Michael J Fox: ‘My wife could have said, Parkinson’s, that’s not for me. But she stuck around’

When Davis Guggenheim, the director of the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, approached Michael J Fox three years ago in the hope of making a feature about his life, the film-maker had a few things going for him besides his success with documentaries about other luminaries, including that Al Gore film. Guggenheim’s wife, the actor Elisabeth Shue, had worked with Fox before, starring as his girlfriend in the second and third instalments of the Back to the Future series. And Guggenheim had directed It Might Get Loud, a documentary about Jimmy Page, Jack White and the Edge, a fact that endeared him to Fox, a long-time electric-guitar player.

Even so, Fox initially baulked at the idea of a movie, particularly one centred on tales he had already written about in four best-selling memoirs. “I told him, my story’s pretty self-explanatory,” Fox says. “I don’t know how many times you can tell it.”

But Guggenheim persevered. He didn’t want to do a film version of Fox’s own memoirs, which detail the actor’s life and career and struggles with Parkinson’s disease, as good as he thought they were. And he didn’t want to make a standard documentary, the sort with talking heads and sombre narration. Guggenheim wanted to make a movie with as much life and humour as its subject, a fun, fast-paced effort not unlike, say, a movie starring Michael J Fox.

“I wanted to take the audience on a wild ride,” Guggenheim says.

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In the end Fox relented, albeit with one request: no violins. “No maudlin treatment of a guy with a terrible diagnosis,” Guggenheim says.

Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, which is streaming on Apple TV+ as well as showing in some cinemas, interweaves scripted re-enactments, archival behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with Fox and copious clips from the star’s four-decade career, including his breakthrough roles in Back to the Future and on Family Ties, which established Fox as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

[ Michael J Fox: ‘In the wheelchair, I’m luggage. No one listens to luggage’ ]

[ ‘I’m alive ... it’s getting tougher’: Michael J Fox talks about his worsening Parkinson’s ]

The result is a genre-defying hybrid that uses Fox’s own film and TV work to creatively illustrate key moments of his life (more on that later) and even reveal long-held secrets – for example, how Fox managed to hide his Parkinson’s for years, even while starring in the US comedy series Spin City.

The film explores Fox’s career from its earliest beginnings, when the actor was 16, but playing 12, in the Canadian sitcom Leo and Me. In a video interview from his office in New York, Fox criticises his work in those early gigs. “I eventually figured out how to act,” he says, “but early on I had no clue.”

Initially, Guggenheim wanted to tell Fox’s story largely through re-enactments, with actors playing Fox at various stages of his life. The film’s Irish editor, Michael Harte (who also worked on Three Identical Strangers) was against the idea. “The problem is, you can’t show the actor’s face,” he says. “What’s brilliant about Michael is he’s so engaging, he’s got this superstar quality.” Using a double of someone as immediately recognisable as Fox, he thought, “would push the audience out of the movie”.

Instead, Harte thought they could use movie and TV clips of the actor to tell Fox’s story, which set up a “battle” (Guggenheim’s word) of creative wills between the director and the editor.

One day, on a whim, Harte combined a scene from Bright Lights, Big City, in which Fox flips through an article he’s been assigned to fact-check, with an audio clip of Fox describing the first time he read the script for Back to the Future. Guggenheim loved the mash-up, and encouraged Harte to find more. It wasn’t difficult. As Guggenheim notes, there were a lot of movies and episodes to pull from.

In the end, the two settled on an imaginative compromise, mixing scripted shots of Fox’s double, shot from behind so his face couldn’t be seen, and shots of the real Fox, either from the actor’s films and shows, or in behind-the-scenes clips culled from 92 VHS cassettes of Family Ties footage.

To find all those scenes, Harte spent eight weeks watching every film and TV show Fox had ever been in. “The TV shows were the Everest,” Harte says. He painstakingly flagged every scene he thought might be useful: Michael drinks coffee. Michael walks down a hallway.

It helped that Harte, who is from Co Donegal, has been a mad Fox fan from childhood. The first movie he saw in a cinema as a young boy was Back to the Future Part II (“a game changer”); his all-time favourite film, even now, is Back to the Future.

Guggenheim, on the other hand, wasn’t as huge a fan of Fox or his films growing up.

“I don’t think Davis had seen the Back to the Future films before this,” Harte says, “and his wife is in them.”

“I was watching different things,” Guggenheim says.

The film-makers also pored through hours of Spin City episodes to find footage of how Fox had kept his Parkinson’s hidden from the show’s cast, crew and audience, a fact Fox wrote about in his first memoir, Lucky Man. In one montage we see Fox twiddling pens, holding phones, checking his watch, rolling up his sleeves – anything to mask the shaking in his left hand. “We were taking stuff that was scripted and using it as archive,” Guggenheim says.

Here’s someone I grew up watching and adoring, and the first time I meet him, we’re not having a few drinks in a bar, I’m presenting what I see is 90 minutes of his life

—  Michael Harte

As Harte was sifting through the thousands of clips for material, Guggenheim set about casting actors for the re-enactments, which included stand-ins for Woody Harrelson, a long-time friend and one-time costar; Fox’s no-nonsense but ultimately supportive dad; and, of course, Fox himself. To find someone who could match Fox’s lithe physicality, the creators had actors jump up and slide across a car hood – or try to. The one actor who could do it, Danny Irizarry, got the job. “I loved the actors that played me,” Fox says.

When the first rough cut was complete, the film-makers screened it for Fox. “It was utterly terrifying,” Harte says. “Here’s someone I grew up watching and adoring, and the first time I meet him, we’re not having a few drinks in a bar, I’m presenting what I see is 90 minutes of his life. Here’s what I think is relevant, and here’s what I think isn’t relevant, so I cut that out.”

Fox is pleased with the finished project. “I think they did a beautiful job,” he says.

Not that moments from his life story weren’t painful to watch, particularly many moments about Tracy Pollan, Fox’s wife of 35 years, whom he first met on the set of Family Ties. “I married this girl who had a nascent career, doing well, and then she married me and was like this single mother,” he says. “I was off doing movies and she was home with a baby, and I made jokes about it on talkshows.” Using colourful language, Fox bemoans the horrible thing he did to her.

“And she came through for me when she could have slipped out,” he continues. “She could have said, ‘Parkinson’s, that’s not for me.’ But she didn’t. She stuck around. Getting to see that in the film was such a privilege.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times