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
I mean, it's not that unusual in a way for a world famous celebrity, you know, for people not to want to talk about them. But it was very intense. And, you know, it seemed across the board universal, this reluctance. And Ezra and his team started to wonder like, what's the big secret here? Is there some secret that people won't tell us?
People slowly did begin to talk.
At a certain point, he had interviewed enough people, over 75 people. To start to get a clearer picture of Prince and to be able to marry a narrative of Prince's life from the beginning really to the end where he died in a very mysterious way with this footage that was in the vault.
And it's not that there's a secret, but there's a complex, tortured, deeply traumatized person alongside the musical genius. And eventually, Ezra had what he felt was a solid cut of the film, and I was able to watch it.
Well, one of the things the film does so well is tell the story of Prince's childhood. And it's maybe worth saying that it doesn't unfold the story in a linear way. It accumulates through the interviews, through all of the different people he speaks to, his lovers, his sister, his friends. And what you see is a picture of a boy.
First of all, he had, according to several testimonies in the film, a troubled relationship with his parents. There was violence in the home. His parents split when he was a kid. First, he was living with his mother. She then remarried. And two people in the film say that Prince told them that when he was a kid, his stepfather shut him in a room or a closet for six weeks. Wow.
And he came out changed.
How could he not? And then when he was 12, his mother kicked him out of the house and sent him to live with his father. He was very close to his father. His father was a musician. And he was a very religious man. He was a strict man, kind of an authoritarian parent. And he found Prince in a room with a girl a couple times. And he, too, kicked Prince out when Prince was 14 years old. So...
he was an abandoned person. And that abandonment and the dissolution of his family and the feeling of neglect, according to the many people who knew him, was a real through line in his life. This drove Prince to his own unstable sort of familial and love relationships. And one pattern that you see in the film over the course of Prince's life is that he would kind of
assemble families around himself in the form of collaborators and bandmates, but he would always really challenge those relationships to the point of breaking. He was distrustful. He was demanding. A couple of his close collaborators say that when they asked for a raise, Prince said to them, if you really loved me, you wouldn't ask me for a raise. He was really controlling with his girlfriends.
With one girlfriend, he tried to prevent her from seeing her family and from making phone calls at a certain point.
Yes, and I think, you know, what you see unfolding in the film is someone also at war with himself. You know, on the one hand, just this overwhelming creativity that was pouring out of him and a desire to have people participate in that, but a constant pushing people away. You know, he was a great elevator of women, for example.
He had many famous female collaborators, but many of those collaborators testify to the fact that he could be
you know not only controlling but kind of put them down and diminish them and make them feel worthless and he could also be physically abusive so you hear from a girlfriend of his a collaborator jill jones who talks about a moment when she flew into a jealous rage and prince hit her and never apologized and her anguish many years later is just totally vivid for the viewer
Well, there's a great moment in the film where he's singing the beautiful ones. You can find performances like this one online. And, you know, one of the refrains is... Do you want him or do you want me? Because I want you. It's the song of yearning. And he is just giving a wild performance of a kind of screaming and keening and, you know, falling. And...
When I heard his like sort of yelps and his cries, I always thought it was about sexuality, you know, and sexual yearning, romantic yearning. But I was able to hear it in a different way. And partly because one of his bandmates is telling me, I hear her voice on the film telling me, this was the central problem of his life, this problem of abandonment. Do you want me?
And you could hear the pure pain in it. And then suddenly Prince's screaming feels also like grief. It's not just sexuality. It's also grief. It's also pain. And it's authentic. And I understand that the song contains all of it. So it's this richness. And you sort of understand what's feeding the performance and that when he's there on stage, like, yes, he's...
I'm sure aware of what he's doing and in control of what he's doing, but he's also possessed and kind of channeling all of this complexity through his body and through his voice. And I just hear his music completely differently now. The layers are so much deeper.
So the movie is an answer to a cultural question that I think has been vexing us for a decade or more, which is what do we do with great artists who are extremely flawed human beings? And the answer that the movie offers is that we basically sit with their contradictions, right? And Prince was, on the one hand, a genius, an original of a generation, an original of a century.
I mean, he's a Mozart of American pop. And with a mind that was teeming with music and ideas, he was also... controlling he could be abusive towards his lovers he was deeply vulnerable he was a person who crossed boundaries and contained multiplicities and edelman is asking us to sit with that for nine hours
Showing 101–120 of 220 · page 6 of 11
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