Sasha Weiss
speaker
220 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 3 May
Sasha Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So I've gotten to know Ezra pretty well over the years of reporting this story, and we've talked a lot. He is extremely dogged and rigorous. He is extremely focused.
He's just very human, Ezra.
So Ezra started out in TV journalism and sports journalism especially. And eventually he started directing his own documentary films.
And he brings a lot of rigor and I would say also a lot of emotion and storytelling chops to these huge canvases that he takes on.
But maybe the best way to talk about his work is to talk about his best-known film on O.J. Simpson, O.J. Made in America, which comes out in 2016 to great acclaim on ESPN. It wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film that year.
Big deal. Got a ton of attention, and deservedly so, because... Part of its magic is that it takes an event that we all thought we knew. We had been over it a million times. And it gives it... We watched CNN.
We knew that many of us watched it, you know, as kids and watched the car chase and remember it and remember the polarization around it. The way that I would say black America and white America viewed the case very differently. And what Ezra manages to do in the film is to give a familiar recent historical event a much broader context.
And not only do you understand O.J., how huge he was, how beloved he was, how deep his downfall was, you also understand the context of race relations in California from the 1960s into the 90s and even the early 2000s. And you understand how many of the racial pathologies of our country run through this case.
So it's this incredibly layered document where all of these different energies are drawn together to tell a new story. And Ezra works on an enormous scale. The film is eight hours and I think is widely thought of as one of the greatest American documentaries, one of the greatest American films that has been made in the last decade.
Well, it may be worth saying, for one thing, that this film was not Ezra's idea originally. Huh. What do you mean? So after the success of O.J., I mean, he's like the toast of the film world. He could do anything. He could do anything. And thinking about his next project, he gets a call from Netflix, and they have a very enticing proposition.
So they tell him that they have made a deal with Prince's estate that gave them exclusive access to Prince's vault. Now, the vault, which is how it's known among Princeologists, is his personal archive, which was housed in Paisley Park, which was his kind of... home studio fortress in Minnesota where he lived and recorded and performed. And it had who knows what.
I mean, it was a treasure trove of archival material.
So tantalizing. It's his vault. And people knew of its existence. And it was the kind of proposition that it would be very hard for a filmmaker like Ezra Edelman to say no to.
So they find beautiful concert footage, some of which has never been seen before. They find band rehearsals, which at first seem like really exciting, but there's hours and hours of it, just music, just him playing music. They find some unfinished films that Prince made, but it's basically all performance. What they didn't find is almost anything that was candid or spontaneous. Mm-hmm.
Prince kind of hanging out with his friends. Prince on the off hours. Prince, you know, talking shit with the band. Prince writing music, composing music. I mean, he was a great songwriter. His process, nothing. And when they would find, like, the beginning of something or the suggestion of something, there was a little bit of footage of Prince horsing around with his girlfriends, for example.
But the footage was scratched. It seemed like someone had tampered with the tape. So they came to the conclusion that it might have been deliberate, that anything that was candid, that was still around, had been damaged.
So he does what he always does, which is to start to interview people intensively. And he wants to talk to all the people who knew Prince well to try to understand what was driving him. What was he thinking about? What were his torments? What were his successes?
And he seeks out kind of everybody in Prince's world from, you know, bodyguards to family members to dear friends to many, many collaborators over the years.
And what he and his team begin to find is basically another locked door, another wall.
People are very reluctant to speak candidly about Prince. They're protective. Some people seem scared.
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