A film about Mister Rogers was long overdue – but director Morgan Neville still had his doubts

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Recently, a well-known comedian was having some fun in Pittsburgh at the expense of the iconic children’s entertainer Mister Rogers. Getting laughs, he naturally figured the bit was strong. What he didn’t realize was that people were reacting positively because the late star of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was from Pittsburgh. The comedian had no idea that was the case. What he also didn’t realize is that Rogers is no joke.​

In the thoughtful new documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, director Morgan Neville presents Fred Rogers and the puppeteer’s unassuming persona Mister Rogers in all seriousness, and with plenty of kindness, respect and soul. Watching it, one is struck by the notion that a documentary on such a game-changing pop-culture figure as Mister Rogers was long overdue. Ironically, the man who ended up making the film wasn’t so sure of the idea of himself.

“When you mention Mister Rogers to people, they often chuckle,” says Neville, who spoke to The Globe and Mail while in town last month. “I had this insecurity. Should a serious filmmaker make a film about Mister Rogers? It was my own bias.”

One of the people Neville sounded out about making a film on Rogers was his own wife, who told her husband it wasn’t a crazy idea at all. Did that convince him? “No,” Neville says with a laugh. “She’s a children’s librarian. She’s predisposed to these things.”

Though he co-directed 2015’s excellent Best of Enemies, a film about the 1968 debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr., Neville has built his career on documenting musicians. In fact, the 50-year-old Los Angeles native has more nominations for Grammys (five) than Oscars (one).

In 2014, Neville won both a Grammy and an Academy Award for 20 Feet From Stardom, his documentary on backup singers. A year later, he released The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, the project that ultimately convinced him that he should make Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

The world-renowned cellist Ma was a frequent guest on Rogers’s preschool educational series, which was carried nationally in the United States on public television from 1968 to 2001. (The series actually originated in 1963 as Misterogers on CBC television.)

“I see Fred’s influence on Yo-Yo Ma, tremendously,” Neville says. “Fred created a unique bond with the children who watched him. He acted as if they had a relationship, and I see Yo-Yo Ma do that as well.”

As Neville sees it, it’s not a performative thing that the connection Rogers had (and Ma has) with audiences. It’s about being a genuine person in every setting.

“It’s a tremendous amount of work to answer all the letters he received,” Neville says of Rogers, who died at age 74 in 2003. “It took hours and hours of work a week for 35 years. It was a real responsibility.”

Neville’s responsibility was to make a film that was not about nostalgia. “Nostalgia is the fast food of emotions,” he says. “It doesn’t ask anything of you to experience it.” As well, Rogers’s wife, Joanne, told Neville not to make her husband (who was an ordained minister) out to be a saint.

“She wanted people to know that he struggled throughout his life, and that the struggle humanizes him,” explains Neville, who interviewed Joanne for the film. “She felt that if he was portrayed as having existed on another plane, we couldn’t live up to his example.”

Rogers’s example and message had to do with compassion. In his office, he displayed the word “charis,” which is Greek for “grace” and the root word of charity. With Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Neville wasn’t interested in making a film detailing Rogers’s life and career. (Tom Hanks is set to play Rogers in the upcoming feature film You Are My Friend.)

Instead of a biopic, Neville has made a film about ideas. “Mister Rogers was basically telling us how we should treat each other and how to treat ourselves,” says the filmmaker. “He’s explaining to kids who aren’t even formed yet what it means to be a person and an adult and neighbour. He was showing them the basic concepts of civility.”

It’s clear enough now, in a current era marked by divisiveness, ugliness and the erosion of kindness, that some listened and took to heart what the gentle man in the cardigan sweater was teaching, while others did not. And if you think Fred Rogers is getting the last laugh, then you don’t know him at all – which, of course, is why Neville made the film in the first place.

Sympathy for Mister Rogers

Before making Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Morgan Neville had released 2015’s Keith Richards: Under the Influence. We asked the American documentarian to connect the dots between the skull-ring-wearing Rolling Stone and the child-whisperer Fred Rogers.

“I know if I got Keith Richards and Fred Rogers together in a room, they would get along famously. There’s a certain kind of Zen to both of them – a wisdom. Keith has reached a state of being comfortable with himself that I think we should aspire to. It’s about not caring about anything trivial, and only caring about things that really matter. I feel there’s a lot of that in Fred. They’re both people I want to learn from.”