David Fear
Contact David Fear on X View all posts by David Fear April 20, 2026
Lorne Michaels (right) in a scene from the documentary ‘Lorne.’ Courtesy of Focus Features. © 2 How do you profile someone who wants to remain a mystery?
Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville has made a number of different types of nonfiction movies, from anatomies of art and music scenes to political history lessons. But the 20 Feet From Stardom filmmaker is probably best known for his portraits of artists who can sometimes be difficult, enigmatic, reluctant to open up and often hard to pin down. Neville has done feature-length profiles on Keith Richards (2015’s Keith Richards: Under the Influence), Fred Rogers (2018’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Rick Rubin (2019’s Shangri-La), Anthony Bourdain (2021’s Roadrunner), Pharrell Williams (the 2024 LEGO-mentary Piece by Piece), and Steve Martin (Steve!, also 2024).
And already this year, Neville has released not one but two docs on two major cultural figures. The first, Man on the Run, tackles an era in Paul McCartney‘s career that’s long been in need of a deep dive: Macca’s post-Beatles breakup reset, first as a farmer and family man in the Scottish countryside, and then as the leader of a new band called Wings. The second, Lorne, attempts to get to know the producer and comedy kingmaker responsible for the institution that is Saturday Night Live. Which brings us back to our original question. Or as Neville says, quoting one of his subject’s friends, ”There’s nobody I know who more wants a documentary made about him… and really doesn’t want a documentary made about him.”
Indeed, the first thought that goes through your head while watching Lorne, now playing in theaters, is: I can’t believe Neville managed to get the famously private producer to allow cameras into his life. The second thought is something along the lines of: How does Michaels manage to keep ducking the doc crew so successfully? There’s a real game of cat and mouse happening as the documentarian delves into Michaels’ past, charts his numerous career highs (and one major low), and follows him around during the intimate process of putting together a typical SNL episode. Most docs concentrate on the groundbreaking show Michaels created. This one tries to figure out the man behind the 30 Rockefeller curtain.
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Sitting down for a long conversation at the Roxy Hotel in downtown Manhattan one afternoon, Neville talked about the particular challenge of making a docu-portrait on the SNL creator, as well as his work on the recent Paul McCartney and Steve Martin docs, the way he manages to gain the trust of subjects wary of making their private lives public, and a lot more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lorne Michaels, Paul McCartney, Steve Martin — you seem to gravitate toward profiling larger-than-life folks. I mean, watching Man on the Run and Lorne back to back — two very different films, two very different people, and yet both huge cultural figures. Part of what has gotten easier in my career is I’ve done enough of these; people tend to pick me for a reason. But I’ve also sniffed around on a project enough to know when I’m willing to make the leap or not. There are projects that I’ve met on, I’ve talked to people, and then jumped out because they don’t really want to go through the process of someone making a film about them. Right, and you’d assume Lorne Michaels would be one of those people. I would! Lorne is a weird one. Like, McCartney was very clear. I met with him, told him what I thought the scope the film should be. And he said great. And then we never had another talk about the film. I didn’t change a frame of it. Lorne hasn’t watched this film. He’s supposed to be at the premiere tonight. He’s been elusive as to whether or not he’s going to have his picture taken. Beyond that, I don’t know.
You know, I never directly pitched Lorne on me making a film on him. And he never directly said, “I want you to go ahead and make a film about me.” Which is very strange.
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But very on-brand, right? You always hear stories about SNL auditions, where he asks someone how they feel about wigs or if they wouldn’t mind living in New York City, and they leave going, “Wait, am I hired? Did I officially get the job?” I totally had that experience as well. You were originally pitching ideas for docs around the show’s 50th anniversary, right? Right. This was around three years ago. I got a call out of the blue to meet Lorne at the Polo Bar, and they are thinking about doing some documentary project. I’ve been a lifelong SNL obsessive. My dad had a Betamax, the first Betamax in the neighborhood. He recorded SNL‘s first season. I saw the Blues Brothers live. I had the Rolling Stone paperback that collected all of the articles you guys ran on the show the first few years. So I’d been following it since the beginning.
When we met, I essentially said, “It’s 50 years — you should make five different documentaries about SNL. Take more of a 30 for 30 approach and make stand-alone stories.“ And he’s like, “Well, that’s interesting. Why don’t you come meet me next week? It’s a show week. Let’s meet, and you can tell me your ideas.”
So I go to meet Lorne at nine o’clock on a Friday night, thinking my meeting is just with the two of us. I walk in the room, and it’s like 16 people, most of the SNL senior writers, the producers. And Lorne said, “So what are your ideas?” I had a dozen ideas, like: You could do a documentary about the cowbell sketch. You could do a documentary about auditioning. You could do a documentary about politics and SNL.
And these became the four documentaries that ran on Peacock, right? Right, I was the executive producer on those. It was supposed to be five docs. I finished with, “And you could make a documentary about you, Lorne. That’d be really interesting.” I sit down. Lorne doesn’t say anything. Finally, I said, “So what do you think?” And he turns to one of his producers and says, “Caroline, what do you think?” She said, “Well, I thought there were some good ideas there….” She’s trying to be positive in a noncommittal way. Then she tosses the hot potato to Steve Higgins or whomever. The meeting breaks up inconclusively. I walk outside, and I’m with Katie Hockmeyer, the head of NBC late night. I say, “What just happened in there?” She goes, “Oh, he likes you. It’s happening.” But then I didn’t know which ones we were gonna make. I just pitched a bunch of ideas.
Eventually, after we’d started figuring out what we were going to do, word came back that Lorne would be interested in participating if there was one about him. And I said, “OK, well, if we’re going to do that, it shouldn’t be an SNL thing. More importantly, Lorne can’t be a producer on this. It has to be separate.“ That’s why there are only four documentaries for the 50th anniversary. This needed to be broken off.
You thought, “Let’s give him the feature-length profile treatment.“ Something like that. There were a number of folks who saw those four docs and said, “They’re great, but… Lorne’s not really in them much. Or at all.” But we couldn’t tell anybody that we were working on a stand-alone doc on him, so we just went, “Uh-huh.” We ended up setting it up at Focus Features. The SNL [celebration] ended up getting so crowded that we thought we might put it out the following October, which is the actual date of the 50th, but the studio decided to wait for the spring.
How are you threading the needle between making something that isn’t an exposé yet doesn’t end up becoming a hagiography? Not to mention dealing with someone like Lorne or Steve Martin, who is also someone with a lot of boundaries around his privacy. Paul [McCartney] is the same way, actually. I felt good about the way I was able to get him to talk about things in a way he normally doesn’t talk about things. But part of it is that my attitude going in is, ”I’m not here to praise someone or to bury someone. I’m just here to understand. Help me understand why you would do this, or what happened at this point here,” and push them when I had to push them.
With Steve, it almost became like a para-therapeutic relationship. Because you’re going back again and again for hours and hours and talking about deeply important things in their life. But with everybody, I sit down in the beginning with a tape recorder before we film and just start talking. With McCartney, it stayed that way, with just the tape recorder. I never filmed anything.
Linda and Paul McCartney, in ‘Man on the Run.’ Courtesy of Linda McCartney/Amazon MGM studios Did you do that with Lorne as well? With Lorne, I went to his office with a tape recorder and we talked for 90 minutes. I came out of that thinking, ”OK, Lorne is not going to narrate his story.” [Laughs.] Lorne is not an unreliable narrator. He’s not a narrator, period. It’s not like McCartney or Steve, where they really walk you through what they were feeling and seeing. With Lorne… that was just not going to happen. And when I showed up with the camera — well, you see what happens in the beginning of the film.
He sort of ghosts you. Lorne kind of vanishes, yeah. I think he’s doing a bit. Like, it’s so pronounced that I thought, he knows we’re here and filming, and he’s running away from us. And then I realized it was not a bit, and the whole process was slowly trying to acclimatize him to the fact we’re there. It was a little like doing a nature documentary.
A nature documentary on a sphinx. “It’s OK. I can get a little closer, a little closer… feed you a little food.” [Laughs.]
You can’t separate Lorne Michaels from Saturday Night Live, of course. But it’d be very easy to make something that focuses on the show in lieu of making something about Lorne himself. He comes in, says something, fills in a blank regarding SNL history — “and this was the year that changed everything” — and then you cue clips and he kind of recedes into the background. Whereas, you know, he’s lived a life outside of the show… He has lived a life, and it’s interesting. I mean, we interviewed a lot of people outside of SNL, including like Hart Pomerantz, his former comedy partner from Toronto and the other half of The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour — we had a lot more about that. When we first put the film together, however, I felt like: There’s an audience who want every little bit, and then there’s an audience who’s like, I don’t care about any of that. So you’re trying to make something that’s for both the obsessives and the people who know very little, as well as making it as personal. Or as personal as you can get.
Is there an art to talking to famous people who are famously stoic about their personal life and famously put up boundaries everywhere? Or, when you’re talking with artists like McCartney or Steve Martin, who tend to fall back on go-to anecdotes, how do you get them to open up and get past that? Is it just wearing them down? With McCartney… he’s probably been interviewed more than almost any human alive. We’ve heard all of his stories about all those records. I’ve heard the story about how Henry McCullough came up with the solo for “My Love” at least 10 times. My strategy for McCartney was that I would go very big and very small. So I remember coming into one of our interview sessions and talking about painting. He knew Willem de Kooning because they were neighbors, and Linda [McCartney]’s dad was de Kooning’s lawyer. I found out that De Kooning had given him painting supplies, and it inspired Paul to start painting. So we talked about that, and parenting, and things other than music. You’re just trying to talk in ways where he’s actually having a new conversation. So by the time you get around to talking about that period in his life… you can start really talking about music and what was going on. If you watch Get Back — I mean, Man on the Run is kind of a sequel to Get Back, in a way. How so? When you see him in that moment and he’s trying to hold it together, songs are pouring out of him. But what happens the next day? What happens when that ends and he has to put that energy somewhere. And he’s heartbroken, too. The fans, the critics — everybody’s heartbroken. That’s where he’s at after Get Back. I wanted to know what happened next. Where do you go? How do you deal with it? What do you write now?
The other thing I would do is get really specific. Like, ”What do you like about the tone of the Rickenbacker, rather than the Höfner? Why do you start playing that on tour?” or whatever. And he’d be like, “Well, it comes down to this…” Just really geek out on the micro stuff, too. Like, you know, ”What did Geoff Emerick bring when he was engineering?” You’re getting them to talk about things they don’t always get the chance to go long on.
Was it the same thing when you were profiling Steve Martin? How are you getting somebody like him to open up? The thing that made me really realize Steve would be willing to go there was that I read all of his novels. He’s a really good writer, really good at nuanced, emotionally complex characters. It’s not just the funny stuff. I said to him right up top, “You’re a storyteller and you understand complexity. I’m a storyteller, and I need to kind of go there as a storyteller.” You talk in a way that’s more of like artist to artist. He understood my mission and was like, “OK, I understand that’s what we’re doing here.”
From having watched every interview he gave, just about he had two modes — 98 percent of the time it was, like, junket mode. And then occasionally he would do Fresh Air or Charlie Rose, and he’d bring a different game to those interviews. I’d tell him, ”I want to go to that second mode.” And he got it.
Don’t just be the funny guy doing bits. He was giving an art talk a few years back at the 92nd St. Y or something, because he had done a catalog book of paintings for an exhibition, I think. Somebody had asked him to come give a lecture on it, and so he was giving, like, a very serious talk. And people were just angry that he wasn’t being funny. All these years later, it was still ”Where’s the guy with the arrow through his head?”
Let’s go back to Lorne for a second. It seems like you had an interesting mix where you were given all this access and yet had very little actual access. Yes. Lorne’s feelings about the documentary were… you know, Lorne is a maestro of mixed signals. As one of his friends told me, ”There’s nobody I know who more wants a documentary made about him and really doesn’t want a documentary made about him.” And I felt that the whole time. There were certain times where it was like, ”We’re just going and filming.” Other times he would just vanish. So a lot of it was just trying to get crumbs.
It would be like a show week, like on a Thursday or Friday night, or even on a Saturday night where he has 20 minutes between dress rehearsal and air time, and we’d just sit and he starts talking. A lot of interview time was just found time. Like, ”I’m just gonna keep going till somebody knocks on that door and pulls him out.” There was a lot of that. We only did a few where we had him for a longer chunk of time.
It’s one thing to read about the stuff that happens on show night in Susan Morrison’s book [Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live]. It’s another thing to actually see him tearing apart the lineup between dress and air, or being under those bleachers and sighing over a sketch that’s not working. It’s seeing Lorne in his natural habitat. You don’t normally get that. You’re seeing how people react to him and he reacts to people. You’re seeing Lorne be funny, which, you know — he has a very dry sense of humor. You see him play a version of himself on TV or whatever, but you don’t see how genuinely funny he is in the moment. I was glad we were able to get that, at least.
I just find it interesting that you’ve been able to do this with folks and have them actually open up without it feeling like some Faustian bargains being made. That’s the whole goal. It helps that I’ve made films about people I think are valuable contributors to our culture. There are people who make films about people they don’t like, and some of those are great films — look at Errol Morris’ The Fog of War. But I don’t know how I would do a film about somebody who I didn’t really respect. I’ve been offered lots of things that I’ve said no to. I don’t want to give my life to a subject that doesn’t mean something to me.
Even if it involves using LEGOs to tell that subject’s story. [Laughs.] Doing Piece by Piece — that was a huge creative challenge to make a different kind of film and make up our own rules about how to make a film. The form fit that story. What I’m doing is, I’m trying to essentialize somebody instead of a Wikipedia type of storytelling. I see a lot that is very, you know, eye-level — “This happened, then that happened, then this other thing happened.” And I’m much more into the ideas and the moments. Even with Steve Martin, I spend as much time on his failures as I do on his successes, and there are big things that I don’t really talk about. Because it’s not about everything they did. It’s about, what shaped them and the ideas they carry?
If they’re not tidy stories, it’s hard to make tidy films about them and feel like you captured something. It made sense to break Steve! into two distinct parts. The first half of it is a really straight, linear story. It’s one man on a solo mission to intellectually solve comedy. He solves it, he becomes big, and then he quietly walks away. The second part is more of, like, a hang. It’s the story, but it’s also much more of his character. He’s got a wife and a kid, he’s got Marty [Short] and a band, and he’s got Harry Bliss, the cartoonist he works with all the time. He’s surrounded by people now, and it becomes much more vibey in that way. I always thought of the first half as being the head and the second half being the heart.
He had to reinvent himself in the same way McCartney did, in a way. It comes down to expectations. After he did Pennies From Heaven, which is a movie he said was the kind he wanted to see and that’s why he made it, I don’t think he understood the expectations people still had of him. I think McCartney didn’t understand the kind of expectations that people had on him. Again, it becomes this question of: How do you deal with your own legacy, and what people put on you? These are questions I think about all the time. People think you’re the dancing monkey, and they don’t know why the monkey doesn’t just want to dance, you know? It’s weird.
“You became famous for something, so why would you want to do something besides what you became famous for?” It’s the discrepancy between where your creative instinct has taken you, which has gotten you so far, and when you want to do something else with it. All you’ve ever listened to is your creative instinct. But suddenly there’s all this weight on you, all these other things that really drive you and end up putting you in a box. Then you’re trying to get out of that box.
Lorne Michaels and Steve Martin in director Morgan Neville’s documentary ‘Lorne.’ Courtesy of Focus Features. All And then you have Lorne, who realizes he’s a great producer and after a while, he just embraces the box. He doesn’t reinvent himself, he reinvents the thing he’s nurtured. You look at the shifts in comedy, and it’s funny how Lorne’s been able to ride those shifts, if not dictate them. Part of why Lorne is an elusive cultural figure is that he’s not an author in that way. He’s a filter for things. He says in the film, “If I do my job correctly, I leave no fingerprints.” He’s attuned to things that he understands if they’re funny, even if he doesn’t understand why. You look at sketches on SNL now and they’re doing something about this week’s TikTok meme. Lorne doesn’t know that what that is, but he understands that other people understand it’s funny and why. There’s no old fogey-ness to Lorne. He’s so malleable that he can be like, “Tina [Fey], if you want to do 30 Rock and this kind of neo-screwball TV show, great. And if we want to do something that’s sophomoric and broad, that’s great, too. So long as it’s funny.”
Sometimes you get a variety of different comedy styles all happening in a single SNL show. “It’s called a variety show for a reason.” I’ve heard him say that so many times to people. He instinctively understands that there’s something for everybody, but not everything is for everybody.
Having gone through the experience of making Lorne, do you feel differently about him, what he does and how he’s kept this thing going? I saw him the way I think the world sees Lorne, as the Wizard of Oz — the all-knowing, all-powerful guy pulling the levers of fame and media and comedy behind the camera. But now I think Lorne is feeling like he’s in the trenches just trying to make it through next week in certain ways. Whenever you talk to him, it’s about what’s happening right this moment, how he needs to get a music guest for next week, why he’s feeling like this cast member isn’t happy they’re not getting enough air time. My guess is part of why Lorne made this film is that people somehow think his job is easy, sitting on a throne and, you know, ruling by diktat. I think he feels like he’s still working hard to just hold it all together in a way that isn’t about grand design, but more about fixing the problem that’s in front of you.
