Paul Reubens did not tell his director that he was dying.

On July 31, 2023, the news of Reubens' death came as a shock to documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf, who had spent a year trying to convince him to make the ambitious two-part documentary "Pee-wee as Himself," now streaming on HBO Max, and over 40 hours interviewing him on camera.

But in 2023, the project was in danger of falling apart: The two had been at an impasse for a while over the issue of creative control and they'd finally found a way forward. He had one last interview scheduled, set for the first week of August. Then the texts started coming in. Wolf sat there shaking.

They'd spoken about everything — Reubens' childhood, his complicated relationship with fame, his ambitions, his commitment to his alter-ego Pee-wee Herman, his sexuality, his arrest — except the fact that he'd been battling cancer for the past six years. But after the initial shock, a renewed purpose set in.

"I went to work the day after Paul died. I started to read the 1,500-page transcript of our interview through the night and was struck by the significance and meaning that came by understanding that he was privately contemplating mortality," Wolf said. "I was aware that this was an extraordinary situation that was part of the story of the film and that the stakes were the highest I had ever experienced."

For the next year, Wolf would wake up and say to himself, "You cannot drop the ball. Rise to the occasion." It was, he said, "the most challenging and involved and emotional process of filmmaking that I've ever gone through and maybe that I'll ever go through again."

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