The journey to happiness of Steve Martin, the indecipherable comedian turned legend

Steve Martin (Texas, 78 years old) has fulfilled the cliché of the sad jester for decades, although a very particular one, hardly comparable to the melancholies of other comedians. In a way, he is still on that record. At least that's how it seems when colleagues like Tina Fey admit before Morgan Neville's camera that they don't really know the man behind the star, despite sharing years of friendship with him. The director, Oscar-winning for the documentary

, he builds a documentary diptych for Apple TV+ around the enigmatic personality of the American.

The two episodes of this miniseries are clearly differentiated: then and now. And how different are the realities of these two Steve Martins. Today he is the man who, at the age of seventy, has achieved one of the greatest successes of his career - as creator of the series

his best personal moment and who enjoys a peaceful (and late) family life. “What a strange life. Everything goes in the opposite direction. How did I go from being full of anxieties at 30 to being really happy at 75?” the actor himself asks in the second part. The secret to success in this reverse journey towards happiness, says Neville, in a telematic conversation with EL PAÍS at the end of March, is “having transferred that discipline in the professional field to his personal life as well.”

The two complementary documentaries introduce unpublished topics around the enigmatic figure of Steve Martin. With the permanent figure of an impossible-to-please father in his subconscious, Martin spent more than a decade repeating the pattern en masse, betting on monologues with an extremely absurd, self-deprecating and deliberately childish type of humor. He was a magician, an awkward stand-up comedian and played the banjo. His was not the norm at the time. Nor was it true that, when thanks to his television appearances on the Johnny Carson and David Letterman

, he managed to convince the audience to the point of becoming a star that filled stadiums, he decided to move away from success at the age of 35 and return to begin.

“Steve speaks bluntly. He is an honest guy, but also reserved. Trust was built little by little. There is a box in his attic labeled 'private', with some of his personal diaries. When he took it and gave it to us, we understood that he truly had faith in the project,” recalls the director. In those intimate texts kept in that mysterious box, full of notes about his relationship with his father, Neville found a clear narrative structure. For the filmmaker, the comedian is a man who closed the circle of his life when he had his daughter. He did it when he was 67 years old. “As her father, he is very different with her than her father was with him. He went to therapy, he made an effort to work on his relationship with his father, being already a successful man and he did not repeat mistakes,” he recalls.

“When he starred in those comedies like

he was the father of America for viewers, when he was nothing like that. He wasn't ready at that point in his personal life to be. But those films served him in a way as therapy,” the director continues.

“Do you know what I think?, and this is just a guess... the break due to the covid pandemic gave him the opportunity to do an introspection exercise and stop to think about what his life had been like. She had never before agreed to participate in a project like this,” comments Neville.

In fact, in

itself , released in 2021, the way its three lonely protagonists come together to tirelessly solve problems, one after the other, is an echo of his own personality. “He says that his character in the series is a projection of what his life would have been like if he had not started a family by getting married for the second time at 62. So he is making humor from what is his own. “His personal nightmare,” he analyzes. He is helped in this new therapy project by the brother he never had: Martin Short, with whom he has been working for decades on various films, programs and shows since they met in

. That real

is another of the great themes of this double documentary: “When Martin Short enters the room, Steve relaxes. He loves that he is a much more relaxed person than he has been,” Neville confesses with a smile.

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