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There’s a moment in Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary about Michael J. Fox that is extremely difficult to watch.
The camera looks back down the street at Fox, who’s lying on the concrete. This happens to the 61-year-old semi-regularly now that his Parkinson’s has advanced. A woman had said hello, and Fox had turned around to say good morning, and suddenly he had fallen. Fox had gone down heavily, and Guggenheim was terrified that Fox badly hurt himself. “I had never seen him fall before,” the director says over Zoom.
Fox, though, is unperturbed. “You knocked me off my feet,” he quips to the woman, and carries on.
Still doesn’t look away from Fox’s falls. We watch him at a doctor’s surgery with a black eye after collapsing and breaking his cheek. There are X-rays of a smashed-up hand. We eavesdrop on physical therapy sessions where the therapist coaching him to walk repeats, again and again, that he needs to slow down.
But when you hold Michael J. Fox to your mind’s eye, he’s always on the move. Usually he’s either sprinting down a corridor or skidding to a halt having sprinted down a corridor, one hand ruffling floppy brown hair. Throughout Still, Fox constantly appears to be on the edge of breaking into a jog.
Like its subject, Still does a lot of things at once. Fox was a short kid from Edmonton, Canada, the son of a brusque army veteran and an actress. After getting a break on the sitcom Leo and Me, he headed to LA at 18 to try to make it. It didn’t work too well: in Still, he recalls selling his modular sofa piece by piece until it was just a single armchair. When he he got his break on Family Ties in 1982, playing young Reaganite Alex P. Keaton, he was broke.
Guggenheim decided to turn Fox’s life into an Eighties movie: “primary colours, fast pace, big music, unsubtle”. It’s hopeful, but unsentimental. Talking heads jostle with archive, and on top there are painstaking reconstructions of Fox’s life, from the tiny Studio City bedsit where he lived on McDonalds to the set of Back to the Future, and imaginatively deployed clips seem to play out what Fox remembers happening off set.
That meant casting someone who could move like imperial phase Fox. Guggenheim got a stunt guy and a car, and asked the Fox-alikes to skid across its bonnet in the time-honoured Marty McFly style. Fox watched on and occasionally gave notes. “And none of them,” Guggenheim says, “could do it.”
It makes a lot of sense to put Fox’s clips to work telling his life story, not least because it was his entire life. Between the start of Family Ties and his exit from Spin City in 2001, Fox was barely off American screens. In Still, Fox remembers being driven home from the Family Ties set, then jumping into another car to get to the set of Back to the Future. He’d shoot there until 4am, sleep in the back of the car home, and be put to bed by his driver. Then, two hours later, the first car would be back outside to take him to Family Ties again.
Still started to come together three years ago, when Guggenheim began reading Fox’s autobiographies. Guggenheim’s wife, Elisabeth, had been friendly with Fox since taking over the role of Marty McFly’s girlfriend Jennifer in the Back to the Future sequels, where she would routinely beat most of the crew and Fox at basketball.
Over three years Guggenheim spent many hours with Fox and his family, tagging along to many of his most intimate moments. He was an open book.“I just think he's a remarkable person. I find it very interesting that he didn't ever intend to be a role model. He wanted to be rich and famous. And he becomes rich and famous, and then life sends him this curveball. But then when things got really, really hard, he changed and he became this really, very open, very passionate person who now is an incredible role model, even though that was never what he wanted.”
Beside the reconstructions and archive, Guggenheim is an important component in Still himself. He interviews Fox from off camera, jabbing at him and taking the piss. It’s not cruel; in fact, Fox seems happiest when people are taking the piss. His family are particularly merciless.
“I think my job is to poke people, you know?” Guggenheim says. “And he [Fox] is very bright. He's very smart. I think sometimes people think that people who are funny are somehow frivolous and shallow. But I think humour, especially his type of humour, reveals a kind of hidden intelligence.”
That reflexive feel for a gag is what set Fox apart as an actor when he was a kid, Guggenheim thinks. Check out the archive. “He does not look like a movie star. He's very short. His cheeks are very round. Even when he goes to Hollywood and he's on these TV shows, he still kind of looks like the nerdy kid, you know?”
The fall onto the hard concrete makes you wince, but, Guggenheim says, it’s essential. “That scene says a lot about him. You know, he could easily just get into a wheelchair. But he's determined to walk, to keep walking, to learn how to walk better. And then if he does fall, he's determined to be not seen as a pitiful creature. Like he says: ‘I'm not pathetic. I got shit going on.’”
Still: A Michael J Fox Movie will be in select cinemas and streaming globally on Apple TV+ on May 12
