Still, a new documentary that chronicles Michael J. Fox’s life and career while living with Parkinson’s disease, just had its debut at Sundance. In honor of the new film, which was helmed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman), Fox has been reminiscing about his life. Of course, he is known best for playing Marty McFly in the Back to the Future trilogy alongside Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown. In October, the duo shared an emotional reunion at NYCC and Fox recently spoke with Variety about his friendship with his former co-star.
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“Chris is a great guy. He’s very enigmatic,” Fox shared. “It took me a few films to get to know him. On Back to the Future Part III we connected in a way we hadn’t on the other films. I came to see how much he loved acting. I never got that before. To sit down and talk about acting and talk about Shakespeare and King Lear… This guy can play King Lear! People don’t expect that of him. He’s full of surprises.” Fox added, “He can tell a movie’s worth of story in two seconds and you get it. Us regular actors have to lay out hours and hours to get the information out. Chris is brilliant at it. His love of film and his love of being an actor… He’s not just a crazy guy, he’s an artist.”
What is Apple TV+’s Still?
Still is expected to include documentary, archival, and scripted elements. Still is described as recounting “the improbable tale of an undersized kid from a Canadian army base who rose to the heights of stardom in 1980s Hollywood.” The account of Fox’s public life, full of nostalgic thrills and cinematic gloss, will unspool alongside his never-before-seen private journey, including the years that followed his diagnosis at twenty-nine with Parkinson’s disease. Intimate and honest, and produced with unprecedented access to Fox and his family, the film will chronicle Fox’s personal and professional triumphs and travails and will explore what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease.
“I didn’t want to make a Parkinson’s movie. I don’t want to make a sick movie. I want to make a movie about a life,” Guggenheim explained to Variety. “The one think he said to me was, ‘No violence.’ We hope the tone of the movie is no pitying. This is a movie about a wild life, an incredible ride of ups and downs, and a Hollywood 1980s movie star and what happens when life throws him a curveball.”
“I’m kind of a freak. It’s weird that I’ve done as well as I have for as long as I have,” Fox told AARP in 2021. “People often think of Parkinson’s as a visual thing, but the visuals of it are nothing. On any given day, my hands could be barely shaking, or they could be …” He flailed his hands around. “It’s what you can’t see—the lack of an inner gyroscope, of a sense of balance, of peripheral perception. I mean, I’m sailing a ship on stormy seas on the brightest of days.”
Still does not yet have a release date.