How did you discover Brando’s audiotapes?One of my first questions was, “Have we got any archives? What have we got?” They said we had access to a lot. There were boxes and boxes and boxes that had all been in storage for 10 years. At the same time that they were thinking about a documentary, they were archiving these boxes. Things were coming out — reams of documents. It was almost overwhelming. I’m like, “Oh my god, there’s actually a lot of stuff here. How on earth do I ever get through it?”
I set myself a year to finish the film. My wage doesn’t double if the timespan doubles. That was the production period once we got the financing. We knew there were tapes. I said, “Well, can I listen to them?” The Library had only digitized about seven or eight hours, so I had those initially. By lovely coincidence, they happened to be really important tapes. There was a three-hour discussion that Brando had with Michael Jackson, which involved a lot of family history. There were some self-hypnosis tracks, from which the title, paraphrased from some of the stuff he’d say to himself. In most of the tapes, he was either addressing himself or an audience. I chopped out all of the other voices that he was speaking to. I used that material in my pitch for finance approval from the estate.