How do you make a movie about the man behind the curtain?
That was the seemingly impossible task facing Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”), who was given unprecedented access to film behind the scenes at “Saturday Night Live” with head honcho Lorne Michaels, 81, the notoriously cagey subject of the new documentary “Lorne” (in theaters April 17).
“The first thing I did was go to his office with a tape recorder and start asking questions,” Neville says. “I realized in that first conversation that he wasn’t going to talk beat by beat through his life; he just doesn’t speak in a way that’s linear.”
But over months of interviews with Michaels and other “SNL” alums, “that became part of the film. It’s letting the audience in on the fact that Lorne is not an easy subject.”
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