The Daily - The Cinematic Masterpiece You Won’t Get to See

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Warning: This episode contains descriptions of child abuse and domestic abuse.Over the past few years, a celebrated filmmaker has tried to unlock the mysteries of the pop icon Prince.Sasha Weiss, a deputy editor at The New York Times Magazine, says that the result is a cinematic masterpiece. How is it possible that nobody will ever see it?Guest: Sasha Weiss, a deputy editor at The New York Times Magazine.Background reading: Inside Ezra Edelman’s documentary on Prince.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Kristian Dowling/Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. For the last few years, one of the country's most celebrated filmmakers has tried to unlock the mysteries of one of the country's most celebrated musicians. According to my colleague, Times Magazine deputy editor Sasha Weiss, the result is a cinematic masterpiece. So how is it possible that nobody will ever see it? It's Friday, March 7th.

Sasha, welcome to the Daily. Thanks so much for having me, Michael. Hard to fathom it's your inaugural episode. I'm delighted to be here. I want to just acknowledge a certain awkwardness to the work we're about to undertake, which is we are going to be talking, you and I, about a very important film that none of us will ever see. Yeah. That's weird.

Totally. But, back when you thought the world very much would see the film, you became deeply invested in the story of it. And you have stayed invested in it for years. Simple question. Why? Well, let's start with who it's about. My name is Prince. The supernova genius Prince. And I've come to play with you. genius Prince. You know, it's kind of a funny thing. I didn't come to this as a huge Prince fan.

I came to it as a person who's deeply interested in him as a symbol. He was part of the wallpaper of my childhood. He is this kind of... Literally or figuratively? Figuratively. But you know, you hear him, you see him. He's kind of this like, in the cultural imagination, he is an avatar of gender-bending, dreaminess, boundary-pushingness, breaking categories.

Sensuality personified. Sensuality, sexiness, but a kind of uncategorizable sexiness. And I think for a lot of people, you know, he's at the top of the cultural pantheon. He's the icon of American pop music. He was a beautiful singer. He could play a million instruments. I mean, his music is just transcendently great. It's like... Kiss! I mean, the songs of Purple Rain alone. He was a world-eating genius. So it's like no subject could be as big, as mysterious, as fascinating as Prince.

Say a word about mysterious. Well, I think Prince cultivated a kind of mystery, right? I mean, he seemed kind of saintly. He seemed spiritual. You know, he was someone who changed his name to a symbol without explanation. There was a performance of a kind of... A knowability.

A knowability. And then that was part of the allure and part of the mystique. Also, he was extremely elusive. So that was my interest in Prince. And the other thing that drew me to the film was the person making it. Ezra Edelman, who I really admired as a filmmaker.

I think he's a once-in-a-generation talent. And I was really curious what it would be to see his mind tangling with Prince. Hmm. Well, tell me more about Ezra Edelman and why he is such a once-in-a-generation talent. Hey, Ezra. Hi, Sasha. Thanks for being here. why he is such a once in a generation talent. Hey, Ezra. Hi, Sasha. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

I'm, I think, happy to be here. So I've gotten to know Ezra pretty well over the years of reporting the story, and we've talked a lot. He is extremely dogged and rigorous. He is extremely focused. Again, you know my issues with this. It's like, I don't want to make this shit about me.

It's just very human, Ezra. That's what I think. He can be kind of intense. And what's his backstory? You know, from the time I graduated from school, where I wrote for a school paper, I always was interested in media and sports. So Ezra started out in TV journalism,

and sports journalism especially, and eventually he started directing his own documentary films. I'm self-taught, I just like watch things. And so in some ways I have the brain of someone who's trained on watching narrative films. And he in some ways I have the brain of someone who's trained on watching narrative films. And he brings a lot of rigor and I would say also a lot of emotion and storytelling chops to these huge canvases that he takes on.

I do believe there's a way of informing, really informing, talking about things and having people learn but do it in a way that also entertains them. And I kind of took that as my mandate. But maybe the best way to talk about his work is to talk about his best-known film on O.J. Simpson, O.J. Made in America, which comes out in 2016 to great acclaim on ESPN. It wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film that year. Big deal. Big deal. Got a ton of attention, and deserved deservedly so because part of its magic is that it takes an event

that we all thought we knew. We had been over it a million times and it gives it. We watched CNN. We knew the story. We knew that many of us watched it as kids and watched the car chase and remember it and remember the polarization around it. The way that I would say black America and white America viewed the case very differently. And what Ezra manages to do in the film is to give a familiar recent historical event a much broader context. And not

only do you understand O.J. how huge he was, how beloved he was, how deep his downfall was, you also understand the context of race relations in California from the 1960s into the 90s and even the early 2000s. And you understand how many of the racial pathologies of our country run through this case. So it's this incredibly layered document where all of these different energies are drawn together to tell a new story. And Ezra works on an enormous scale.

The film is eight hours and I think is widely thought of as one of the greatest American documentaries, one of the greatest American films that has been made in the last decade. Okay, I very much now appreciate why the prospect of this filmmaker, this mystery unlocker, being applied to the subject of Prince, who remains pretty deeply mysterious, would be appealing to you. So how does Ezra Edelman become drawn to and ultimately undertake a documentary of the same scale of the work you just described applied to Prince. Well, it made me worth saying, for one thing, that this film was not Ezra's idea originally.

Huh. What do you mean? So after the success of O.J., he's like the toast of the film world. He could do anything. He could do anything. And thinking about his next project, he gets a call from Netflix and they have a very enticing proposition. So they tell him that they have made a deal with Prince's estate that gave them exclusive

access to Prince's vault. Now the vault, which is how it's known among Princeologists, is his personal archive, which was housed in Paisley Park, which was his kind of home studio fortress in Minnesota where he lived and recorded and performed. And it had, who knows what? I mean, it was a treasure trove of archival material. I mean, the word itself is so tantalizing. So tantalizing. It's his vault.

It's his vault. And people knew of its existence. And it was the kind of proposition that it would be very hard for a filmmaker like Ezra Edelman to say no to. It's Prince. There was a vault of material. He is a mysterious figure whose story had never been told. And so for me, it really was trying

to help fans and non-fans alike understand who this person is. And at the same time, in that understanding, help them understand his art more. And what do they find inside this vault? So they find beautiful concert footage, some of which have never been seen before. They find band rehearsals, which at first seem like really exciting. But there's hours and hours of it, just music, just him playing music. They find some unfinished films that Prince made, but it's basically all performance. What they didn't find is almost anything that was candid or spontaneous.

Prince kind of hanging out with his friends, Prince on the off hours, Prince talking shit with the band, Prince writing music, composing music. I mean, he was a great songwriter, his process, nothing. And when they would find like the beginning of something or the suggestion of something, there was a little bit of footage of Prince

horsing around with his girlfriends, for example. But the footage was scratched. It seemed like someone had tampered with the tape. So they came to the conclusion that it might have been deliberate, that anything that was candid, that was still around, had been damaged. So the vault, for all intents and purposes, and perhaps on purpose, was kind of empty. So what does he do?

So he does what he always does, which is to start to interview people intensively. And he wants to talk to all the people who knew Prince well to try to understand what was driving him, what was he thinking about, what were his torments? What were his successes? And he seeks out kind of everybody in Prince's world from, you know, bodyguards to family members to dear friends to many, many collaborators over the years. You know, like look, somebody who was around him for decades and met with us before we started filming, basically was like, good luck. And what he and his team begin to find is basically another locked door, another wall. People, you know, people who were around him

were not at liberty necessarily to talk freely and publicly whether they wanted to or not. People are very reluctant to speak candidly about Prince. They're protective. Some people seem scared. Even in death, people were reluctant because I think it's a natural inclination of some people whose names are made, were made because of their connection to him. So do I want to sully that through talking honestly?

But at the same time, people- I mean, it's not that unusual in a way for a world famous celebrity, you know, for people not to want to talk about them, but it was very intense and, you know, it seemed across the board universal, this reluctance. And as around his team started to wonder, like, what's the big secret here? Is there some secret that people won't tell us? And in fact, after many, many years of really persuasion and building trust, At the same time, people had a lot to say once they sat down because they had not really talked openly about him. people slowly did begin to talk.

You start to investigate who the person was and you realize there are these chapters in his life. There are this many people. At a certain point, he had interviewed enough people, over 75 people, to start to get a clearer picture of Prince and to be able to marry a narrative of Prince's life from the beginning really to the end where he died in a very mysterious way with this footage that was in the vault. And it's not that there's a secret, but there's a complex, tortured, deeply traumatized person alongside the musical genius.

Eventually, Ezra had what he felt was a solid cut of the film, and I was able to watch it. What did you think? It's a masterpiece. What makes you say that? Well, one of the things the film does so well is tell the story of Prince's childhood. And it's maybe worth saying that it doesn't unfold the story in a linear way. It accumulates through the interviews, through all of the different people he speaks to,

his lovers, his sister, his friends. And what you see is a picture of a boy. First of all, he had, according to several testimonies in the film, a troubled relationship with his parents. There was violence in the home. His parents split when he was a kid. First, he was living with his mother. She then remarried.

And two people in the film say that Prince told them that when he was a kid, his stepfather shut him in a room or a closet for six weeks. Wow. And he came out changed. How could he not? How could he not? And then when he was 12, his mother kicked him out of the house and sent him to live with his father.

He was very close to his father. His father was a musician. And he was a very religious man. He was a strict man, kind of an authoritarian parent. And he found Prince in a room with a girl a couple of times. And he, too, kicked Prince out when Prince was 14 years old. So he was an abandoned person. And that abandonment and the dissolution of his family

and the feeling of neglect, according to the many people who knew him, was a real through line in his life. This drove Prince to his own unstable sort of familial and love relationships. And one pattern that you see in the film over the course of Prince's life is that he would kind of assemble families around himself in the form of collaborators and bandmates. But he would always really challenge those relationships to the point of breaking. He was distrustful.

He was demanding. A couple of his close collaborators say that when they asked for a raise, Prince said to them, if you really loved me, you wouldn't ask me for a raise. He was really controlling with his girlfriends. With one girlfriend, he tried to prevent her from seeing her family and from making phone calls at a certain point. He wanted... Sounds like somebody locking somebody in a room for six weeks.

He wanted control. So basically this is a portrait of, this is something of a psychological cliché, but someone who was hurt who goes on to do some real hurt. Yes. And I think, you know, what you see unfolding in the film is someone also at war with himself. You know, on the one hand, just this overwhelming creativity that was pouring out of him and a desire to have people participate in that, but a constant pushing people away. You know, he was a great elevator of women, for example. He had many famous female collaborators, but many of those collaborators testify to the fact that he could be not only controlling, but

kind of put them down and diminish them and make them feel worthless. And he could also be physically abusive. So you hear from a girlfriend of his, a collaborator, Jill Jones, who talks about a moment when she flew into a jealous rage and Prince hit her and never apologized. And her anguish many years later is just totally vivid for the viewer. I wonder if you can explain, and I'm sure the film attempts to do this, how all of that pain, that anguish, all this biography influences and is ultimately responsible for Prince's music. Well, there's a great moment in the film where he's singing the beautiful ones. ["The Beautiful One"]

You can find performances like this one online. And you know, one of the refrains is, ["Do You Want Him?" by The Bunch of Rascals playing in background.] I know you want me, cause I want you, yeah. Do you want him, or do you want me, cause I want you? It's the song of yearning. And he is just giving a wild performance of a kind of screaming and keening and, you know, falling and... I gotta know, I gotta know,

what it won't be. When I heard his like sort of yelps and his cries, I always thought it was about sexuality, you know, and sexual yearning, romantic yearning, but I was able to hear it in a different way. And partly because one of his bandmates is telling me, I hear her voice on the film telling me, this was the central problem of his life, this problem of abandonment. Do you want me? And you could hear the pure pain in it.

And then suddenly, Prince's screaming feels also like grief. It's not just sexuality, it's also grief, it's also pain and it's authentic. And I understand that the song contains all of it. So it's this richness and you sort of understand what's feeding the performance and that when he's there on stage, like yes, he's, I'm sure, aware of what he's doing and in control of what he's doing, but he's also possessed and kind of channeling all of this complexity through his body and through his voice.

And I just hear his music completely differently now. The layers are so much deeper. So the movie is an answer to a cultural question that I think has been vexing us for a decade or more, which is what do we do with great artists who are extremely flawed human beings? And the answer that the movie offers is that we basically sit with their contradictions, right?

And Prince was, on the one hand, a genius, an original of a generation, an original of a century. I mean, he's a Mozart of American pop. And with a mind that was teeming with music and ideas, he was also controlling. He could be abusive towards his lovers. He was deeply vulnerable. He was a person who crossed boundaries

and contained multiplicities, and Edelman is asking us to sit with that for nine hours and take it all in and allow ourselves to pity him sometimes, allow ourselves to adore him and worship him, and allow ourselves to criticize him and to sit with the wild brew of who Prince was. And also to make the argument that knowing this enriches our understanding of the art he made. It deepens our understanding of the art he made. It deepens our love of it because we know where it comes from or we know something about

where it comes from and how he transforms the raw material of his selfhood into something transcendent. We'll be right back. So Sasha, I think we've arrived at the moment in this conversation. We've held it in suspense long enough. You just have to explain why it is how it is that this masterpiece is never going to be seen by anyone else. How that's possible, what the story there is.

So, as part of the original agreement that Netflix struck with the Prince Estate for access to the vault, the estate was going to have an opportunity to review the film for factual accuracy. Ezra Edelman welcomed this. He's a journalist. He said, sure. Nobody wants to get anything wrong. You can review the film for factual error.

Now, in the years that Ezra spent working on the film, there were these ongoing complicated legal battles over Prince's estate, in part because Prince left no will. So the estate changed hands. It changes from being overseen by a bank and courts in Minnesota to now being overseen by a lawyer who used to work for Prince in the 90s, members of his family, and a music company. And the new people in charge watched the film. work for Prince in the 90s, members of his family, and a music company.

And the new people in charge watch the film. And they submit this list that's 17 pages long. All kinds of quibbles and queries and objections, almost none of which have to do with facts. They have to do with things about Prince that they don't want included in this documentary. And Edelman, you know, makes a few changes to try to kind of compromise with him, but he's not going to change, for instance, one of Prince's collaborators talking about how when he became devout and extremely religious, he asked her to renounce her homosexuality

before he would collaborate with her again. He's not going to take out an assessment of his album, The Rainbow Children, which was kind of widely shared at the time, that there were anti-Semitic lyrics. He's not going to take out elements of the story that are sad or unfortunate or portray Prince in a negative light because they're part of the story and they're part of the arc. And he's not going to allow extra journal the story and they're part of the arc. And he's not going to allow extra journalistic facts to determine the shape of his film. So this back and forth continues for many months. And the estate manages to hold up the film on questions of length.

They claim that they had agreed to license music for six hour film and no more. And this was no simple thing. To cut this film by three hours would be, the metaphor that I keep thinking of is unknotting a hand woven Persian carpet. Extremely difficult to disassemble. It would be like starting all over. But also, it wasn't ever clear that this would satisfy the estate anyway because they had made their strong objections to the project very clear. So the project seemed to be in an impasse. And ultimately, last month, Netflix comes out with the following statement. 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. Translation. Translate that. Ezra Edelman's film is dead. He's cut out.

It's thrown away. And if there's ever gonna be a film, it's gonna be a film made by the estate. Wow. Sounds like Netflix basically sells out Ezra Edelman after all these years and says that some family-made version of a film might someday replace what you have described as this masterpiece? Well, all of the parties have been tight-lipped about the situation for contractual reasons, but that's my sense of it. Yeah.

So, the day after this news came out, I was able to talk to Ezra. Well, it's kind of a grim day. Yeah, it's a little sad. It's a little sad. And he was devastated. This is a real film. It's called The Book of Prince. It's a little sad. And he was devastated. This is a real film. It's called The Book of Prince. It's nine hours long. It's a product of a lot of people's hard work and blood, sweat, and tears.

Caroline Waterlow, Tamara Rosenberg, Nina Kristick, Brett Granado. And, you know, we were talking a little bit about the state's rationale or what we perceive as the state's rationale. And he thinks it's absurd. I have no interest in putting on a film that is factually inaccurate. Like, oh, so the estate gets their opinion about the film put out for the world to see

after they're getting their way, which is the film getting killed, and the film gets slandered in the process. And like, that's not okay. The lawyer for the estate said to Ezra at one point in this process, he fears the film will do generational harm to Prince. The film will do generational harm to Prince. What does that mean?

So the argument was that a film that fully exposes the motivations and the biography of this artist Will hurt his reputation for a generation. I just want to translate that phrase. Yes, I think I think the fear is In a cross way this will get Prince cancelled. Hmm. He was a jerk. He was a difficult boss You know, he was mean right that it would demystify this Icon, you know fundamentally they're concerned about their bottom line. I do believe the irony is this film would be great for Prince. And I think it would serve the estate and its bottom line tremendously.

But I think, you know, Ezra sees it the opposite way. You know, what do you see when you visit Paisley Park? Oh, this is where a guy lived. But what you see is now a museum that's full of rooms that are named after albums. There are rooms that are full of his shoes. There are rooms that are full of his outfits. But there's really no mention of sex.

There's really no mention of sex. There's really no mention of religion. There's a glossy thing that's being promoted for monetary gain. This image that we continually need to traffic in of this person who wore glitzy outfits and glitzy shoes and made all this work, all which is true. But like it's so much deeper, his struggles between good and evil in himself. This struggle that you see in the music and the art, and then how it played out in his life. It's like how can you not want to tell that story? But that's the story of Prince. Lex's meaningful engagement with Prince just deepens our relationship with him and kind of revives his legacy.

And I mean I totally agree, like Prince is present but it's not like he's a vital figure in the culture right now. And I bet anything that if this film had come out there would have been a whole huge discourse around Prince. And a complex one and an interesting one. And I think it would have brought him again to the fore of the cultural conversation. And I mean, when Ezra did show a very small group of people an early cut of the film as he was working on it, he saw that kind of reaction.

There's almost invariably, whatever people's responses are through the trajectory of this life and this story, they all come away being like, oh my God, I love this guy. I want to listen to more of his music. This is why I believe this is short-sighted. That's the estate side of this. What does Ezra make of Netflix's role in all of this? Well, Ezra declines to discuss Netflix, but in my own reporting around the unraveling of the deal, I think Netflix bears a lot of responsibility for what happened. I think that when Ezra started making this film, it was a kind of heyday of prestige documentary. And Netflix was producing high profile, really rigorous documentaries that were

kind of in the mold of some of the things that Ezra does, really intense investigations, journalistically important. They made the film Icarus, which is about the Russian doping scandal during the Olympics that won the Academy Award. And in the years since, documentaries have been transformed, and Netflix has been transformed. The executive who originally hired Ezra has been let go and new leadership was brought in.

And they've leaned further and further into certain kinds of documentaries that were skirting away from journalism much more toward entertainment, right? True crime, celebrity documentary where celebrities began to be producing partners. And- Megan Markle comes to mind. Megan Markle comes to mind.

David Beckham, I mean, there are lots of them now. So they're becoming a global empire. They're one of the largest and most important players in the documentary world. They're the arbiters in some sense of what documentary films are, the direction that they're going in. And now they're just generating tons of content quickly, cheaply, kind of formulaically. And the kind of painstaking,

long gestating project like Ezra's is not the currency anymore. I mean, they still make some really good things, but they're able to make a lot more things that aren't that good, but that a lot of people watch. And meanwhile, Ezra's film is all tied up in this complex legal battle. And- So for all those reasons, it's kind of easy for Netflix to walk away from.

That's my sense. I mean, I interviewed one person familiar with the company who said, why would they want to be tied up with this legal fight when they could just go make ten more reality shows about real estate? And they can make ten more celebrity documentaries where they're partnering with the estate. So I think for them, the great art versus making a whole bunch of stuff more readily cost benefit analysis, my sense is that ultimately they didn't stand by the film. Let's just assume for a moment that Netflix is in the business of doing what's good for

Netflix and Netflix's audience. Would Netflix be right to assume that what Ezra Edelman has created here might not actually necessarily be what its vast audience wants? Yeah. I mean, I think it's possible that that's their calculation, that they're making a kind of pure, you know, look at the numbers business decision. I think that's possible. We'll never know because the film doesn't, isn't being given a chance to be put in front of an audience.

But I think Ezra would totally disagree with that idea. I believe that people can handle the truth in an honest portrayal of a brilliant artist and at times a flawed human. So you know one argument that was aired when I was talking to people who had seen the film, talking to some people who hadn't seen the film, but even the idea of the film. One thing that was said was essentially an argument about black genius left to stand as celebrated, you know, like white rock stars of similar stature are not... Exposed to the same level of scrutiny?

Are not exposed to the same level of scrutiny. And why can't we let Prince stand as a kind of, you know, monument before we start to take him apart? So what do you make of that argument? I mean, I make a lot of things of it. First of all, it is born out of a complicated history of a country we live in. I understand the desire to have our Black heroes be

celebrated for who they are and certainly on par with their white counterparts whose talent and accomplishments they match and or outdo. But at the same time, I reject the argument first and foremost because A, if I were making a film about David Bowie, I would set out to do the same exact thing that I did with Prince. Who was this person? Why did he change characters?

What was going on in his life at all those times? And was I sensitive, by the way, as a black man taking on a black subject, knowing that people might think, oh my God, why are you tearing this person down? But also, why is Warts and all such a terrible concept? Why is it not okay to know about a human, especially again, we get to have it both ways. You just want to love his art, but have him remain unexamined.

But if we examine him and you, you maybe are going to appreciate that art that you love so much even more, you might appreciate the struggle. By the way, this guy got kicked out of his house when he was a teenager. He lived in the basement of his best friend. He created himself out of whole cloth. His will, his drive as a person, as an artist, the struggle he went through that a guy, yeah, he happened to also be a genius,

is unparalleled. That's also what the movie's about. Why can't we hold two truths together? It's not that hard. These things go together. His genius, by the way, would not have wrought prints, would not have created prints. Genius alone. No. Genius plus plus drive plus trauma.

Those are the things that created prints. Why is that a hard thing? Why can't we handle that? Why can't the world handle that? I don't understand it. As far as this argument of like we- I think Ezra believes that for audiences to be given this rich, chewy thing to engage with about this major icon would be satisfying for them.

I want to ask you a somewhat provocative question. This was an effort to demystify someone who, to a large degree, wanted to be unknowable. And so this outcome, as tragic as it must seem to Ezra Edelman and clearly to you as someone who sees it as a masterpiece, is there any kind of cruel poetic justice here that this controlling artist who curated his image so carefully is going to remain, because of what happened here, unknowable. That he is weirdly getting the last word on what we all get to see of him. Yeah, I mean, I did often feel reporting this piece haunted by the presiding spirit of Prince and feeling like he was messing with all of us.

So I think, yes, there's a kind of, you know, cruel poetry to it all. On the other hand, you know, Prince at the end of his life was opening up a little bit more and the last hours of the film actually are about this. They're about a series of concerts that he gave, lo-fi, piano and a microphone, natural hair, where he was singing and talking and starting to talk about some of his pain, his childhood, his regrets, his loves. And it's still kind of veiled and perfumed, but it's more raw, and the style of performance is more raw. And he also was undertaking the writing of an autobiography. And there was something happening. I think he was changing.

Maybe he did want to be more known. I think in some sense. I mean, look, probably on his own terms. But there's the question of what Prince would have wanted and then there's also the question of like what's good for the culture in some way and what's good for the legacy of a person like Prince. And actually after the news of the film being finally killed, broke, Jill Jones, who's the girlfriend that I was talking about before, who was one of the people who appears in the

film talking about Prince's abuse of her with a lot of pain, posted something that I was talking about before, who was one of the people who appears in the film talking about Prince's abuse of her with a lot of pain, posted something that I thought was incredibly moving about what's wrong with this film not coming out. She was very in favor of the film coming out. Why? Well, let me read you a little bit of it, because I think she says it really beautifully. So she says, 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. 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 reinforce 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 most likely receive a sanitized, polished version of Prince, in quotation marks, a carefully curated illusion that erases the depth of his reality. I thought that was something really extraordinary coming from someone who had been hurt by Prince, who saw some of the worst of Prince. But she can hold that against A, his greatness,

but B, these sort of layers of pain that prevented him from being known. And she's saying, like, let's look at the whole thing. Because that's the way to really appreciate who this man was. What she really seems to be saying is, to deny the world this film is to deny this man's full humanity and to hide it away.

And that only reinforces the idea that there's something wrong with being what all of us kind of are, which is damaged and complex, and that this whole journey means that revealing the fullness of that experience is somehow intolerable. I think that's exactly right. And I think humanly, not only artistically, we have to make room for what's broken in us, And that's part of the story. Sometimes it's the center of the story. And that's what Edelman has done here. And yeah, I find it really like bitterly ironic

what Jill Jones is saying that like maybe in some way one of Prince's deepest fears was that he would be seen and people would run away scared. And that's what's happened. So this leaves Ezra in a kind of existential limbo. And I know he's thinking a lot about his future as a filmmaker. You know, we are only as strong as our own shoulders after all. And like, it's like, am I built for it? I might be built for it as a person,

but am I actually any more built for it? And so, trust me, it's not like this is a loss of innocence. I thought the world was great and people do the right things for the right reasons. But when it happens to you in this way, you're like, huh, okay. It does change you a little bit. It does sort of harden you.

A question in people's minds may be like, where is the film? Like, where does it exist? Like, is it in, is the film itself in a vault? Like, it's in a hard drive somewhere? I think the film exists, I mean, I assume it exists in Netflix somewhere. I mean, this is the thing. Now it is, like, I would go back and change the last shot of the film to, you know, there's a motif in the film of, you know, Prince made a few documentaries where he shot a bunch

of stuff. And so each time, though, he decided based on where he's at in life that they weren't going to actually ever be seen. So they went back in the vault. So each time though he decided based on where he was at in life that they weren't going to actually ever be seen. So they went back in the vault. The point is everything goes back in the vault. You try to make a film that goes back in the vault. So I would now, if I could change the film, the last shot would be this whole thing going

back in the vault. And the vault door would close. And that's a wrap. MUSIC Ezra, thank you so much. You're welcome. I always enjoy talking to you, Sasha. You too.

Well Sasha, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. President Trump is suspending tariffs on most imports from Mexico and Canada for the next month in a concession to the country's leaders and to the U.S. business community, which fears the tariffs will cost them money. Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum celebrated the news, saying that Mexico's cooperation with the United States had, quote, yielded unprecedented results. And on Thursday, California's Democratic governor Gavin Newsom broke with other top party

officials by saying he objected to the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports. Would you do something like that? Would you say no men in female sports? Well, I think it's an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness. So it's deeply unfair. Would you speak out against this? Newsom, widely seen as a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2028, made the declaration during an interview with the conservative podcaster, Charlie Kirk, at a moment when Democrats are wrestling

with how to respond to President Trump's victory and the reality that the party's position on social issues, like trans participation in sports, is unpopular with many voters. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Astha Chathurvedi, and Diana Nguyen. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Brendan Klinkenberg. Was fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alisha Baitu and Diane Wong. And sound design by Alisha Baitu.

It was engineered by Alyssa Moxley with help from Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Babor. See you on Monday.