Ezra Edelman

And, you know, if someone calls you up and says, hey...

What do you think about Prince?

We have his entire vault that's never been accessed or seen.

And then I'm like, I also know Prince is basically this mysterious figure.

And I know that his story in some ways hasn't really ever been told.

Here's the puzzle.

And this is the puzzle solver that we're going to pay to do this.

There's a reason why Prince's story has never been told.

Prince was not someone in life that was interested in sharing.

And he cultivated an air of mystery, and he did it in a pretty impressively consistent, domineering and ironclad way.

He famously, if not notoriously, lived a life that was sort of marked by pretty dramatic sort of severing of relationships and separations.

And by the way, there have been plenty of books written about Prince, but none have really connected the dots

of his life to really sort of go how did we get from a teenage virtuoso genius who was the youngest artist signed by Warner Brothers and given complete creative control to a guy who died of a drug overdose

In an elevator in Paisley Park, in essence, died in a box within a box that he built himself, especially the guy who in much the public's consciousness didn't do drugs.

Look, there's a responsibility and obligation to me as a filmmaker, as a documentarian, to answer the question, well, how did that happen?

So is that the question that you set out to craft this map to answer?

I was trying to answer a question of someone who, he is an artist that has really helped people grow.

go through the world feeling seen themselves.

Yes.

His androgyny and his sort of being able to tap into his female side, his racial sort of ambiguity at times and his message that sort of comes from being, let's just say, open to all things.