a traditional sense. It's a film about ideas. And that was my pitch from the beginning is that if you think about what he was trying to do with his ideas, then there's a lot of dramatic tension because it's him against a world that doesn't necessarily care about kindness and in an industry who treats most of the things he finds precious as worthless. He came of age at the exact moment television did. So, you know, the story he told was that his senior year of college, it's 1948, he goes home on spring break.

His parents have this new television, one of the first anywhere in their living room. He watches it. And he said at the end of that week, I have to change my life's course and I'm going to go into television. And they said, why? And he said, because I hate it. Wow. But he saw this tremendous potential in television and kind of the – and he continued to have this optimism. Like television is a meeting place for all of us.

It's a place to educate and a place to edify and console and minister and it can do all these different things. Yet when you look around the landscape, essentially kids' TV is there to sell toys and sugar right and even in the 50s you show us that that's what it was like it was it's noisy and it's distractible and it's kind of all over the place and he's looking for a different a different meter yeah and he created one that's so different not only

different like ahead of its time but unlike anything else anybody's ever really done like the amount of space on the show is phenomenal. The kind of intimacy he created with people to watch the show. I mean it was interesting because he never said, hey, kids. It was always, how are you doing today? It was like – and he always addressed the camera directly. So if you were a kid, you're like, oh, he's talking to me.

I know him. And when Fred would run into kids in the real world, he always acted as though they had a relationship because to the child they did. You know, he also got at one point more letters than anybody in America. And he responded to every letter because again, to the child writing, they knew each other. Yeah. He has this fascinating, godly, but not egotistical pursuit. And how do you balance like what's real and what's not real about it? Because he's a human being. Yeah. And I think that was the key. The key thing is like, it would be so easy to sanctify somebody like Fred Rogers and to be very hagiographic about it. But in fact, it was Joanne Rogers, Mrs. Rogers, who's in the film, Hoy Adore. She's very charming. She's great. And actually not at all like Fred

too. You know, if Fred was very kind of prim and teetotaling, vegetarian, she's the opposite of that. She's off the cuff. Yeah, she's fun. And you could see how they work together as a couple. But she said to me early on, you know, don't make Fred into a saint. And I think that's people always thought of him as two dimensional. They didn't understand the depth because he did a show that was simple and deep. But people often mistake simple for superficial. He felt like people didn't understand that he was a dimensional person. And to sanctify him is also to treat him as a two-dimensional person, that somehow he wasn't human and didn't struggle. And what you realize, and what I came to realize in making the film early on was that he was a tortured artist, really underneath it. The letters he wrote,

the memos he wrote, the doubt he had about... What do you think was gnawing at him? The same like imposter syndrome that every artist has, the same frustrations with their ability to succeed. What was gnawing at him?

I mean, I think he said it over and over. I mean, whatever he was trying to address in children and whatever fears they had and whatever needs they had, he was really trying to address in himself. I mean, when he talked to children, he was trying to talk to his own childhood self in many ways. So, for plain kind of armchair psychologist. You can't help but do it even as you're watching the movie because you're just like, how can someone be so decent? Even if you consider yourself a decent person, he kind of overwhelms the idea of decency. It comes back

to this idea of love. As I've tried to kind of break down the philosophy of Fred Rogers, I feel like he talked about love a lot and his love being capable of being loved and allowing yourself to feel that you're lovable. He talked about that a lot. Because I think if he felt that love was the thing you aspire to on the one hand, that the thing that's the opposite of love is fear. Because fear can fester and manifest as hatred and anger and resentment. And those things really stem from fear. And if you look at so much of what he did,

it was about helping kids not fear things. Are you afraid of going down the bathtub? Are you afraid of death? Are you afraid of bullies? Are you afraid of whatever you're afraid of? I'm not going to pretend these bad things don't happen. I'm going to help you understand it so you won't fear them. So helping us understand him is an interesting task for you because, you know, you've made a lot of films about Johnny Cash and Muddy Waters and artists who have, you know, vast archival

footage to pull from, but probably nothing like Fred Rogers, right? Who has hundreds of thousands of hours of television. Thousands, who has hundreds of thousands of hours of television? Thousands. Maybe not hundreds of thousands. Okay, thousands of hours of television. Thousands of hours. Hundreds of episodes. Yeah.

I mean, he did almost 1,000 episodes. And that's just to begin with. You know, he did other shows. He had a show, a regional show for a decade beforehand. Umpteen speeches, letters. How do you make a movie out of that? Do you have to watch every show? Who's helping you?

A team of great people. Kate, my amazing assistant editor who watched virtually every episode. Wow. But my editors and all of us, we're just – digesting is a huge part of it and then looking for nuggets because an archive doc is almost like a verite doc in a way that you're trying to find the story and the material. Like you have ideas going in and you have ideas that you want to make into scenes, but the footage can make its own scene. Like if you find something like, well, that's got to be in there. That's amazing.

You do stop and just show us an extended cut from the show at times. And it's just really powerful and shows you who the person is. Yeah. I mean, I've done a lot of music films. And one of my all-time favorite people is this legendary Memphis music producer named Jim Dickinson who produced everybody from Big Star to The Replacements. And he played with the Stones. Amazing guy. And I remember asking him once, how do you produce music?

What's the secret? And he said, well, the secret is you turn up the good and you turn down the bad. So I think about editing that way. Don't forget to turn up the good and turn down the bad. You go on with a lot of preconceived notions, but at the end of the day, go with the good stuff. Like, even if it doesn't fit, remember that, you know, particularly in archival films, if it's good, if you find yourself talking about it to friends, you know, if you're showing people this clip on your laptop, then it should be in your film. You know, remember that. So, kind of whatever moves you, remember that that's

the most important thing. It seems like it'd be easy to get people to talk about Fred Rogers. But was there anybody who you struggled to, you know, compel to do this? Because there are a lot of voices and a lot of unexpected voices too. Everybody I talked to was very game, essentially. The only interview I didn't get, I have to say, which I tried hard, was Lady Aberlin, who was the female cast member on the show. Betty Aberlin is the actress. And she hasn't done an interview in a long time. And I talked to her for hours on the phone. And she'd go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And at the end of the day, I just couldn't get her to

do an interview. Interesting. And for any particular, did you just want to stay private? She seemed, you know, self-conscious and hadn't done one. And yeah, I mean, those are the battles you fight all the time. Yeah, it's interesting because you do such a great job in the movie

of showing kind of the extended Mr. Rogers universe to use a modern phrase, like all the other figures and the stories of their lives that appeared on the show too. Were they excited to talk to you about that? They were. But I mean the thing I tried to avoid was a lot of times in documentaries, you end up doing fan interviews or there are all these famous people who liked this person.

So you can interview them and it gives your film more profile. And I've done some of those interviews over the years in different projects. But I tend to not like them because they're superficial. I mean I like the subject and they like the subject. But their insight isn't going to be the same as the person who was there. And I felt like this was a rare chance where they gave us access and freedom to do whatever we wanted, to tell the story from the inside out. And if you have that kind of access, then use it. The more we kind of stay inside of Fred's head and then the concentric circles

close to Fred, the better the film felt. Was there anything about him that shocked you as you were interviewing people and learning about him? There was nothing I heard about him that I felt like, God, that's out of character. But there were a lot of things that surprised me about him. You know, all the languages he spoke, that he, I mean, I mentioned he was a vegetarian, you know, virtually his entire adult life because he said he didn't want to eat anything that had a mother. Wow. That is also very modern. Yeah. Just things he would do. I mean, we have some of them in the film, like the one, four, three idea about, you know, he'd swim a mile every single day and then weigh himself. And he weighed 143 pounds every day of his adult life because for him, 143 stood for I love you. One letter,

four letters, three letters. So it's interesting you bring that up. I have one friend who saw the film who also was very moved by it, but he was just like, there is a slightly creepy aspect to like the precision and compulsion of his life and his methods. And like how do you really – how do you cope with something like that? I think because we almost see somebody who seems so pure and we're like what's underneath there? Well, I mean we talk about that in the film too. It is compulsion. I don't know if it's creepy compulsion, but it's definitely an obsessiveness. And again, for somebody who was as accomplished as Fred Rogers and who was as kind as Fred Rogers, you don't have a TV show for 35 years and lead a nation of kind of children without some sense of compulsion and ego and just drive.

You know, so I think a lot of that comes back from his own kind of insecurity and wanting to have control. You know, I think that control was something that made him feel comfortable. Yeah, I also feel like the film has a chance to be used as kind of a political tool and people will position it in a way. And I'm sure – I suspect some of your feelings about even wanting to do it are born of the nature of the discourse. But also that Fred Rogers is kind of an unlikely figure to be positioned in these times, right? Like a Republican preacher basically or reverend.

Yeah. I didn't make the film to say Steve – Fred Rogers was a liberal pastor, but our relationship with him predates our sense of political identity. And those basic principles he's talking about are the things that I feel are not being nurtured in our culture. So it's not an idea I've come back to on many of my films. It's one of the things that I think about a lot. It's one of common ground. I made a film called Best of Enemies. I was just going to ask you about that. About Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, which to me is kind of a mirror documentary to this documentary.

Literally, you noted my note. You did your homework. My next question was literally the flip side of this is a film you made a few years ago. You know, looking for places where we can agree. You know, even if we disagree politically, we agree about how we should speak to each other or how we even allow ourselves to communicate or, you know, that basically a neighborhood is a society. And being a neighbor is being a citizen. And what Fred was doing was advocating for a healthy society. These are the basic rules.

And I feel like we take those things for granted and we're living at a time now where I think we've taken those things so for granted that they made their fraying and they could even break. That there's nobody out there advocating for civility. Nobody, you know, that's essentially what Fred was doing. And I feel like we live in very uncivil times. Absolutely. And so to remind ourselves that a neighborhood or a society is a fragile thing, it cannot be taken for granted. And I know that sounds kind of, you know, soft and wishful, you know, and I think that's exactly what Fred dealt with this whole time. But I've always kind of believed, can we remind ourselves of how much you have to fight to keep a society healthy and civil, that it's not something we should just bet on. And in fact, we have a culture now that has so much, so much riding on the incivility of it. You know, there's so many people that profit

or get votes or get eyeballs or make money by playing to our lesser human instincts. No, it's true. I mean, that kind of tension, it's something you've been working here every day. We figure out when there's an unfortunate moment, unfortunately, it means more people are paying attention. So there's a difficulty in communicating about that. Exactly, so we're incentivized to play to those things. That's exactly right.

You know, and it's like, so how do you make kindness attractive? It's something Fred talks about in the film. You know, is it a story about puppies at the end of the evening news? Yeah, yeah. Well, that feels phony, right? It feels phony, and it's not the point of kindness, you know? And in a way, I was just talking to somebody this morning, and I was like, if you want a real superhero, like, you could do a lot worse than Fred Rogers.

For sure. Somebody who's fighting for really the thing that we should all be fighting for, you know, and it's, is that corny? You know, to me, it's urgent. You know, it's not corny. Yeah. It's interesting because this movie obviously has this message that we're talking about and it's, it's kind of unvarnished in that way. Not, not every movie has that, but this movie, there is something straightforward looking into the camera saying, be good, be, be fair to people, be honest. What's it like for you now? I mean, you've had a really kind of amazing five or six years in your career. You've been making movies for a long time, but is it really important for

you for like a lot of people to see. And it's not just trying to create a platform, um, to tell a story. like at this point, I'm picking films that are as much about me as they are about the subject. And not that I'm that Mr. Rogers like, but I felt like what he was talking about was something I really want to talk about. And so in that way, I feel like the more people see the film, the, you know, the more good works I will have put back in the world. It's like that message of like I'm trying to do all I can to try and make the world a better place too. And I know that just always sounds so corny. But there's something that's happened with this film and it's only happened – it happened to me on 20 Feet from Stardom where the film – I I mean, people, I guess, say this sometimes, but like it takes on a life of its own.

Like in a weird way, it's starting to feel like it's not my film anymore. Yeah. The first time I saw it, I felt a genuine energy in the screening from people who wanted to talk about it right away and communicate about how they felt about it, which is, that's unique. It's great. And, you know, normally if somebody loves your film, they'll say, oh, I'm going to tell my friends about it. What I've been hearing from people now is I want to take my friend to go see this. Yeah, that's a good feeling.

I mean, that's really unusual. For a documentary, that's, you know, bizarre. So you mentioned 20 Feud from Stardom. You won an Oscar for that film. I wanted to know what changes for a documentarian after you win that Oscar. The biggest change was that instead of spending 50% of my time raising money, I spend 6% of my time raising money. Yeah. And as an independent filmmaker that's been doing this for 25 years, that's huge. And people ask, God, you've been so prolific

how are you doing all these things and it's because I don't have to raise money I can make a lot more films if I'm not spending all my time trying to raise money did that dawn on you instantly? did you know that when 20 feet from stardom was happening? well for instance Best of Enemies I've been working on that film

for years before 20 feet from stardom and nobody was very excited about paying for a film I had been working on that film for years before 20 Feet from the Startup. And nobody was very excited about paying for a film about two old dead white guys talking on TV 50 years ago. I love that movie. I love it too. I'm so proud of it. But after 20 Feet, suddenly there were people willing to pay for it.

We got it made. And then afterwards, everybody was like, why? Why didn't you ask me? And everybody was armchair quarterbacking that. And that's kind of been the experience, you know, that I've been able to tell the stories I want to tell and have the freedom to do it. And, you know, a lot of people come to me and say, well, you want to do scripted and you want to do all this other stuff. And I love scripted and maybe, but I feel like being in the position I'm in now is a gift as a nonfiction storyteller.

And I don't ever want to take that for granted. I love documentary work. I had started as a journalist. And my first documentary I started 25 years ago next month. So I'm almost in my quarter century of making documentaries. So you're silver? Yeah. My silver anniversary, maybe it was at 40. I don't know.

25, anyway. Your wooden anniversary. Sure, sure. But two weeks after I started my first documentary, I called my parents and I said, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. Like I knew it instantly. It was like this is everything I like in one job. And, you know, when I started, documentaries were like the spinach of filmmaking.

Nobody cared about them. Nobody wanted to pay for them. They weren't sexy. And now we're in this amazing golden era of documentary and nonfiction storytelling that just keeps getting more interesting. It is boom time. I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah. Do you think this will last?

I know there are a lot of reasons why it's happened over the last 10 to 15 years. Yeah. And you're involved basically and you have your foot in both pools. You work on shows that are on Netflix and you've also made a lot of great theatrical releases. How long do you feel like this is, this has got a 20 year lifespan in front of it or what happens if it doesn't? It's definitely cyclical because even in my career, I've seen things rise and fall. I mean, just a quick history of documentary when I think about it,

you know, there was kind of the end of the VHS market was happening pre-DVD takeoff. Then there was a moment in the early 2000s where Michael Moore and Spellbound and a few films did really well theatrically. And suddenly there was a lot of equity money to make documentaries. And then a bunch of those films didn't make money so the equity money went away and then the DVD market came in strong and you could finance films based on kind of projected sales of DVDs and then that disappeared and then finally the streaming market came in and kept changing it. So I've – You've weathered the storm. I've felt many waves come and go. So I have no illusions that it's going to last in this kind of golden era right now. I mean I think the filmmaking will continue to be good and I feel like the technology

has made it a lot easier for all kinds of people to tell stories. But what I think has happened that I don't think is going to unhappen is that people have now, you know, what I heard for a long time was I love documentaries, I don't know where to see them. And now if you can go to iTunes

or go to Netflix and see documentaries next to comedies or dramas, a lot of people pick documentaries. So just the accessibility of documentaries, I think has changed the profile of the films. And a lot of people pick documentaries. So just the accessibility of documentaries I think has changed the profile of the films. And a lot of people, even a lot of people I know who work in scripted who say, well, what I personally watch is documentaries.

What I want to watch on a Friday night is a documentary. So a lot of the films that you've made, maybe all of them that you tell me, seem to be about people and movements that you're passionate about, right? And not just their ideas but like genuinely that you're probably a fan of or intrigued by. Yeah. I mean, I've been really fortunate to, you know, in films about Johnny Cash or Keith Richards and Iggy Pop, like people who are heroes of mine, which is amazing. Who's your white whale? David Bowie.

Oh, yeah. That would be good. That would be good. That'd be good. Why don't you do it? You only have to spend 6% of your time now raising the money, you know? Well, it's not the money. It's the permissions. The rights.

Yeah, true. Bowie's been a white whale for a lot of people to do something big. There are a few white whales out there in the documentary world and the music world. How do you feel about doing a story that is sort of bigger than a standalone, you know, on the more serious level but that is completely owned by you, that is your thing? Because, you know, you've obviously worked on Ugly Delicious, which is wonderful and abstract and these series is on Netflix. But is there a six-part Morgan Neville definitive story of X? No. I mean there could be, but I don't have one in my pocket.

Okay. I keep these shows I've been doing, like Abstract and Ugly Delicious. They're anthology shows to some extent, you know, that each episode is a standalone. You don't have to watch the next episode. You don't have to watch them in order. And for whatever reason,

I kind of love those. They're a tougher sell. It's tougher to kind of have an audience. And I really enjoy great doc miniseries like Wild Wild Country or whatever. And, you know, it's great. It's great to have that kind of space. But I don't know if it's because I grew up as a kid in movie theaters, but there's something I still, in my mind, for whatever reason, think of the purest form of what I do being the perfect 93-minute film that you sit in a theater and

watch with other people. And if I can keep doing that, I'm going to be really happy. We had a lot of conversation about that with Wild Wild Country. Is it a film? And what does that mean if it isn't? I don't know. I mean, I will say with a lot of these nonfiction series happening and a lot of great things are happening, but when I see the kind of miniseries style single story, they're often a little padded for my taste.

Certainly. Tell me a little bit really quickly about the next film that you have coming about Orson Welles. Orson Welles. Yeah. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead is what it's called. And what's the focus of that? It's about his last movie. It's really actually about the last 15 years of his life. So the setup for it is Orson left Hollywood. He went to Europe, made films for 20 years. And in 1970, this is the dawning era of the new Hollywood so you know Easy Riders just hit

and the company that produced it, BBS brings Orson back to Hollywood to write a script and Orson is like the conquering king who is the godfather to new Hollywood and he never finishes another feature film

in the last 15 years but stays in Hollywood, doesn't last 15 years, but stays in Hollywood. Doesn't go back to Europe, stays in Hollywood. And in the middle of it, he attempts to make a film called The Other Side of the Wind. He shoots it for six years. And it's a film about a film director at the end of his life that can't finish a movie. So rich. It's so rich.

And even his movie is a movie within a movie, a documentary wrapped around a feature film. So all of that footage sat in a vault in Paris for 42 years. And we liberated it about a year and a half ago. And I'm doing it with Frank Marshall, who is – Famous producer. Yeah, famous producer, but who was also a very young production manager, line producer on Orson's film, on this film, The Other Side of the Wind, that Orson was making.

So he and Peter Bogdanovich and a number of other people are finishing the feature, and then I took the six years of dailies and a whole lot of other stuff into making a film to tell the story of Orson really at the end of his life. Can't wait. I'm an Orsonologist at the end of his life. Can't wait. I'm an Orsonologist.

I'm very excited. Oh, my God. It'll be fun. If you're a film geek, then it's like an amusement park. Morgan, I end every episode by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they've seen. What is the last great thing that you have seen? The last great thing I've seen. It's a documentary.

It's coming out on Netflix later this year. It was Sundance. And it's a very complicated story about a film that was made. It's actually kind of related to the Orson film. It's a film that was made by a very young girl and a bunch of her friends in Asia in the 80s. And somebody ran away with the footage and they were never able to finish it. And here, 30 years later,

she found the footage and was able to tell her story and the story of what happened with the film by using that film. What a perfect companion project. Morgan, thank you so much for doing the show. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to this week's episode of the big picture and thank you to morgan neville for joining us please check out more podcasts featuring me this week on the ringer including

the rewatchables a special 25th anniversary edition of jurassic park times to jurassic world fallen kingdom and then later this week we'll have another episode of The Big Picture featuring The Incredibles 2 director Brad Bird, which is very exciting. And for more on The Incredibles and the Pixar universe, check out TheRinger.com where we're ranking all the movies and Shea Serrano is ranking all the characters. And we're all writing about Incredibles 2, so check it out. Thank you.