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
Well, Ezra declines to discuss Netflix, but in my own reporting around the unraveling of the deal, I think Netflix bears a lot of responsibility for what happened. I think that when Ezra started making this film, it was a kind of heyday of prestige documentary, and Netflix was producing...
high-profile, really rigorous documentaries that were kind of in the mold of some of the things that Ezra does, really intense investigations, journalistically important. They made the film Icarus, which is about the Russian doping scandal during the Olympics that won the Academy Award. And in the years since, documentaries have been transformed and Netflix has been transformed.
You know, the executive who originally hired Ezra has been let go and new leadership was brought in and they've leaned further and further into certain kinds of documentaries that were skirting away from journalism much more toward entertainment, right? True crime. Celebrity documentary where celebrities began to be producing partners.
Megan Markle comes to mind. David Beckham. I mean, there are lots of them now, you know? So they're becoming a global empire. They're one of the largest and most important players in the documentary world. They're the arbiters in some sense of what documentary films are, the direction that they're going in. And now they're just generating tons of content quickly, cheaply, kind of formulaically.
And the kind of painstaking, long gestating project like Ezra's is not the currency anymore. I mean, they still make some really good things, but they're able to make a lot more things that aren't that good, but that a lot of people watch. And meanwhile, Ezra's film is all tied up in this complex legal battle.
That's my sense. I mean, I interviewed one person familiar with the company who said, you know, why would they want to be tied up with this legal fight when they could just go make 10 more movies? you know, reality shows about real estate, and they can make 10 more celebrity documentaries where they're partnering with the estate.
So I think for them, the great art versus making a whole bunch of stuff more readily, cost-benefit analysis, you know, my sense is that ultimately they didn't stand by the film.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's possible that that's their calculation, that they're making a kind of pure, you know, look at the numbers business decision. I think that's possible. We'll never know because the film just isn't being given a chance to be put in front of an audience. But I think Ezra would totally disagree with that idea.
So, you know, one argument that was aired when I was talking to people who had seen the film, talking to some people who hadn't seen the film, about even the idea of the film. You know, one thing that was said was essentially an argument about black genius left to stand as celebrated. You know, like white rock stars of similar stature are not...
I think Ezra believes that for audiences to be given this like rich, chewy thing to engage with about this major icon would be satisfying for them.
Yeah, I mean, I did often feel reporting this piece haunted by the presiding spirit of Prince and feeling like he was messing with all of us. So I think, yes, there's a kind of, you know, cruel poetry to it all. On the other hand, you know, Prince, at the end of his life, was opening up a little bit more. And the last hours of the film actually are about this.
They're about a series of concerts that he gave, lo-fi, piano and a microphone, natural hair, where he was singing and talking and starting to talk about some of his pain, his childhood, his regrets, his loves. And it's still kind of veiled and perfumed, but it's more raw. And the style of performance is more raw. And he also was undertaking the writing of an autobiography.
And there was something happening. I think he was changing.
I think in some sense. I mean, look, probably on his own terms. But there's the question of what Prince would have wanted. And then there's also the question of like what's good for the culture in some way and what's good for the legacy of a person like Prince.
And actually, after the news of the film being finally killed broke, Jill Jones, who's the girlfriend that I was talking about before, who was one of the people who appears in the film talking about Prince's abuse of her was a lot of pain. Right. posted something that I thought was incredibly moving about what's wrong with this film not coming out. She was very in favor of the film coming out.
Well, let me read you a little bit of it because I think she says it really beautifully. So she says, "...Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him." He built a persona so larger than life that it became a prison, a gilded cage, one he could never fully step out of.
He knew that revealing his true self, stripped of the carefully crafted persona, would lead to rejection. And in a way, he was right. The recent choices made by Netflix and his estate only reinforced this truth. The world is unwilling to accept Prince as a man, only as a myth. Without the elaborate stagecraft, without the veil of mystery, his raw humanity is deemed insufficient.
His struggles, his journey, his sacrifices, all the elements that shaped him will remain obscured. Instead, the world will most likely receive a sanitized, polished version of Prince, in quotation marks, a carefully curated illusion that erases the depth of his reality.
I thought that was something really extraordinary coming from someone who had been hurt by Prince, who saw some of the worst of Prince. But she can hold that against, A, his greatness, but B, these sort of layers of pain that prevented him from being known. And she's saying, like, let's look at the whole thing because that's the way to really appreciate who this man was.
I think that's exactly right. And I think, humanly, not only artistically, We have to make room for what's broken in us. And that's part of the story. Sometimes it's the center of the story. And that's what Edelman has done here.
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