‘Super/Man’Directors Ian Bonhôte & Peter Ettedgui Talk Christopher Reeve, Robin Williams, & The Art Of Documentary [Interview]

Crafting a documentary around a larger-than-life figure is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have a copious wealth of material, anecdotes, and legacy to utilize in the storytelling around your subject. On the other, the richness of their life and the iconicity surrounding them means you risk painting an incomplete portrait of them, of only being able to capture so much within the real estate of a movie. What subject provides a grander combination of these benefits and challenges than Superman?

Director Ian Bonhôte and writer Peter Ettedgui have made themselves veterans of the documentary feature, particularly those which chronicle such larger-than-life subjects: “McQueen,” in 2018, examined the life and career of Britain’s fearless and against-the-grain fashion designer Alexander McQueen, while 2020’s “Phoenix Rising” captured the powerful rise of paraplegic Olympians in their rise to the top of their fields. In a way, “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” is akin to the next step up in their ambitions as documentarians. Reeve, one of the great actors, is as inseparably tied with his definitive, most iconic portrayal of the Man of Steel as he is to his tragic 1995 accident that paralyzed him. His advocacy for people with disabilities and his fundraising towards treatments and cures for paralysis before his untimely passing in 2004 are also widely celebrated, but “Super/Man” aims to show the depths of Reeve’s lasting impact on medical research as well as the full, human man and brilliant actor that he was outside of donning the blue and red suit.

The end result is arguably the pair’s finest documentary to date, a work unafraid to celebrate Reeve but ultimately determined to dive deep into the layers of who he was and what he accomplished in a rich and varied life. It features interviews with Reeve’s family and closest friends, as well as anecdotes from the actor himself, thanks to audiobooks he recorded after his accident. As relayed by the duo when we sat down with them to discuss the documentary, it’s impossible to squeeze every single achievement, every great performance, every iconic moment into 105 minutes, but they craft a heartfelt portrait of a larger-than-life actor and human being that does him justice. Below is our interview with Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, where we discuss how “Super/Man” accomplishes this, as well as the surprising emotional core it finds in chronicling Reeve’s brotherly friendship with the late Robin Williams.

Hey, Peter and Ian. How are you both?
Ian Bonhôte: We’re good. There are so many Bond posters in your background!

Peter Ettedgui: I love your poster collection.

Ian Bonhôte: I’m less of a James Bond fan, but Peter used to be the vice president of the James Bond Club when he was 15, 16. So you made his day right there.

Peter Ettedgui: And I have to tell you that Barbara Broccoli’s been something of a supporter of this film and she was a great friend of Christopher’s. You will spot it in the film, that moment where Superman is shooting on the 007 stage, and “The Spy Who Loved Me” is being shot at the studio.

Going off of that little anecdote there, did you talk with Barbara at all during the making of this film?
Peter Ettedgui: Yeah, we did. She was friends with Christopher, and her partner, Fred Zollo, was the producer of “In the Gloaming,” the film that Christopher made after his accident with Glenn Close and Whoopi Goldberg.

Ian Bonhôte: His first film as a director.

Peter Ettedgui: Yeah. How amazing is that?

Ian Bonhôte: It was a dream he had before the accident. Few people know that he actually ended up directing two movies, and that’s something he really wanted to do. You don’t have many quadriplegic filmmakers directing movies, but Chris did it.

I’m kind of jumping ahead a little bit here, but that is essentially what I got in the end, was a picture of where the trajectory of his career would’ve gone. Chris was getting more fulfillment out of being creative behind the camera, specifically in how he could empower other people. Were these kinds of things that you were hoping to explore in the film, maybe in a longer cut if you had the real estate for it?
Peter Ettedgui: We touch upon it, but yes, there are many more stories about the making of “In the Gloaming” in particular that I thought we would’ve featured more. But you have to be rigorous. We had a particular vision for how we wanted to tell the story. You have to be a bit ruthless; you have to say, I love that, but there’s not enough space to explore it in this particular version of the story.

Ian Bonhôte: But we use the second film that he directed, “The Brooke Ellison Story,” which is very important towards the end of the film. The thing we explored a little bit is his acting playing a quadriplegic. It was limited, but he actually ended up doing quite a bit. And when you know that he lived nine years after the accident, he directed two films, featured in five or six, wrote two books, did countless speaking engagements, created a foundation, raised millions of dollars, and changed federal laws. He was a very active man even after the accident.

That’s the thing that’s so inspiring about him as a figure is the ways in which he impacted lives beyond being Superman, which is really the core of this film. I feel like you guys use the Superman story to really peel back the layers of him and explore the reasons why he was the man he was and why he was exceptional. His essence wasn’t this character he played; instead, the character he played allowed him to do all these other things, which is the beautiful part about him as a person. And I thought you guys captured that brilliantly.
Peter Ettedgui: Thank you so much. That was always the intention. Everyone knows the basic facts about Christopher Reeve, or at least every one of our generation. So we wanted to peel that back and go behind the facts that everyone knows: that he was the greatest Superman and that he had this terrible tragic accident that made him become an advocate. We wanted to go much deeper into that and tell it from a more personal point of view so you really reveal the full man.

Ian Bonhôte: I think it would be really hard to make a great film about an actor who doesn’t have such a deep life outside of acting because then you would just make a geek piece about this actor who made this film and that film, and so on. Chris’ life was so rich, he was so engaged politically as an activist, he was so multifaceted, but at the same time so complex. He had to live through some of those complexities, and that was the meat of the film because otherwise, you’re making a movie about his filmography. We wanted to use some of his films, but we didn’t need to use so much of them because there was so much more to his personal life, even his love for horse riding, starting from being allergic to a horse and then falling so crazy in love with it. The way he took on sailing, the way he taught himself, you know, he learned how to fly, and he would fly himself a bit everywhere and then look at deforestation in parts of America. Chris was just capable of anything.

What you guys captured so well was that he was drawn to these challenges that perhaps he couldn’t even really conceive of tackling at a certain point in time. Still, he wasn’t afraid to go in there and do it, because he recognized that it was just kind of an innate part of his DNA to be drawn to kryptonite in a sense. And the way you guys used the sculpture with the kryptonite to show that, to peel back the layers of him, I thought was very effective.
Peter Ettedgui: We always saw the injury as a form of kryptonite, and we wanted to sort of set that up by showing him in the first film, sinking into the rock pool in Lex Luthor’s lair with kryptonite around his neck, pulling him down. And we felt that by using that at the right moment, we could thread this notion of kryptonite through the film a little bit without being, I hope, too obvious or glib.

Ian Bonhôte: When you make a documentary, if you make it about Superman, there’ll be a lot of Superman in it. But we wanted to inject our own visual identity. And I think that’s why we decided to create the sculpture. We always had this idea that audiences might not see it and might not get the same interpretation as us, but we felt that a sculpture, which is static and can’t move, in a way, represented his state after the accident. He was trapped within his own body, and if you look at the statue going up, it seems like it’s flying away, or if you turn it around or you flip it on its head, it looks like it’s falling down and it’s trying to stop the fall. We played with the idea of Superman in outer space. After the accident, everything Chris wanted to do was related to the inner space of the spinal cord. We realized that visually, there were so many connections to what people say: inside our bodies is what’s out there in the universe. So we just used that and created the world of that sculpture, allowing us to create moments of pause and rest from the madness of archive footage and interviews. That’s something we developed in our first film that we love working with. We have a great CGI team at Passion Pictures. That allows us to do big visuals that can be completely appreciated on the big screen. It allows you to actually move around because a lot of things in documentaries are quite static, quite 2D.

Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that I really appreciate about your work. At its core, documentary filmmaking is filmmaking above all else. I think sometimes we forget that given how manufactured the art form has become, thanks to streaming. Is having a component like the sculpture essential to making not just a compelling documentary but also a compelling film?
Peter Ettedgui: For us, absolutely. It doesn’t have to be for anyone else, but for us, it’s like the raw materials that we’re often working with are quite literal, whether it’s an interview setup or whether it’s different forms of archive footage. We try to choose subjects that have a slightly mystical aspect to them, and we like to create imagery that elevates away from those raw materials to give it a different perspective. It also helps, as Ian just said, to bind together all these elements. It gives unity to the whole film. If you are using something, if you establish something in your title sequence that you then use interstitially throughout, it helps give a visual identity to the whole film.

Ian Bonhôte: Peter and I consciously decided in our first film to use two cameras, one for a closeup and one for a wide shot, and quite a wide shot at that, to borrow from the cinematic. The closeup is very much linked to the emotion. Even if you look at the person and hear the person, you don’t get all of the emotion in a medium shot, and even if they don’t say anything, just a little flicker in the eye gives you so much. And when you watch it on the full screen, despite being a documentary, you have the impression that you have the hero talking to you. And in the wide shot, that’s the shot that gives you more of a palette of who the whole person is. We borrowed that from the language of fiction films, not just filmmaking. One of the great compliments we received recently is that our films can be singled out amongst other documentaries because they’re so different. You just enjoy watching them as a piece of filmmaking rather than strictly documentaries.

Something else that I really like is how you effectively weave together these pre-existing sound bites, the personal anecdotes you get from the family and friends, and Chris’ voice from audio books that he recorded as well. You’re never relying on just one voice to drive the narrative, and so you get this very well-rounded portrait of the person. Because you had so much subjective material for Christopher Reeve as a person, how do you balance the objective recollection that people have of him with his own subjective experience as a person?
Peter Ettedgui: That’s a process that continues throughout the edit. You don’t think, okay, it’s going to be 25% Christopher’s voice, 20% interviews we film ourselves, and 25% archived interviews. We don’t think like that. We think very carefully about who the storyteller is in this scene. Is it Jeff Daniels, or is it Christopher Reeve, or is it one of the three kids, or is it Susan Sarandon? It is very much trying to create scenes in the same way that you would if you were making a scripted film. You have to think about what the scene is about and, therefore, who is the right person to tell the story at this moment.

Ian Bonhôte: And we like the idea that sometimes it’s a two- or three-hander. You always create the dialogue so that we will have worked out our answers. We craft carefully from the start who we interview what place and what character they’re going to be in the film, and where potentially they might match. We always want to have the right person talking at the right moment, but we like having two or three voices so that you feel like you’re in a room for a conversation. Exactly like Peter is saying, it’s not a monologue. Monologue is a theatrical device, not a movie device. In movies, generally, if someone in a movie starts talking to you, there’s the risk it becomes like a journalist talking to the camera or reality TV. Generally, you would have one camera here and one camera there, and then a wide shot. And that’s very much what we tried to do with our film. I hope I don’t sound pretentious, but we really want to make films. We use non-fiction tools, but we feel that our films are emotional enough, visual enough, and pushed to the limit of how we think about storytelling so that people can enjoy them as a film first and a documentary second. Documentaries have a place as real films. Not all documentaries end up being journalistic essays or very artsy, but the same thing can be said with fictional films. Some fiction films are very abstract, etc. This film feels like another Superman story.

I want to talk a little bit about the inclusion of Robin Williams in this film. I was aware that they were friends and that they went to school together, but I didn’t realize the extent of how close they were. Was that something that you were both very aware of and wanted to make sure you included?
Peter Ettedgui: No, we were exactly the same as you. We thought about how interesting they were friends. Why were they friends? Not only did they meet at a particular time in their lives, but what drew them to each other, and how much support did they give each other during difficult moments in their lives? I think that Chris was the rock. He was a risk-taker, but he was quite a stable, dependable person. And for Robin, what he gave to Chris was this sense of fantasy and anarchy. It’s a really interesting relationship to explore. They called each other brother, and that’s something we loved. And it comes through in a lot of the archive. For us, though, the really important thing to bring it to life was speaking to Marsha Williams about their friendship. She said to us that she didn’t want to do an interview. She said, “I could be forced, but I think you’ve got everyone who’s important.” She was like the fairy godmother of the film, just as she was the fairy godmother of the kids and the fairy godmother of Chris and Dana. She knew exactly what was going on and who we were meeting because they were all friends. But what she did give us was these precious moments in all of the home footage of the Reeves and Williamses together that really spoke to that intimacy between them and the relationship between them. It allowed us to bring it to life in a way that was very unexpected.

Ian Bonhôte: We were surprised, though, that so many people got hooked on that. We didn’t devise it thinking, oh, Robin Williams. People loved Robin Williams; let’s get him in there. It was just true to their life. We saw how many people still miss Robin as much as they miss Chris. And to learn a bit more about Robin through Chris, because we have Dana talking at Chris’ eulogy, and then we have Robin speaking at the eulogy, which nobody in the audience had seen. You see how distraught he is, and he really had lost a brother there. We used that because, for us, Robin had become a character, but we were never like, we love this interview that he did, and if we use that, we’ll get asked about Robin. It was surprising that people really, really latched onto that.

“Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” soars into theaters nationwide this Friday, October 11.