'Mr McMahon' producer Matt Maxson speaks on how Vince opens up to the more passionate.
On Wednesday the 25th of September, Netflix released the 'Mr McMahon' documentary that featured six episodes and covered the career of the former owner and chairman of WWE. The show featured interviews with Vince McMahon himself, in which Vince would cover a litany of topics up until 2022.
While speaking to Kevin Iole in a recent interview, producer of the show Matt Maxson reflected on working with Vince, and how it appeared that McMahon would open up more to the filmmakers if they came across as passionate. Matt also noted that McMahon being an unreliable narrator was a fulfilling thing.
"I also think, you know, Chris Smith, who is the director of the series, has no background in professional wrestling. You know, we would always kind of bring to him, it was David Shoemaker, who was one of our consulting producers from The Ringer. I grew up in the 90s in wrestling, so I have the institutional knowledge of these type of things. But also, one of my other colleagues, Eric Malloy, didn't have that type of knowledge. So we would all kind of be this brain trust filtering through Chris and be like, hey, this is what matters. This is it. But Chris had this beautiful thing of letting a silence be awkward. Sometimes as a reporter or as a producer, you want to fill the thing or you want to walk your interview subject into the next thing and he would say something and he would just let him sit in it. Sometimes the longer he sat in it, he realized how uncomfortable it could be. Or he'd just be like a quick follow up. Like, what do you mean? So many of those things made it into the series that you can see that it's not just necessarily passion. It's asking things he's never heard before. It's, you know, taking a look at things or being introspective. There's a moment in the series that I don't think anybody else has caught on to as much as, you know, things have kind of got like Phil Mushnick 'because he's a dirtbag' or things like that. Nice to be able to do it. But there's a moment where he says, you know, there are times where I, you know, what I say isn't necessarily what I mean. That was just such a fulfilling thing. He's like, I'm the chairman of the board. I'm not going to tell you the truth. We even set that up at the very beginning. He's not a reliable narrator. But, you know, Chris did many subtle ways of getting that out that I just think was just such an art form and really was able to allow us to show him in a much different way."
For more articles surrounding the 'Mr McMahon' documentary, you can read them here.
Following the release of the documentary, Janel Grant's legal team released a list of examples of McMahon and WWE's toxic culture. You can read more about that here.
If you use any of the quotes above, please credit the original source with a H/T and link back to Fightful for the transcription.
