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Its a matter ofwhen.
I had a Proustian response to this movie.
Before the open credits were even over, I had a lump in my throat.
Im in my mid-40s, and youre a little older.
Could you talk about the power of that?
He never said, Hey, kids!
It was always, How areyoudoing today?
It was this one-on-one relationship.
He says in the film he always thought of a single child that he was speaking to.
It was never millions of kids.
Kind of like, Who is this?
Why do I care?
It occurs to me that you might have younger people today accessing him in a different way.
I recall the clip of him before Congress making an argument for public television.
Also his response to events like 9/11, that quote about looking for the helpers.
For the younger generation, those viral moments might be their first introduction to Fred Rogers.It is!
Yesterday, I screened it for every tenth grader in Columbia, Missouri.
They had a special screening and there were 1,200 tenth graders at the Jesse Theater.
I said, How many of you know who Fred Rogers is?
Id say a solid 60 percent, maybe even 70 percent, raised their hands.
It says something about the high-school students.
It also says something about the quality of Q&As generally.
So, was it an accident of timing that you started doing this now?
Or is the film a deliberate response to the times?An accident of timing.
Id say there are a couple of things.
And he said, Mr. Rogers taught me.
Youre blowing my mind.
Thats not what I expected from that answer.
It was a combination of that and that Senate testimony going viral.
And then suddenly it went from like, Really, youre gonna do a Mr. Rogers documentary?
to like ReallyI want to do a Mr. Rogers documentary!
I cant believe nobodys done this before.
This was, like, me justfeeling, and this is something Ive talked about for years.
This is somethingBest of Enemiesis about, too: Where are the adult voices?
Where are the adult voices in our culture?
Whos worrying about the long-term health and wellness of our culture?
When I started thinking aboutWont You Be My Neighbor… What kind of society do we want to have?
Being a neighbor is being a citizen, and those kind of issues are so urgently needed right now.
So he was fighting those headwinds as well, wasnt he?Yeah.
Do we really need public broadcasting?
Like, nobody could afford to make them in that way.
Right where the rivers meet in downtown Pittsburgh is a statute of Fred Rogers.
It was like we were taking on sacred material by talking about Fred.
kindly tell me Im not gonna lose him, too.
It was on film, so that was amazing to get that stuff.
But also his papers, and all his correspondence.
Everything was at the Fred Rogers Center in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which is like a beautifully archived library.
I felt like it had been sitting there for 15 years waiting for us to show up.
Am I good enough?
And I think he was more in touch with his own childhood than most of us are.
That had to take a certain amount of insistence and fight on his part.It did!
We dont really go into in the film, but he started in 1968.
The next yearSesame Streetstarts, andSesame Streetis the hip, cool kids show on PBS.Sesame Streetwas growing fast.
When he was doing his little public performances, he refused to see more than 30 kids at once.
He would do 30 performances a day for 30 kids.
He wanted it to be personal.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
