Interview with “Super/Man” Co-Director Peter Ettedgui

Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui collaborated on what is one of the most powerful documentaries of the year, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (which I reviewed out of DC/DOX). In it, they chronicle the highs and lows of actor Christopher Reeve’s life, including both before and after the tragic 1995 horse-riding that paralyzed him from the neck down. Including poignant interviews with his three children and ample footage from his movies, they craft a warts-and-all portrait of a very human subject. Especially moving are the moments with wife Dana (who also died, in 2006, leaving their son Will a complete orphan). Expect tears, but also joy; it’s quite the cinematic feat. I recently had the chance to chat with Ettedgui by Zoom, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: I want to start by asking you about the recurring image within the film of the twisted body of Christopher Reeve as Superman, turning in the cosmos, surrounded by tendrils of kryptonite. When and how did you land on that as a visual motif?

Peter Ettedgui: I’m going to backtrack slightly to the first two films that Ian and I made together, McQueen and Rising Phoenix. Because for both of those films, we worked very hard to get a visual leitmotif that would run from the main titles interstitially through the film, almost like connective tissue that sort of brings together the various visual elements of the story. Because when you are making a documentary, you deal with certain tools, whether it’s archive or interview, and we always seek to try and find something that works on a kind of metaphorical and more visual level that takes you into a space where you can reflect on what you are seeing in the archive and hearing in the interviews. So that’s been something that we have striven to do in all our films. And with this one, when we started thinking about the film, we were very interested in the idea of a statue because there’s something obviously heroic there, but also the fact that a body is seized in stone; it’s a form of entrapment.

And I think that’s quite interesting for Christopher in both modes of the story. When he’s Superman, he’s kind of trapped by the part, and after his accident, he’s trapped in his body and can’t move at all. So we thought a lot about that image. And then in terms of the background to the image, that cosmos that you see behind it, we were very interested in something that Christopher said very early on: it was almost a call to arms to science and medicine to say, “Look, we’ve taken man to the Moon, we’ve conquered outer space … isn’t it time that we conquered inner space and tried to find ways of healing the kind of fracture that I have?” So we liked that idea of outer space and inner space a lot, and we felt that there were certain rhymes when we started looking at the imagery of outer space and imagery—microscopic imagery—of what goes on inside the spine. We found that there were some really interesting correspondences.

So with our amazing computer-graphics team that we work with at Passion Pictures, we started experimenting with that and the idea that a planet can turn into two stem cells, for example. So that was really the thinking behind it. But as I say, it all comes from this place of wanting to create a powerful metaphor that you can thread through the film and serves a variety of purposes: thematic, but also serving the documentary medium, as well.

CLR: Well, it’s certainly a very powerful image and it’s a very powerful film. I should have led by telling you how much I loved your movie. I saw it for the first time at DC/DOX where Alexandra Reeve, Christopher’s daughter, was present. It was quite a moving experience. I just rewatched it last week and it was equally as poignant. So thank you for making the movie.

PE: Thank you so much for saying that.

CLR: So, you mentioned your previous films, that you and Ian first collaborated on. McQueen is a 2018 documentary about fashion icon Alexander McQueen, and Rising Phoenix is a 2020 documentary about the Paralympics movement. You did fashion and then you did disability. That explains partly how you might’ve had an interest in this subject, but could you tell me how you came to be the filmmakers to make this sort of definitive movie about the late Christopher Reeve?

PE: There’s always an element of kismet about these things. When we were making Rising Phoenix, I was very struck—going through a bunch of archives one day with our amazing editor, Otto Burnham, who also worked on Super/Man—that there was this archive of Christopher Reve MC-ing the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Paralympic Games. It was an image that really stuck in my mind. We weren’t able to use that archive in the film, but it definitely stuck in my mind. And we were approached through an archive producer, Daniel Kilroy, who had reached out to Matthew Reeve, and this archive producer was trying to find out whether the family had archives that they might be willing to have used in a film about their father, because incredibly, there hadn’t been a documentary made about him.

Well, maybe not so incredibly because the kids had always slightly resisted. They had been approached for, I think, both fiction and nonfiction versions of their father’s life, and they’d always backed off from that. I think they grew up with a lot of attention around them being the children of Christopher Reeve and an enormous amount of attention on their father. And after he passed away, I think there was a conscious effort to try and remake their lives and find their own paths, as they say at the end of the film. So they hadn’t wanted to go back to the past until now, with the 20^th anniversary of his death looming. But they felt that now was the right time.

And so Daniel’s approach was serendipitous and they immediately said, “Well, we might be willing to do this, but who would direct it?” And then we came into the picture at that point, and I think the first thing to say is that they knew McQueen, and they came to know Rising Phoenix. They loved them both. And so from the beginning, there was an element of trust between us. When we started talking, they knew that in spite of appearances to the contrary, we were not going to be complete Muppets and mess up their dad’s legacy. So that’s really how it came about for us. It was a no-brainer.

I mean, you mentioned the two films that we made, and yes, McQueen is obviously set in the world of fashion, but it’s a biographical story. And it led us to think quite deeply about how you engage an audience in biography and not get trapped in that sort of cradle-to-grave episodic storytelling. And then obviously Rising Phoenix drew us into the world of disability, and we fell in love with many of the stories and the athletes that we met. And it became something of a passion that really changed the lens through which we saw the world. So coming back to it for this film was a no-brainer for us. And this is a story that I grew up with. So it was truly a privilege to get to direct a film about Christopher.

CLR: It can’t have been easy for many of the people involved to talk about Reeve. We see Gae Exton, the mother of his first two children, break down, and Reeve’s youngest son, Will, has quite a moment when discussing his late mother’s diary entries. Again, rewatching the film, I found that incredibly powerful. How did you and Ian, yourselves, handle the emotional roller coaster of such scenes?

PE: The first thing to say is that it’s absolutely essential to build a degree of trust, and I would almost say friendship and confidence, with your subjects so that when you come to do the interview, it’s a safe space and there is not a problem in revealing how you truly feel about something. We always encourage that anyway, but we also make sure that whether it’s Will or Gae, in fact anyone on the film, that they all feel that it’s a safe place and they can confide in us and in the audience.

There’s a lot of loss in this story. but I think there’s also, I hope, an element of uplift, but the loss is pervasive and it stays with you. And for Gae, it was all too clear, the first time we actually met her well before the interview, that there was still a deep love that she held for Christopher. And with Will, who seems like the most confident, eloquent young man, it became clear that he was still very much working on the process of grieving. It’s something that has accompanied him through his life, because he lost not only his father, but his mother and his grandparents in a very condensed period of time.

So we knew that there was going to be a lot of emotion in the room, and we are careful about it with Gae: you see the first few seconds when she breaks down and we cut camera at that point. With Will, he was fearless about it; he would’ve hated us to cut. And I love the fact that they were able to feel so comfortable and so candid in the interviews. And yeah, there were a lot of tears, not just on that side of the camera, but also on our side of the camera.

CLR:  I want to give a shout out to your composer, Ilan Eshkeri, who’s done such an amazing job here. He has an incredible variety of movies to his credit, before this, including Layer Cake, Kick-Ass—of all films—Austenland, Alan Partridge, The White Crow, etc. What instructions did you give him? I find the score extremely evocative in the best possible way.

PE: We worked with Ilan on a television series called Kingdom of Dreams a couple of years ago, and we knew not only how versatile he is, but also how able he is with melody. And we felt that the score needed to have a classical component, not least of all because it has to, in some respect, work in tandem with John Williams’ amazing Superman score. When we started talking about the film, we talked a lot about Christopher’s character and his home life and the archive in which we see him play the piano. And Ilan’s first attempt was to sort of organize a melody around the piano. But we felt that that wasn’t quite strong enough.

And actually the film could use something more because it’s quite epic in its emotional scale. It could take something that was more orchestral and that is in counterpoint to Williams’ use of the French horn, which is a heroic instrument in the orchestra, and the harp, which is the most fragile instrument, and to us sort of represented the spinal column almost. Also strings. And once he felt encouraged by us to go that route, he came up almost immediately with that theme that we hear throughout the film. I mean, there are several different themes and motifs in the film, but that central theme, which is Christopher’s theme, is what he came up with. It didn’t change after that. We all just fell in love with it.

CLR: Well, it’s a really powerful score for a really powerful film. I want to thank you so much for talking to me, Peter. It’s an honor.

PE: A pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. And thank you for the questions.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.