‘Leaving Neverland’ Director Talks Michael Jackson Movie

Almost a decade ago, filmmaker Dan Reed began production for what would become the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, a bombshell film detailing — in graphic detail — sexual-abuse allegations made by Wade Robson and James Safechuck against Michael Jackson. One of the year’s most acclaimed and polarizing documentaries, it catalyzed a growing reassessment of the legendary pop star. (Jackson denied all such allegations throughout his life.) But after its initial airing, the Jackson estate successfully sued HBO to remove it from the network’s offerings. As part of the settlement terms, it is unavailable to view on any official platform until rights to the film revert to Reed in 2029.

That hasn’t stopped Reed, who released a sequel on YouTube last year and is planning a follow-up based on Robson and Safechuck’s upcoming civil lawsuit against two corporate entities connected to Jackson. “I want to see their story to its conclusion,” Reed tells Rolling Stone from his home in England. “Which will be the end of the road for them with this Michael Jackson business. I’m going to make [Leaving Neverland 3] come what may, because that’s the final chapter of my journey with these guys.”

As he works on his latest film, Superbug — a documentary about the urgent need to create new antibiotics, set for release on HBO later this year — Reed still has many thoughts on Michael, the sanitized new biopic on the singer that never mentions any sexual-abuse allegations.

Where is your head right now as the movie is set to open worldwide?
It brought back a lot of the Leaving Neverland situation, with these competing narratives of who Michael Jackson was. My first impression [of Michael], obviously, was that’s a weird thing to attempt given the subject matter. I saw a leaked, early copy of the script that portrayed [Jackson’s first abuse accuser] Jordan Chandler and his parents as exploitative, manipulative extortionists. I kind of laughed and retched [reading it] at the same time. It struck me as spectacularly cruel, given that Jordan and his mom are still alive. Painting Michael as a victim was a serious attempt to move the dial on the story and to contradict everything that Wade and James said in Leaving Neverland. One of the big motivations, one suspects, in the [Jackson] inner circle behind making this movie is to go, “No, no, no it’s not the way it happened in Leaving Neverland. Let us tell you the way it really was.”

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Would you have preferred they address the allegations at all, even if it meant a drastically alternate narrative to the one in Leaving Neverland?
It’s a jukebox movie and that’s kind of boring. I think it would have been highly entertaining to watch them try to [address the allegations] head-on because the potential downsides are phenomenal for them in mishandling that. And that’s probably what they realized. They weren’t able to do the Jordan Chandler story. [One of Jackson’s early accusers, Chandler and his family reached a settlement with the singer in 1994 that stipulated the estate couldn’t depict him or use his name in any movie, thus making many key scenes that were already shot unusable.] But there are many other stories that they could have done. They chickened out and won’t go back to it. They’ll have made so much money, they won’t care anymore.

It’s kind of a shame they didn’t go there. The level of delusion that you need to believe that you can put a $150 million movie out there with this preposterous version of the Michael Jackson story takes either immense foolishness or courage. You’re opening yourself up to intense public humiliation by anyone who has their head screwed on. Part of me thought, “Wow, I hope they do this so that we can have the fight in public.” But they didn’t.

Let’s go back a little bit. Walk me through your reaction when the estate won their suit and you realized that Leaving Neverland couldn’t be seen anymore.
I wasn’t involved in the talks with lawyers to a significant extent, so I was aware that this legal contest was happening but not told exactly what was going on. It was a matter for HBO, and they kept it between themselves and their external counsel.

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That was your choice?
No, no, no. That’s just the way it was. HBO reached an amicable settlement with the estate that involved taking down the movie. I can’t sugarcoat it. That’s painful. It’s a gut punch. HBO were very brave in the way that they financed [the film] and backed me. I have nothing but respect for them. They certainly didn’t give up without a fight.

What does it say about the power of the estate that they won?
It aligns with the whole meta-narrative of Leaving Neverland, which is that power, influence, and cunning lawyers can achieve almost impossible feats of repression. They suppress anything. They suppressed Jackson’s child abuse while he was alive. Even when he was taken to court in the criminal trial. He shouldn’t have got away with that, but he did. Part of the reason, admittedly, was because Wade Robson was defense witness number one. Had Wade not testified [in Jackson’s defense at the time], it might have gone a different way. But it shows that you can ride roughshod over the truth if you have aggressive, resourceful lawyers and an immense amount of social capital. Even [HBO owner] Warner Bros. were unable to stand up to them in the end.

The rights to the film revert back to you in 2029. Do you already have a plan in place to re-release it?
My intention is to make sure that Leaving Neverland can be seen in North America. There’s no problem or issue [with the film]. The integrity and truthfulness of the film hasn’t been challenged or undermined in any way. This is a technical legal settlement to do with a contractual dispute between HBO and someone HBO signed a contract with a long time ago.

I think it’s a timeless film and very much about how kids can be groomed by someone who is trusted by their parents, and who they trust and who they find wonderful and interesting and marvelous, but [who] exploits that to have sex with them and really do serious damage. The fact that it was Michael Jackson gave it immense reach, but that’s what the film’s about to me.

You told The Hollywood Reporter that the release of Leaving Neverland 2 was “unsatisfying.” What did you mean by that?
Well, it turns out I was kind of naive, and I thought, “Hey, maybe YouTube is going to be a great way to release my work.” The problem is my work often deals with conflict or disputes or often contains gory material or references to child sexual abuse and YouTube is not really a platform that can handle that because of its internal algorithmic specification.

And then you had the Jackson fan base downvoting the film. There is automation that enables a large contingent of people to downvote a film. And if the thumbs-up go below a certain percentage, then it gets lost. It’s still available, but it didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t get the huge audience that we expected. To be fair, some people came to it thinking, “Oh, my God, Leaving Neverland 2. What’s the big revelation?” There’s no bombshell. We made a film so that people wouldn’t forget about Wade and James. It’s been, like, 12 fucking years that they’ve been doing this lawsuit. I didn’t want them to disappear from our culture after Leaving Neverland.

 “I don’t want anyone to cancel Michael Jackson. I just want people to listen to Michael Jackson knowing that he was a child rapist.”

A new generation of fans will presumably learn about Jackson’s life through Michael. How does it feel knowing the allegations aren’t in there from that lens?
Clearly with this movie, a lot more young people are going to discover Michael Jackson and they will come away from this picture probably with the image that he was a very talented performer who was rather nice to children and that is a travesty of the truth. Young people are familiar with the trope of the movie star or pop star whose private life is unsavory. They’re not stupid or naïve. But it’s a testament to the power of the estate and its heft in Hollywood, because there’s this reality distortion field where, “It’s Michael fucking Jackson. What are you talking about? None of your child-abuse stuff. Fuck that. It’s Michael fucking Jackson.” This is pure money. It’s pure influence. It’s pure fucking Hollywood glory. And you look at these people and go, “Don’t you have a spark of… Do you have children? Have you ever met any children?”

But there’s this cloak of majesty that is wrapped around Jackson, and this is how I explain how [director Antoine] Fuqua and [screenwriter John] Logan — legit talents in Hollywood — have allowed themselves to be part of this movie, which is, by all accounts, not a great movie. Would these people be part of a movie that glorified the films of Harvey Weinstein without ever mentioning that he raped women? Would these people be part of a great promotional film about the charitable works of Jeffrey Epstein? [Sarcastic tone:] “Epstein threw these great parties and helped all these children.” You would not get a single major Hollywood talent to sign up to a movie about that. Why are all these people glorifying Jackson?

Fuqua defended Jackson recently and said, alluding to the accusers, that “sometimes people do nasty things for some money.”
Yeah, that’s exactly what Antoine Fuqua did. He’s an authority.

He discussed a scene that was shot but scrapped about the 1993 FBI raid on Neverland Ranch, saying, “I shot him being stripped naked, treated like an animal, a monster.”
Dude, he was a monster. What are you talking about? The reason he was being stripped naked was not because he was stopped on the street by a random racist cop. It’s because he was under serious suspicion and being investigated for sexually abusing Jordan Chandler. This guy was a criminal.

Many of the reviews of the film discuss how Michael is painted as a victim.
If they came clean, and it was like, OK, so Michael had these staggeringly inappropriate sexual relationships with very young children and also he was victimized by his father, and also he was an innocent, vulnerable child, I buy that. That’s a picture that I can relate to. But [saying] he was just an innocent victim who had not a shred of malice in his body, I’m sorry, it’s more complex than that. He became very wealthy, very suddenly, and was in this goldfish bowl of celebrity and performance and was a great talent and was able to focus very hard on creating an impression on stage. I get that. But you don’t need to go and fuck children.

This is a movie in which the critics and the audience will probably be on polar opposites of the spectrum. You’ve said in interviews that his continued popularity shows that “people don’t care that he was a child molester. Literally, people just don’t care.” Could you expand on that?
There is a cult-like relationship [among his] fan base, whoever they might be. I’m talking about the sort of stans who write emails like the one I got this morning saying, “Hope your mother dies in hell.” For those people, Jackson is a god, and they are part of a cult, and I’m committing blasphemy and it’s just not possible for him to have done these things that we allege in the film.

Other people are just like, “Yeah, well, Leaving Neverland was debunked” because they saw something on Twitter or YouTube. And it gives them permission to go and enjoy the music because it’s the definition of an inconvenient truth — that your idol, who did the soundtrack of your wedding, your teenage years, whatever it might be, happens to be this monster. I think most people who will go and see the movie just literally don’t care.

When I interviewed Wade and James in 2019, they were adamant that their goal was not to “cancel” Jackson.
I’m not a book burner; that belongs in the deep past. I don’t want anyone to cancel Michael Jackson. I just want people to listen to Michael Jackson knowing that he was a child rapist.

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Are you going to see the film?
I intend to for research purposes. I obviously wouldn’t go in the normal run of things. But I’m curious about what’s in it and how an audience will react. I hope I don’t get spat at.