Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui first worked together on the Alexander McQueen doc McQueen. “We had so many issues with access and with archive,” remembers Ettedgui. “It was a partnership forged in the fire, and we came out the other end of it and thought, ‘Let’s do something else together where it’s not going to be such a shit show.’ ” The duo then made Rising Phoenix, about the history of the Paralympic Games, which came out in 2020 on Netflix.
It was because of these two films, one about a public figure and the other centered on the world of disability, that they felt prepared to tackle the story of Christopher Reeve when approached by his children — William, Matthew and Alexandra — in 2022.
Heavily featuring family home videos, along with clips from his movies and late night interviews, Super/Man tells a more intimate story of Reeve than the one many film fans might know. The movie jumps between his early years as a Juilliard-trained stage actor, his superhero superstardom, his parenting of three children and his time as a disability activist after the 1995 spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Apart from Reeve’s children, talking heads include Susan Sarandon, Jeff Daniels and a rare interview with Reeve’s first partner, Gae Exton.
After the film was released theatrically by Warner Bros. this fall, the directors talked to THR about telling Reeve’s story.
Why did you sign on to the film?
IAN BONHÔTE When [the Reeve children] reached out to us, they really wanted the film not to be a cheap celebration about how great he is. They wanted something really truthful. They were not at all against us really exploring some of the bad sides of Chris, or some of the dark moments he went through after the accident.
PETER ETTEDGUI It’s not that we’d always say no to doing a celebrity puff piece — because it might be an interesting celebrity — but it’s not for us. That’s not interesting. What is interesting is taking somebody who has meaning within the world, because that’s going to get audiences through the door.
It’s vital for [the Reeve children] that they knew that we were the right people to entrust with everything. But it was vital for us to know that they were open to how we wanted to make it, what we wanted to express through the film. Ian was talking last night about the fact that they’re not professional offspring. They don’t go around writing and talking about their dad and doing interviews about him, generally. They’ve got their own thriving lives and families. They said, “We’ll give you a day with each of us to do an interview, and here is all of our family archive.”
And it was a massive archive. Did any one of the materials feel like a film-changing find?
BONHÔTE Chris bought a camera when he moved back to the U.S. from the U.K. to just keep in touch with the kids. He had this idea that he would film himself and make a VHS tape about his daily life and send them to the kids. He did that two, three times, and for them, it was really cringey, but that meant we got some of those. Matthew Reeve also shot two films about his father. We saw the films, but we tracked down the rushes with Matt’s help. Matthew’s footage was pretty amazing. The level of intimacy and the level of access Matt was getting, being the son of Chris, was quite exceptional. He constantly had the camera on and didn’t have to ask for permission. He would stay over for long periods of time, even at night, where a documentary crew might be going home. He was home.
ETTEDGUI That camera that was used for the vlogs then became the family home-movie camera. Chris would get members of the family to videotape him horse riding, so that he could then look back and check … what he was doing right and wrong. He was very rigorous and meticulous in everything he did.
You could’ve easily done a linear narrative, but you chose to jump around in Reeve’s life. Why?
BONHÔTE There were plenty of reasons why we wanted to avoid the cradle-to-grave sort of structure. One of the reasons is there would be a before and after the accident. So you would have a part of the film where he’s standing, and he’s supposed to represent the full masculine virility, and then the second part would be him in a wheelchair. We didn’t like that. When we talked to the kids, we felt the accident was a freak accident. It’s something that happened. It wasn’t something we wanted to become the focus.
ETTEDGUI Everyone in the audience knows two things about him: He’s Superman, and he had this accident. We get to those two things in the first 10 minutes, then say, “But now we’re going to really show you the story.” He wrote a series of essays called Nothing Is Impossible that he published much nearer to the end of his life, and in that book, there’s this beautiful moment where Chris says, “I’ve now stopped thinking about my life as before and after the accident. It’s now one continuous timeline.”
Reeve and Glenn Close (far right) on the set of 1997’s In the Gloaming, Reeve’s directorial debut.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The film was bought by Superman studio Warner Bros. out of Sundance. What does it mean to be distributed by the studio behind Reeve’s best known role?
BONHÔTE I won’t lie — I was the paranoid one about Warner Bros. I was briefly paranoid before we finished the film, and Peter was as well. We did the film completely independently, so we raised the finance independently. We didn’t even show a single frame before the film was actually launched in Sundance. But in the back of our heads, it was always like, “Imagine if they really want to kill [our] film.” Because we were talking to the licensing department to get the footage. On top of it, when we signed the contract, we were not allowed to use any of the Superman footage within any promotional use. We couldn’t use it in the poster. We couldn’t use it in the trailer. We knew they were going to watch it, and we had a call with quite a few distributors, and they were 100 percent behind the film. They didn’t want a single change to the film.
ETTEDGUI Two weeks before Sundance, we still hadn’t signed the licenses for the archive. Then they finally came back to us and said, “You can use this, this and this, but I’m afraid you can’t use John Williams’ music if it’s not actually in sync with the picture.” We had it at three or four other times in the film and, by that point, we had recorded all the [original] music. Ilan Eshkeri [who did the film’s music], we had to go back to him and say, “We’re going to have to take out these two really important John Williams cues. Help!” Within the day, he took all the elements that he recorded and rearranged and re-edited them to create new cues. The extraordinary thing is that both of [the sound cues] fit the story better than the John Williams music.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
