Judd Apatow can’t be sure anything Mel Brooks told him while making Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! is true. Early in the two-part doc, Brooks reveals that many of the anecdotes he recounted on talk shows and in comedy routines were exaggerated, or essentially untrue, which also calls into question everything he revealed during the 10 hours Apatow interviewed him.
“The implication seems to be that some of those stories have been punched up,” says Apatow. “We’ll never know exactly what went down. But I don’t think he has been dishonest about his life. As we went along, he got more comfortable, and every once in a while would really surprise us and tell us something that we weren’t even looking for.”
That “us” includes directors Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, both of whom HBO approached about centering a film on Brooks. What resulted is a three-and-a-half-hour testament to one of the boldest and most influential comedy voices of the past century. Ultimately, Brooks’ past obfuscations gave Apatow and Bonfiglio their hook: How can we peel back the curtain on someone who has kept so much of it drawn?
“We’re making films where we want to introduce you to this person whose work you may or may not know, and then we try to get deeper into understanding these people and what makes them tick,” Bonfiglio says.
