The Big Picture · Interview
June 13, 2018/ 33 min/ Sean Fennessey
Sean Fennessey talks with Morgan Neville about his Mr. Rogers documentary, radical kindness in an uncivil moment, and why documentary went from the spinach of filmmaking to a boom.
5 films across 1 segment.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
In conversation
Neville's Mr. Rogers film — pitched as a movie about ideas, not a biography. He boils Rogers down to "radical kindness" and argues its opposite is fear. Joanne Rogers' instruction: don't make Fred a saint.
His Oscar winner, on backup singers. The win cut his fundraising from 50% of his time to 6%, which is why he can be this prolific.
The Gore Vidal–William F. Buckley debates; Neville calls it a mirror to the Rogers film — both about civility and common ground. Nobody wanted to fund "two old dead white guys talking on TV" until after the Oscar.
His next film, on Orson Welles' last 15 years back in Hollywood, made with Frank Marshall.
Welles' unfinished film about a director who can't finish a movie; the dailies sat in a Paris vault 42 years before Neville and Marshall liberated them.
Also mentioned raised along the way
In passing Easy RiderSpellbound
Ringer cross-promo Jurassic ParkJurassic World: Fallen KingdomThe IncrediblesIncredibles 2
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV Mister Rogers' NeighborhoodUgly DeliciousAbstract: The Art of DesignWild Wild Country
Podcasts The Rewatchables