‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ director Davis Guggenheim: ‘I was looking for some joy in my work’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“I felt like I was in a personal rut and a professional rut,” recalls Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim prior to directing “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie.” “I felt like I’ve been making the same thing over and over again. I was looking for some joy in my work. And I read this interview with Michael where he’d had this conversation about his most recent book, and his writing was so good. The storytelling was so good, but also there was a humor, a surprising humor and wisdom in his book. I started to read it for myself, and as I read his books, then I listened to his books on tape. I was like, ‘Oh my God, this would be amazing movie!'” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” follows the life of beloved actor and advocate Michael J. Fox, exploring his personal and professional triumphs and travails, and what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease. Guggenheim won an Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2007 and Emmy for “Boys State” in 2021. He was also Emmy-nominated for “He Named Me Malala” (2016).
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“When I pitched it to Apple TV+ I said, ‘I wanna make it a movie that feels like a wild ride – like a Michael J. Fox movie from the 80s’,” he explains. “With the color and the music, big music, big score. And I wasn’t gonna do any interviews. And then last minute I just said, ‘Let me just try one interview.’ A really intimate single shot closeup of him to see what that would be like. And he was so surprisingly funny and poignant that I did more and more of that.”
Guggenheim’s film shows various clips from the actor’s body of work, including “Back to the Future” and “Family Ties,” to tell Fox’s personal stories. The director gives much of that credit to his Emmy-nominated editor, Michael Harte (“Three Identical Strangers”). “My instinct was always to do recreations and we filmed a lot of them up in Vancouver,” he says. “But Michael Harte, the editor who’s just a movie fanatic and a Michael J. Fox fanatic, would start to cut these scenes from different movies as scenes from his own life. There’s so many examples, but one example is Michael and Tracy [Pollan], who were both actors on this movie, ‘Bright Lights, Big City,’ and the scene is them on a date. And they’re walking in the streets of New York in Greenwich Village. In real life they’re dating and falling in love, but the scene is them dating and falling in love, and he’s the biggest movie star in the world at that point. And her character says, ‘Oh, I guess I’m supposed to be super impressed by your job.'”
“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and began streaming on Apple TV+ May 12.
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