Michael J Fox’s life has been remarkable by any measure, encompassing a rapid rise to fame followed by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease. Screen talks to the actor and filmmaker Davis Guggenheim about their award-winning biographical documentary.
With four memoirs to his name, Michael J Fox has already written his version of his life story. When Davis Guggenheim became the latest of several filmmakers to approach the Back To The Future star-turned-Parkinson’s research advocate about a biographical documentary, however, Fox was grabbed by the idea of a different take.
“I thought it might be interesting to see where he goes, what story he tells,” the Canadian-American actor explains, calling Guggenheim “a compelling filmmaker and a really interesting guy. The things he talked about were the things that meant something to me. And he asked me the questions that I didn’t know the answers to, and that excited me.”
The resulting Apple Original film Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie recounts Fox’s 1980s rise to hard-partying Hollywood superstardom, the difficult years that followed his diagnosis with Parkinson’s in 1991, when he was only 29, and his recent life dealing with sobriety and his degenerative disease.
To Guggenheim — best known for his 2007 Oscar winner An Inconvenient Truth, as well as It Might Get Loud, Waiting For Superman and other acclaimed feature documentaries — Still is about “what happens when an incurable optimist confronts something that’s perfectly designed to defeat that optimism”. And it was made, says its director, with the intention of subverting the conventions of both “the celebrity story and the story of someone with a disability. Michael didn’t want the ‘sick’ movie.”
Guggenheim structured the film as a hybrid documentary, combining cleverly edited clips from Fox’s long résumé of films and TV shows with voiceover excerpts from the audio versions of his books, vérité sequences showing him getting physical therapy and relaxing with his family, recreations of scenes from his early life and contemporary one‑on‑one interviews.
Though they give the film some of its most intimate and affecting moments, the one-on-ones, shot with a special set-up developed by cinematographer Clair Popkin that makes Fox appear to be looking directly into the camera, nearly didn’t happen. Originally, admits Guggenheim, who had final cut on the film and produced through his Concordia Studio, “I didn’t want to do any interviews. That was foolish. Then I finally did one and it was so good we did more.”
For Fox, the interview sessions, conducted over a six-month span in his New York office, produced some challenges. “The thing that was toughest was the stuff that caught me by surprise,” he says. Talking about the father who helped him get started in Hollywood but died a few years later, for example, left Fox wondering how “something so deep and so profound was accessible. As an actor it’s hard to access that, but Davis put me in a place where it came up.”
One moment during the sessions was particularly charged. Los Angeles-based Guggenheim says he had been “very hesitant to talk about why [Fox] avoided talking about his pain. I flew back to New York to ask that one question. I felt like that was something I’d avoided asking him.”
For Fox, pain “was not anything I was comfortable talking about. But I didn’t set it up as a thing not to talk about and when he brought it up, I felt an obligation to answer.” The emotion released when he answered the question was, he says, “a body shock”.
Rich archive
The film and TV clips — drawn from some of a baby-faced Fox’s earliest small-screen work, a short behind-the-scenes documentary about his breakthrough sitcom Family Ties, his string of 1980s blockbusters and his post-diagnosis appearances in shows like The Good Wife — are edited together to provide an uncannily accurate illustration of events from Fox’s real life.
The technique was made possible by the involvement of Michael Harte, the UK-based editor of Still who is a Fox aficionado and, according to Guggenheim, “as obsessed a fan as you can imagine”. Harte, says the director, who had originally planned to make greater use of recreations in the film, “showed me scenes which blew my mind. He found things that I never imagined, using [Fox’s] movies almost as an archive.”
For the funny and self-deprecating Fox, seeing the clips reminded him of times when his younger self could come across on set as “smug” and “a mealy-mouthed wiener”. The excerpts also reminded him that early in his career, his acting was not always of the highest calibre. “I was not from a hotbed of film actors and I had to learn how to do it,” he concedes. “I don’t have a lot of ego wrapped up in this stuff. It’s what I do, and what I enjoy doing.”
Having officially retired from acting in 2020, being back in front of a camera — albeit as himself rather than in a role — had its pleasures, Fox confirms. “It’s nice to do what you do,” he says. “To revisit that gift of knowing how to communicate with an audience. I was always good at what I did — except when I sucked.”
In other respects, the subject of Still suggests, participating in the film has had its upsides and the odd downside. “The film is great, I’m really happy with the film,” stresses Fox. Watching it and reflecting on his life has been “like seeing your obituary”, getting “a view of what your life has been and what it’s meant from someone who’s known for their eye, their attention to detail and their sense of the big picture”.
The film should also have a positive effect on the work of The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the organisation launched in 2000 with the goal of building knowledge about the disease and supporting research into its treatments and cure. Over its lifetime the foundation has raised nearly $2bn for research and, points out Fox, “any time there’s a conversation about me, there’s a conversation about Parkinson’s, and any time there’s a conversation about Parkinson’s it helps our mission”.
On the downside, Still has returned Fox to the kind of celebrity he has not experienced since his acting days. “I felt that that level of attention on me was over, happily, and I had moved on in my life,” he says. “So it’s strange to be back in that whirlwind again.”
The film’s awards season run has certainly been a long one. After its premiere at last year’s Sundance and its streaming debut on Apple TV+ in May, Still earned seven Primetime Emmy nominations last July and recently took four — including best documentary and awards for Guggenheim and Harte — at the strike-delayed Primetime Emmy ceremony. There have also been best documentary awards from the Critics’ Choice and National Board of Review groups and, most recently, a Bafta best documentary nomination.
Guggenheim and Fox, meanwhile, are moving on. The former has just started work on his next directing project, details of which are under wraps. And Fox reports that he is working with his friend Denis Leary on a possible project while also mulling film and book ideas.
There is always “a low hum of interest” in further film or TV involvement, says the incurable optimist. “I can do anything that I want, to an extent, but I have to think about how exhausting that is — and I am exhausted most of the time. But I’m always excited about things.”
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