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For over thirty years, Emmy®-award winning directors / producers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine have jointly created critically acclaimed, multi-character documentary narratives that advance their characters' individual personal stories into expanded portraits of the human experience. Multiple awards have anointed their documentary features, including Isadora Duncan: Movement From the Soul (1988); Frosh: Nine Months In A Freshman Dorm (1994); Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (1996), which aired on Cinemax in September 1998 and was the recipient of two national Emmy® Awards; Now and Then: From Frosh to Seniors, which premiered theatrically in October 1999 and aired on PBS in October 2000 as the lead program of the Independent Lens series; Ballets Russes (2005), which was recognized as one of the top five documentaries of 2005 by both the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review and appeared on a dozen critical "10 Best Films" lists; Something Ventured (2011), which premiered at SXSW, went on to play at festivals internationally, and was eventually broadcast nationwide on PBS; The Galapagos Affair: Satan Comes to Eden (2013), which premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival, followed by a robust festival run; as with Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song (2021).
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Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher (2025) premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, then appeared at the Mill Valley Film Festival where my press credentials allowed me to view the documentary remotely; but, I regretted not being able to interview them during their Bay Area promotion. Thus, I was pleased that—while I was recently visiting San Francisco—Everywhere Man was picked up by Greenwich Entertainment for theatrical distribution, which was incentive enough for me to reach out to Dayna and Dan, invite them to lunch, and sit down to talk with them about the film in anticipation of its theatrical release at the Quad Cinema in New York on June 19, 2026, Los Angeles on June 22, San Rafael on June 26 and in my hometown Boise on July 10, 2026.
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Michael Guillén: I’d like to start out by mentioning that I watched your brief interview at the Woodstock Film Festival where—along with being quite funny—you made a comparison between Peter Asher’s chaptered life and your own chaptered life as filmmakers. You said that each time you make a film, you try to make something a little different. You try not to repeat yourself. After all, it takes three to five years to make a film and that’s a committed portion of a filmmaker’s life.
I’m sure it’s serendipitous how the two of you decide to make a film. My understanding is that the inspiration to make this film was largely due to Linda Ronstadt?
Dayna Goldfine: Yeah, my high school boyfriend—who is still a friend—lives with Linda. When Peter first started doing his one man show, which took a while to evolve into what it is, he was coming to town and I got this random call from my friend the day of saying, “Linda and I have an extra ticket. Do you want to come and see Peter Asher?”
Guillén: This was the Bimbo’s show?
Goldfine: It wasn’t at Bimbo’s then; it was at the Rrazz Room in Hotel Nikko.
Dan Geller: Did he have a backing band at that one?
Goldfine: He did.
Geller: It was more a musical memoir than a one man show.
Goldfine: As I’ve said many times, I went because I wanted to meet Linda Ronstadt. I had no idea who Peter Asher was.
Geller: And her friend only had a plus one.
Goldfine: Yeah, Dan didn’t get to go.
Guillén: Marriage is a negotiation.
Goldfine: Totally! The first thing I noticed when I walked into the Rrazz Room was there were all these famous people that were coming in. I thought, “Who is this guy?” Because Robin Williams came in and Ben Fong-Torres (who’s now in our film) and all the local luminaries like Peter Coyote, so I thought, “Hmmmm. That’s interesting.” And then he started with the show and I was like, “Oh my God!” He was unbelievable.
Guillén: I have a close friend who works for Linda once a week, she comes and cooks for her and I’m sure other things, and she told me a story that disturbed me. One day Linda gave her a whole bunch of photographs and said, “Burn these.” As she was burning them, she noticed that there were photographs of Linda with Mick Jagger, among lots of other people.
Goldfine: Oh my God! Whoa.
Guillén: I said to her, “You didn’t sneak a few into your pockets? That’s what I would have done.” She said, “No. I couldn’t do that. Linda was asking me to burn them, so I burned them.” I mention that because, by contrast, I was struck that in your movie Linda wanted to remember Peter. On one level she’s trying to forget her memories but this was so important for her.
Goldfine: Because it wasn’t about her. It was about Peter. If you look at Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s beautiful documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (2019), you hear her voice but she doesn’t appear in it.
Guillén: I felt her appearance in your film was brave. Being challenged with Parkinsons, her willing to be interviewed on camera underscored her love for him.
Geller: We offered her to do this audio only if she preferred and she said adamantly, “No.” She wanted to be on camera. I think you hit it on the head, Dayna. She’s not one to talk about herself. She’s highly self-critical but she is loyal and absolutely aware of where intelligence sits with other people. She knows that Peter is brilliant. When Dayna asked her where her career would be without Peter she said—I’m paraphrasing—“It would be in oblivion.”
Guillén: And with commensurate brevity, the clip of her accepting her Grammy in 1977 for “Hasten Down the Wind” says it all, pow, like that. We’re so used to people accepting awards by thanking their mother, their sister, their cousin, their uncle, their nephew, their dog!
Goldfine: And it’s because of that clip that we didn’t put in the comment about the oblivion because it felt redundant. It was in there for a while but she says it all in that clip in a very sweet way.
Guillén: I’m impressed with your editorial finesse….
Geller: Obsession.
Guillén: … and the way you have structured this documentary. Clearly you were using Peter’s musical memoir as a spine. Was it when you saw him perform at the Hotel Nikko that you decided to make this film?
Geller: Dayna came home that night saying that this would be an incredible story to portray in one way or the other but that there was a filmmaker, CC Goldewater, already there filming a little bit.
Goldfine: I noticed another woman with a camera and I went up to her and said, “Are you by chance making a documentary about Peter?” and she said, “I am.” And I said, “Let me tell you something: it’s not competitive at all and it’s the biggest compliment I can give you but I’m very jealous. Go out and make a great one.”
Geller: We were over for lunch at Linda’s house and we asked, “Ever hear anything else about that CC Goldwater project?” I think what happened is she just didn’t pursue it further. So we reached out to CC because we didn’t want to step on her toes obviously. Peter was coming to Bimbos in the Fall of 2019 and Linda arranged for all of us to get together after the show at Bimbo’s. She prepped Peter to understand that there was the likelihood that Dayna and I were going to ask him about using his memory show as a spine but doing a movie about him, particularly about that period of his life. We were well into editing on Hallelujah, our Leonard Cohen movie, which he was aware of. When we asked him, his immediate response was, “But I’m no Leonard Cohen.” I remember saying, “That’s a great answer. Because that’s the whole point. You are you and Leonard’s Leonard. Different movies. Different ideas.” So from that moment COVID just shut everything down for a couple of years. We had to get vaccinated, continue talks, and then get into gear.
Guillén: Well, it’s true that you make different films each time. Your own chapters are quite distinct. Whereas Hallelujah was about a song and a songwriter….
Goldfine: It was more spiritual.
Guillén: What I got most out of your film on Peter was discovering his unknown role as a music producer, which is often the case. You never know who the producers are most of the time. I used to know a producer down in L.A. who hated people knowing what he did. He was extremely private about it. He’d come to visit me in San Francisco and stay at my place, and he’d often be reading scripts. One morning he said to me, “I’ve just read the most interesting script. It’s about this little kid who sees dead people.”
Goldfine: Oh my God! Wow.
Guillén: How many producers do you have on this film? You have yourselves and your company and you worked with another couple?
Goldfine: We have multiple Executive Producers.
Guillén: So what’s your title?
Geller: We’re Producer Directors. Mike Drews and Robin Sagon and Dayna and I formed a company WWOL Company to make this movie. We’re actually making another movie together. They’re the investor partners but they’re creatively fabulous. I went to college with Mike. We’re simpatico. Mike, Robin, Dayna and I have known each other for many decades.
Guillén: Were Mike and Robin the ones who negotiated the Greenwich distribution deal?
Goldfine: No, we did. Along with working with Submarine.
Guillén: And who are Submarine?
Goldfine: Submarine is one of the two top sales agents who come on board—sometimes when a film is in production or post—but, in our case it was all finished for the most part. They saw the film, knew it was going to Telluride, and got excited about it. They wanted to get on board, shepherd it through, and see if they could find a buyer for it.
Guillén: And they did!
Geller: And they did. So Mike’s a Reproductive Endocrinologist.
Guillén: Okaaaaaay. [Eyes blinking.] I can’t believe he said that! I would have totally butchered pronouncing that. A Re.pro.duct.ive Endo.crin.olo.gist….
Geller: An Infertility Specialist. Robin worked for many years at the CBS radio network as a cultural reporter. She now runs a horse ranch for therapeutic purposes for children and/or adults who are challenged or have been traumatized. They’re not film people by nature but they have become film people. We’ve all come together to work creatively.
Goldfine: They were involved in a smaller way on Hallelujah. They also have EP credits on that one. They had such a good time with that film that they said, “We want to be involved from the beginning on your next one.”
Guillén: What is Greenwich Entertainment’s reputation? Why are they a good fit for this film?
Goldfine: Ed Arentz, who’s one of the two principals, he’s—I don’t think he would care if I said this about him—but, he’s one of the original gangsters of independent film distribution. We first got to know him in the ‘90s because he was running and booking Cinema Village in New York, which was one of the only theaters and he was one of the only bookers who would actually play indie documentaries. He started agreeing to show our little documentaries that we finished in the ‘90s. Then he went on and founded Music Box, which is kind of a precursor to Greenwich. It’s still in existence but he left Music Box to found Greenwich. Since then, he’s distributed two major music documentaries that we love very much—Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice and Echo In the Canyon.
Guillén: So music is a strong suit for him?
Geller: But he’s also distributed a lot of fiction and non-fiction films. His company Greenwich is really effective and very clever about how to work in a changing marketplace and they’re honest.
Guillén: Well, that’s a novelty….
Geller: It is!
Goldfine: They’re very respected. It’s been gratifying … I mean, the announcement’s only been out about a week but I’ve been surprised by how many bookers have reached out already.
Guillén: How would they roll out a film like yours? Do they go by region? Is it national?
Geller: Typically there’s a national rollout that starts simultaneously or is staggered by major markets.
Goldfine: I wouldn’t say national.
Geller: I mean national like New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles. Then they would branch out from there.
Guillén: I want to make sure it gets to Boise.
Goldfine: Me too! Hopefully, the deal is that a lot of the smaller towns are waiting to see how it does in New York, San Francisco and L.A. It’s not that they wouldn’t book it at all but the length of their booking and their commitment to the film will depend a lot on whether it does okay in those first three places.
Guillén: Returning to the chapters of Peter’s life, you focused in depth on the earliest most formative chapters of his career when you could feel him morphing, beginning with his being a child actor. I haven’t had a chance to watch them yet, but I have located all except maybe one of them. Outpost in Malaya (1952) is available for rental on Prime. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955) television series is on YouTube.
Goldfine: Which one can’t you find? Maybe we can get you a link.
Guillén: I couldn’t find Isn’t Life Wonderful, which isn’t even included in his IMdb credits.
Goldfine: That one is hard to find. I think we somehow had to get a DVD of it. It’s so hard to find that. There’s one that was in the film for a long time but we had to shorten that section up. He performed with Boris Karloff in an episode of the series Colonel March of Scotland Yard (1954-56). It’s hilarious. Peter plays this potentially murderous young kid. That makes him the last surviving actor to have ever acted with Boris Karloff.
Guillén: Why doesn’t it surprise me that he starred in a movie with Boris Karloff? He’s Zelig, right?
Goldfine: He’s Zelig!!
Guillén: I’ve seen that repeatedly mentioned in various write-ups. It’s stunning his presence in the careers of so many artists. Myself, as a teenager growing up in (and wanting to escape from) Twin Falls, Idaho, I was deeply influenced by the diaries of Anaïs Nin. She had a line that aligned with my dream of escaping Idaho; she said: “All I want is to be at the cultural hub of things.” That became an inspirational mantra for me: go somewhere where you can meet and befriend other artists.
Peter appeared to have the same mantra. He knew and knows everybody. He is literally, as you describe him, an “everywhere man” and why I was intrigued by—having been so much a part of the lives of so many people—he cloaked himself a bit in the background invisibility of production such that, like yourself, I didn’t really know who Peter Asher was. I mean, I briefly knew him as Peter and Gordon.
Geller: In some ways that was the last time he was thrust into the limelight in that way or even necessarily wanted to be in the limelight quite that way. He also was never a hostile producer, the way that you might think of some producers, particularly Phil Spector; his was a style where there was a strong chance you would know who produced the record. Peter’s production style was always in service to the artist and the work. That’s why he’s a little bit invisible when most people ask who’s the producer.
Guillén: And quite frankly if it’s a choice between Peter Asher and Phil Spector….
Goldfine: I know, right?
Guillén: I recently watched Sadie Frost’s 2024 documentary on Twiggy. She’s a fascinating person and the documentary is a survey of her own chaptered life. There’s an episode where Phil Spector invites her and her husband over. They’re sitting there for an hour and he hasn’t shown up. Her husband says, “This is getting a little creepy. Why don’t we just go?” The moment he says that Phil Spector’s voice comes over an intercom and he says, “I’m not going to call you Twiggy. I’m NOT going to call you Twiggy.” Her husband turns to Twiggy and says, “That’s way too weird. Let’s get out of here.” Just then the doors fling open and there’s Phil Spector, repeating, “I’m not going to call you Twiggy.” And he pulls out a gun. Her husband picks Twiggy up and runs out of the house. A couple of months later he shot Lana Clarkson. In the documentary Twiggy says she was lucky to be alive. I only relay that because you mentioned Phil Spector and I wanted to ask about Twiggy being in your documentary. What was her connection with Peter?
Geller: They became friends a little later on but Twiggy was at the center of….
Guillén: …of the London Indica scene!! Of course. That makes sense.
Goldfine: Again, there’s more to that story that was in the film but it had to come out because the film couldn’t be longer than two hours.
Guillén: Not if you didn’t want The Hollywood Reporter getting on your case about it!
Goldfine: Just as an aside, when someone says, “Oh, The Hollywood Reporter loved your film or The Hollywood Reporter panned your film”, I feel compelled to say, “No, no, no, Dan Feinberg loved our film or Dan Feinberg panned our film.” Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that one person at a big outlet like The Hollywood Reporter becomes the voice for the whole outlet?
Guillén: I hear what you’re saying. It’s a disproportionate thumb on the scales of how a movie’s received.
Goldfine: But what I was going to say was that when Peter was at Apple Records the second most famous artist for Apple was Mary Hopkins and her song “Those Were the Days”. Twiggy actually discovered Mary Hopkins and brought her to Apple. Peter knew Twiggy from that rock historical moment. Again, that was in the film but way too complicated. So Peter, Twiggy and Paul McCartney drove up to see this girl who had no idea that she was about to become so famous.
Goldfine: And doesn’t do interviews. Her daughter was shocked that she agreed to let us interview her.
Guillén: But of course she did because it was about Peter Asher!
Goldfine: Her daughter said, “I’ll ask her because it’s about Peter but she’s not going to say yes.”
Guillén: I was impressed how you incorporated Paul McCartney into your film because, of course, it was doubtful he would meet you.
Geller: But he thought about it, he really did, but at that moment he was so overwhelmed with all the Beatles things he was doing, and being on tour, and the Wings documentary, that he was at a breaking point. But he really weighed it. It worked out so well when we asked—in lieu of an interview—could we have the audio from Barry Miles’ 1997 interviews with him for the Many Years From Now book and he said, “Sure. Show me what you want.”
Guillén: And that was temporally appropriate.
Geller: It was far more close to when these events happened and felt really intimate in a way that—even when we do a film shoot and keep it intimate—at that point in the ‘90s he had known Miles for decades and so in their sitting there at a table talking there’s a specific intimacy that comes out of that.
Goldfine: As you said, it was temporally appropriate and his memory was a lot clearer.
Goldfine: I know! Isn’t that wild?
Guillén: It is wild, as were all the many connections between he and Peter; Paul’s involvement with Peter’s sister Jane. There’s an intimacy to this film, not only about music history, but also this cultural hub that I find so important, this social fabric that Peter was so much a part of, both warp and weft.
Goldfine: As we mentioned earlier he’s often compared to Zelig and Forrest Gump and what I would say about the Zelig reference is that—yes, Zelig—but way more active in terms of his participation than a Zelig would be. Zelig is the guy who’s standing on the outskirts, always there, always looking in, but Peter was very hands on.
Guillén: Agreed. Peter was more like Dolly Levi. He was arranging all of these relationships that are now considered classic. Breaking up marriages!
Geller: He never has had nor continues to have any kind of master plan. More begins to show up the more you do, right? He never had any grand master plan other than his deep intuition that he always wanted to be a record producer.
Goldfine: I think saying yes, that could be a plan if you answer yes when you’re asked to do something you want to do.
Guillén: I’m reminded of when Dick Cavett interviewed Katherine Hepburn and he asked her how she had gotten into acting and she said, “I was born with energy.” I can see that applying to Peter. I subscribe to an ancient pre-Socratic philosophy regarding the oak and the acorn.
Goldfine: Explain.
Guillén: Well, it’s not popular now because it reeks of predetermination, but the idea is that when you’re in the countryside and you see a beautiful old oak tree with its branches spreading out into the sky, that was already in the acorn. Some people are just meant to be who they are. They’re born with an energy they act upon.
Goldfine: I think you’re right.
Geller: Given the proper nurturance and when they’re born and where they’re born…
Guillén: I think of it more as an allowance. They’re allowed to become themselves. Peter Asher was allowed to become himself because the culture at the time was allowing artists that opportunity.
Geller: Also, his parents allowed it. He said another set of parents might have said, “You will become a physician” or “you will become a barrister” but they gave him room to be who he was.
Guillén: That’s exactly it. That’s what I’m saying. They allowed him to become himself, which is true to the oak and the acorn theory. Trying to become yourself within the confines of what we call civilization is very difficult. First you have parents who—as you were saying—have ideas about who they want you to be—a physician, a barrister. Most parents are not like Peter’s parents. They send you to schools who try to mold you, who teach you to conform, and then next is religion and that shapes you, and then you get married and that has its fair share of compromises and negotiations.
[Dayna and Dan both nod their heads yes at the same time, which makes me burst out laughing.]
I have often said because I truly believe it that most people lead inauthentic lives.
Goldfine: Intentionally though?
Guillén: Well, yes, because they succumb to the pressures of civilization. They tell themselves, “Oh, I better please Dad and do what he says.” Or I better obey my teachers or adhere to my Sunday school lessons. I better do what Dayna tells me to do … or else!! One of the reasons I’m attracted to the idea of a cultural hub is because I’m only attracted to authentic people. Just as your documentaries are always attracted to authentic people. Even if they’re strange. Even if they go off to live by themselves on an island in the Galapagos.
Goldfine: They were authentic. Leonard Cohen is an example to me of someone who—maybe even more so but as much as Peter for sure—came into the world as himself. He was destined to be Leonard Cohen.
Geller: I think about Lucy Gray when at some point we were having a discussion about him and how our films are always different and she said, “You don’t quite get it about your films, do you? All your films are about the process of people becoming their truest self.” And I thought, “She’s kind of right.” All our subjects—Frosh, Isadora—they were people who all were on a quest, a voyage, to discover or become their truest self.
Guillén: That’s the inspiration of your films. Of the three films I’ve had the opportunity to talk to you about, that’s exactly what it is. I don’t know about most people but I think most films are meant to make the spectator passive.
Goldfine: You do?!
Guillén: Yes, I think a lot of films are meant to make you passive. But your films invite the person watching them to want to be like the subject they’re watching.
Goldfine: Thank you.
Guillén: You’ve chosen subjects who are idiosyncratic and successful at that.
Geller: What I love about cinema is that it works primarily first through emotions and next the intellect maybe and instead invites you to be the people on screen and feel the way they might feel or at least project your feeling into them. Really great documentaries do that for me, like Come See Me in the Good Light. You want to be with those people and be like those people.
Guillén: As filmmakers when you decide upon the subject of a film, knowing it will be a chapter of your life, and in a sense you’re becoming yourselves, have you seen an evolution in your personalities as you explore these subject personalities? I mean, surely you wanted to be Leonard Cohen?
Goldfine: I just wanted to be able to sing in tune! I feel I’ve become more philosophical about the process, not that there aren’t still lots and lots of dark nights of soul where I think, “Can we actually make this thing fly?” The first film that made me philosophical about the idea of chapters was when we did Ballets Russes because it’s the first one where I realized, “Oh yeah, we take on these things because there’s something there that’s nudging us” and the actual reason for doing it—at least for me—doesn’t become clear until we’re well into the project. In Ballets Russes we were in the process of filming it and had probably shot a handful of good answers when all of a sudden it occurred to me, “Oh, I just turned 40, I’m thinking about the aging process. Maybe that’s why we’re doing this project.” Here are these people who are octogenarians, and some nonagenarians, and they’re leading these lives—talk about leading true authentic lives!—they all said, “What if we didn’t care about making money and we just wanted to live in the art and live a life of creativity?” That was the first time where I was like, “Okay. I was gravitating towards the project because I was looking for role models in the aging process, but I didn’t know that at the beginning.
Geller: If I’m getting the aspect of your question right—has it changed us?—it’s that acorn issue you bring up. Would I have been this way no matter what? I don’t know; but, what I do see is that—in each chapter that we engage with people or stories or milieus that may be different from each other—there is that commonality of struggling to become your fuller self. That does reinforce this notion that it would be easier to sit back and make the same kind of film over and over again than it is to keep going to something new and try to learn from it and engage with it in a way that is so rewarding and fulfilling in the process of making. In that way, yeah, it does add fuel to the fire to say, “Let’s try something really different. Let’s do something different again.” The next film we’re working on is radically different. I feel in some ways supported by all of the people that we made films about along the way. Keep doing it. Try something different. Peter’s a perfect example. Why not do a comedy album because Robin Williams is there? Or do a bluegrass album with Sea of Blood?
Guillén: And you can see how Peter is celebrating his own life with the memoir tour.
Goldfine: It’s true and he’s still doing it. He’s on the road every week with that show.
Guillén: It reminds me of the line from Tennyson: “I am a part of all who I have met.”
Geller: There’s a closing line in Ballets Russes by Dame Alicia Markova that she says during our interview that—when she said it—Dayna and I looked at each other and the hair went up on the back of our necks. It was such a gift! At this point people watching the movie have been through the whole Ballets Russes voyage—it’s Balanchine and it’s Stravinsky and it’s Matisse—so when Dame Alicia says, “We never made much money, but when I think about how I worked with this one here and that one there”—and you know who she’s talking about—“think about how rich I am.” That’s a motto for a life. How fantastic is that? I feel so incredibly privileged to be able to engage with these worlds that making a movie gives me access. I can’t otherwise knock on Peter’s door and say, “You might not know me and there’s nothing I want to do, I just want to hang out with you for a while.”
Guillén: I know I’ve asked you this before, but I remain interested in how the two of you assemble the different segments of your films, and especially this one, where you have so much material, primary interviews, recorded footage, video footage, music rights….
Geller: It’s really important to give credit to Darren Lund who was the prime editor on this project—and Jason Reid for a little while—but Darren especially because he was there all the way through. We had made it clear to Darren and to Jason when we brought them on board that Dayna and I would be editing and we’d all be trading scenes out of point. But Darren took it far down the road before we then began to jump in and edit each other’s scenes and talk about how to restructure, where the problems were, where things were flowing, where we loved things but had to get rid of them anyway, so he deserves an enormous amount of credit.
Goldfine: This film is very episodic, right? When we started we were working with both Darren and Jason who at the time were coming as a duo. We organized the project, almost like chapters, so it was really easy to go, alright, there’s the whole chapter on Apple Records and there’s the whole chapter on the Indica Gallery and Bookshop; but, once we had organized all the footage and archival materials in these pod-like chapters, I remember saying to both Darren and Jason before they started cutting anything, “What chapter would you start with?” and Darren raised his hand and said, “I want to start with Indica.” I was like, “Oh man, you are bold.” Because that was such a complicated thing.
Guillén: Which reminds me of that great serendipitous footage of the tour group in front of the former storefront of Indica.
Geller: That was even more strange than we could put into the film. Their bus had a flat tire. They weren’t going to be in there. They were only going to pass by and look in through the window.
Guillén: And then one of them goes, “Are you Peter Asher?!!”
Goldfine: It was one of those moments if you’re lucky it happens once in every film where you’re like, “I’m meant to be doing this.” That was one of the first scenes that Darren cut and we both thought, “Wow, he’s really good with verité and he caught that intangible surprise and sweetness.
Guillén: And Peter’s generosity. A lot of celebrities might say, “No, I don’t want to take a selfie with you” but he was so open.
Goldfine: No, Peter is so generous.
Geller: And he also has a great sense of humor, which is why he was friends with Robin Williams, Eric Idle, and Steve Martin. He could see the absurdity of the moment as well. As far as the Steve Martin part, which we shot pretty late in the game, that was one where we just had a hunch something might come up out of that. We made it clear from the beginning with Peter—and Steve was totally up for this—that we wanted them together, we didn’t want to do an interview with Steve. We thought that since they were friends something might come out of this. What came out of it was just so wonderful. It opened the film nicely.
Guillén: And their being together bookends the film.
Goldfine: But we didn’t know that when we shot it.
Geller: We do tend to like to work in—it’s not exactly a circularity—but a spiral where you come back around to something to get a sense of closure and completeness that comes from that, which I find emotionally satisfying when I watch a movie.
Goldfine: But we also say to ourselves and editors that we’re starting to work with, “We’re not cutting the beginning and the ending until we have the whole arc of the story.” That beginning was shelved. We didn’t even know what we were going to do with it. We basically started with … well, we didn’t even necessarily start with the beginning of Peter’s show. But Darren said, “I want to see what I can make of Indica.” His first cut was 25 minutes of just that section. And then to be equally ambitious Jason said, “I want to do Apple” and that section was 25 minutes too, and then I said I wanted to something smaller like Peter’s connection with the Everly Brothers.
Guillén: I think I’ve also asked you this before, but I’m interested in what your respective roles are when you’re actually filming? I especially noticed in this film that it’s you, Dayna, who seems to be doing most of the interviewing?
Goldfine: Dan’s shooting and in general I do, I prep all the questions, I show them to Dan and Dan sometimes adds or subtracts or changes. Then I do the primary interview.
Geller: If it feels like there’s something that dawns on me in the course of an answer I’ll say to whoever we’re filming, “Hey, could you follow up on that?” Usually at some point Dayna will say, “Wait, wait, I’m not done asking my question.”
Guillén: Don’t interrupt me!!
Goldfine: Well, I try to keep it as a personal conversation because the best interviews are when they’re conversations, right? In fact, situationally I try to get as close to a knee-to-knee conversation with whoever we’re filming where we’re really making eye contact. And I’ll tell them, “Even if Dan throws in a question, please keep looking at me.”
Guillén: You do have an intimate style that allows people to talk to you, almost to confide in you. You’re equally gracious. Case in point, when you were asking Peter about Betsy….
Goldfine: Oh my God, that was the most painful moment.
Guillén: It is painful and you could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it and he gave you just a little bit but you didn’t push him, which I respected.
Goldfine: I barely could bring myself to ask the question. Dan and I went and interviewed him a number of times at that same location.
Geller: It was a desk in an upstairs bedroom above his office.
Goldfine: We said, “Okay, it’s time for one of the flowered shirt interviews again…”
Guillén: The “flowered shirt” interview…?!
Goldfine: It’s a particular shirt. We said: “Can you just haul that shirt out again so that it looks like we’re interviewing you at the same time?”
Geller: For continuity.
Goldfine: In Ballets Russes we did that a lot with Freddy Franklin. “We need to put you in the green chair again.”
Guillén: Now, see? This is why I love you: you’re exposing what’s behind the curtain.
Geller: Of course! It’s not news or reportage in that sense, it’s hybrid with cinema where there is artifice involved.
Guillén: There has to be.
Goldfine: Also, I think it’s comforting to an audience member when you’re interviewing someone that the clothing doesn’t keep changing so you’re not distracted. In Peter’s case, if he’s either onstage or in his flowered shirt at his desk it’s one less thing you have to think about.
Geller: About pushing him, at that point where we’re asking that specific question we had already filmed several things where we began to ask him about Betsy. We had filmed Eric Idle talking about how Peter suppressed feelings. We had filmed and asked Peter about his father’s suicide. So when Dayna put the question to him about how Betsy’s disintegration affected him, at that point his body language had him looking out the window, getting so uncomfortable, that we didn’t need to push him. By that point we had all these moments that we knew an audience would understand him. They would have gone through these other moments with him to see that this was the peak of his uncomfortable responses to these questions. We didn’t need to ask any more.
Guillén: It totally graphs a cultural intuition because—in full disclosure—I weathered substance abuse issues for many years while I watched many others go. Peter mentioned this in your documentary: why do some people survive and others don’t? Why does drug abuse affect some people in devastating ways and skirt others? I loved Linda’s comment: “It was fun … but it ruined everything.”
Goldfine: People kept saying there had to have been things that happened in Peter’s life that were not all positive. Then we would say, “Yeah, his first wife, it was really a horrible split. She disintegrated.” Then people would say, “You’re not putting that in the film? You have to put those things in the film.”
Guillén: But why?
Geller: To understand why he is so sensitive to other artists and their expression of themselves in their music and then to bring the best of that onto a recording, you need to understand then what were the sensitivities he had in his life, the pain as well as the joy, because—face it—most songwriters are singing about trauma or pain, or a quest for something. Songs generally aren’t just bright and celebratory.
Guillén: I asked why but I understand the necessity. I’ve commented on this elsewhere but it seems like every bio pic I see or every documentary profiling an artist reveals that creativity isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. It’s almost like being a shaman. Most shamans suffer for their cultures. A lot of artists suffer for their cultures. I was a student of Joseph Campbell’s and I remember him saying to me once, “Artists are the saints of our times” in the sense that saints were often persecuted, or even earned the mantle of sainthood by being persecuted.
Goldfine: I don’t think Peter suffered much. That’s the thing. For the most part he did live an amazingly positive life.
Guillén: He didn’t get in his own way. When I talk about becoming yourself, Peter didn’t get in his own way. He didn’t try to be something he wasn’t. There’s a feeling of ease to what he accomplished and that’s the inspiration he offers: if you can get out of your own way, you can actually help other people be creative, you can be creative. The blazing testament to that is your montage of all the album covers of albums he produced. Oh, my fucking God!! It’s unbelievable! So many of those album covers triggered immediate memories within me. I grew up listening to those albums, loving them. He entered into my life and impacted my life through his productiion of them.
Goldfine: They were all so different.
Guillén: Which again speaks to his invisibility as a producer. Perhaps invisibility is requisite to promoting the visibility of others? I don’t know.
Goldfine: I don’t really care what critics think—we just do our thing—but one of them said that when we showed all those album covers we reduced it to a minute and didn’t follow up by interviewing Diana Ross, etc. But here’s the thing: this film is really an origin story. You know what happens afterwards.
Geller: It’s like those Marvel superhero movies!
Guillén: Exactly. You have to have a good origin story in order to lead into a chaptered life.
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