aka Charlie Sheen

0:00Rebecca Lavoie:I'm Rebecca Lavoie, and this is You Can't Make This Up.

0:14Rebecca Lavoie:You Can't Make This Up is the podcast where we uncover the true stories behind your favorite Netflix documentaries and films. On today's episode, we take a closer look at the Netflix documentary film, a.k.a. Charlie Sheen. I think there's so many stories and so many ingrained images in people's minds about the concept of me. It's not even like think of me as a person. They think of me as a concept. Today we're talking to director Andrew Renzi. Following in the footsteps of his famous father and brother, Charlie Sheen became a star on both the big and small screens. But addiction sabotaged his relationships and his career, culminating in a bizarre flame-out fueled by cocaine and, quote, tiger blood.

0:57Rebecca Lavoie:Now sober, Sheen opens up about his life of success, excess, and nonsense. The Netflix documentary film, aka Charlie Sheen, looks at the actor's rise to movie and TV stardom, his personal demons, and his public implosion. With deeply candid insights from those he loved and those he fought, Sheen gives his own colorful takes on the heights of celebrity, the depths of addiction, the cycle of self-destruction, and the quest to be winning at life. If you ask Charlie, did he do this? He's going to tell you the truth.

1:43Rebecca Lavoie:And I'm joined now by director Andrew Renzi. Welcome to You Can't Make This Up. Thank you so much for having me. So how did this project come about? Because you can't do this without Charlie Sheen at the center of it, right? Yeah, I think that I was looking for a new project to do. And I wanted to try to enter the conversation of icon documentaries, but in a way that meant something to me, because I thought the conversation around those stories was becoming a little controversial. It was like a little stale. Maybe they were becoming promotional pieces in some ways. And there was a lot of chatter.

2:13So I got excited about trying to locate somebody that would fit my template as a storyteller, what I was into, maybe somebody that's not so specifically trying to promote something or anything like that. And Charlie Sheen just sort of came top of mind. My producing partner and I were like, you know, what a great story that would be to try to tell. And it's just turned out we had a mutual connection through Chuck Rovin, who's a producer that we had known for a long time, who thought the idea was cool. He wasn't in docs. He hadn't ever made a doc. And he was like, it almost felt like a pet project for him to try to get me Charlie Sheen.

2:44And Charlie did not want to make a documentary. There was, you know, he was like, why? 10 years and living a real good life. Like, why would I do this? But we just kind of got to know each other. And I think the real luxury that I had that I think doesn't always exist is I spent about eight months with him before we even shot a frame of the movie. So we figured it out and I figured out what I needed to and he figured out what he needed to. And then we were off to the races.

3:10Rebecca Lavoie:Sometimes it seems he's leading the conversation in the interview when he's being interviewed. Is that the case? Does he sometimes just take charge of the room? No, I think that's like the style of interviewing that I really like to do where it's, you'll hear my voice off screen. He's like, I don't like to tell people, hey, I'm going to ask you a question. And then your answer, make sure that the audience knows what my question was. It just creates, in my opinion, a stiffness to the whole thing. And I think because we were so familiar with each other by the time we got into the interview chair, there was just like a confidence to him and even to me that I think comes across in the way he was willing to tell, you know, being willing to tell a story in the way that he did.

3:48And I just I love that. Like, I thought, like, wow, like, what a way to see this guy who we haven't seen for 10 years to show up with this kind of confidence. You know, I mean, the last time we all saw him, we remember him from like, you know, an ABC News interview where it seemed like he might have been hot. You know, I think that that's like a shocking revelation for me to see those two juxtaposed against each other. And it was amazing, to be honest.

4:07Rebecca Lavoie:We start by hearing Charlie tell the story of him being on a plane. He's drunk. He's in relationship trouble. And he leverages his celebrity status to go into the cockpit and enabled by the crew to pilot the plane. And I start guiding this plane. Very, very subtle adjustments. And this just perfect magical flying machine responding in a way that I cannot put in words. And then they saw that maybe this might get away from them. He realizes this is a bad idea in the moment. So why did you start there? Because this is just so emblematic of what it means to be a celebrity, right? Yeah, I thought it was perfectly emblematic of what it means to be a celebrity, but also Charlie Sheen specifically.

4:55This idea that he was in this new relationship, you know, he was just married and they were in, you know, what you might consider to be like a minor argument, like a relationship tith. and then he's suddenly given the keys to the sky, you know, and the lives of 400 people who he's never met are in his hands, not to mention while he's drunk, while he's pirate drunk, as he describes it. And I think that to me, A, I was just like, this is such an unrelatable idea. You know, it's just so crazy. And then it really, for me, summed up how you would be able to justify or understand a human that was able to live his life with so many peaks and valleys, with so many highs and lows.

5:38You know, John Cryer says it in the beginning that he would build it up and burn it down and build it up and burn it down. And I just sort of understood him through that anecdote to say like, God, what must it feel like to be able to hold the plane and have everyone's lives in your hands, walk back and then be like, this argument doesn't matter to me because I'm untouchable. I'm like, I'm the guy they're going to give the plane to. And I just felt like in that time for him, it must have been psychologically like a hard thing to navigate. And the reason why I wanted to tell it because present day Charlie has has a reflective quality and an understanding of what that meant.

6:08It's like he doesn't he's not that person. He doesn't he doesn't want that plane anymore. And I thought that that was a nice juxtaposition of where he is now versus where he was then.

6:16Rebecca Lavoie:You had some incredible contributors to this documentary. I was mostly expecting to see like friends, you know, talking about the hard times he's gone through. But you had people that he's had very public either fallings out with or difficulties with. And I was just like, oh, this is going to be bad. Were you surprised by who you were able to get? Yeah, it's really interesting. I was surprised at who I was both able to get and who didn't show up. Honestly, it was a really interesting like blend. And I think the perfect blend, because to your point, I didn't want to just have a bunch of people that still loved him and were close to him and and just wanted to say how great he was and how much he's changed.

6:52I wanted to kind of understand the whole picture and what addiction looks like to everybody around you. And I mean, And honestly, that might have been like the greatest part about it is that like Charlie showed up and he like was the best version of himself and he told a great story. But without the people around him, I don't think it would have worked. And so I'm just I'm super grateful that they all came for it.

7:11Rebecca Lavoie:Yeah. You've got a wide variety of celebrities here. You have John Cryer, who's famously a nice guy, straightforward guy. You have Sean Penn, who's gone through this range of personas over the years. And his latest seems to be this sort of wizened Hollywood hippie type. Were you surprised by, you know, who they brought on camera with them? Like, they all seem to really be themselves. Yeah. You know, it was maybe one of my favorite things is John Cryer. You know, the Hollywood nice guy kind of brought the most smoke. He brought the heat. Yep. The dictator of North Korea was a guy named Kim Jong Il.

7:43He acted crazy all the time and thus got enormous amounts of aid from countries who were so scared of him that that they would shovel money at him. Well, that's what happened here. his negotiations went off the charts because his life was falling apart. Me, whose life was pretty good at that time, I got a third of that. It was so funny, too, because I watched it with Charlie. And, you know, Charlie's like, all right, John, you can have this one. He was like, I got to give it to John. Like, you know, I put this guy through hell. He deserves to sit down and kind of put me on blast. I thought it was great that John Cryer showed up and didn't just kind of like, you know, show up with the, you know, the I'm glad he's doing well.

8:27Like, yeah, he had some really revelatory ideas about who this person is. And I love that. I mean, Sean Penn, it's like, you know, to the day I die, I'll say that was one of my favorite days. I got to interview him for about an hour and I probably used 59 minutes of what he said because he just had such great things to say. He smoked like three packs of cigarettes in 45 minutes. And it was amazing. And to this day, I think his soliloquy about the effects of cocaine on Charlie Sheen versus the rest of the world might be one of my favorite monologues anyone's ever given. It felt like it was like written by P.T.

8:58Anderson or something like that. Thank God for anybody that describes that their dick don't work when full of cocaine.

9:09Rebecca Lavoie:What the fuck would it be like if it was the opposite? Ask Charlie Sheen. Speaking of, you got Charlie Sheen's drug dealer. What a guess. Sure did. How did that come about? Charlie Sheen's drug dealer who lives in a condo that Charlie Sheen bought for his drug dealer. And I think you can't write that. I had just got out of prison and I get a phone call. He goes, hey, man. I'm like, bro, who are you? He's like, it's me. It's me, Charlie Sheen. I'm like, oh, my God, this has got to be a fucking prank. but I kind of recognize his voice because the only shit they played in prison was cops, George Lopez, two and a half men.

9:50Charlie Sheen's drug dealer is sitting on a piece of property and maybe owns one of the only things that Charlie Sheen might still own. I don't know. And so that was amazing. Honestly, in the early stages of figuring out how to make this movie, Charlie and I spent a lot of time together and broke through the idea that the only way that this is going to be good is if it's unexpected, if it's surprising, and if it doesn't feel like you curated this in any way. And he was totally on board with that. He understood that it's not just my responsibility, but I think it's just what we wanted to give people and what everyone should want to give people, just the best version of a complicated tale.

10:28And I like to approach things with humor too, even the darkest stuff and the saddest stuff. And I just felt like this guy's the greatest character we had, Marco. He's like one of the one of the fun, one of the most fun pieces we could add.

10:38Rebecca Lavoie:You let the audience know that Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez declined to participate in the documentary. Was it just a no or did they give a reason that you can share? Oh, yeah. I'm happy to talk more about that because it was a complicated and sort of thoughtful process of ultimately ending up in a place of not participating. You know, I watched it with both of them. And so it's not as though this wasn't collaborative, not collaborative, but, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't like cold or anything. It was just sort of a discussion that led to a place of, it wasn't a good idea for those two. I can say Martin, I'm sure could speak for himself if someone were to ask him.

11:14But from my perspective, Martin as a father had two things that he wanted to really keep in mind about this was that number one, he didn't want to just have some guy sit across from him and make him relive all those moments in a life that he feels like is behind him now, you know, and I think that that's something I really respected. But I think maybe more than that, the second part was just that, like, if this was to go sideways for Charlie in some way, and Martin is a part of this, like, he can't defend his son, and he couldn't be there. And I honestly, like, I was like, there's nothing but respect with that.

11:44And thinking about my own dad and the things that he would do to protect me, it's like, I get it, you know, and I thought that it was kind of almost beautifully poetic to have to tell the story without him, because then And I was able to really mine the moments in film history that they exist in and try to tell that story in his absence in a way that I honestly feel like might be more impactful.

12:03Rebecca Lavoie:Were they surprised by anything that Charlie or anyone else had to say in the documentary, Emilio Estevez and Martin Sheen, I mean? I haven't personally had a conversation with Martin. Emilio wrote me a really incredibly nice and thoughtful note about it. I think that he's, I'm sure, you'd probably have to ask Charlie like what specifically Emilio was surprised about. But I know that Emilio felt like his brother handled the moment with a lot of class, grace and boldness because it's like pretty bold what he decides to go out there and do and talk about and say and confront. And I think his brother was just probably proud of him, honestly, at the end of the day.

12:38Rebecca Lavoie:Can you talk about how being Martin Sheen's son shaped young Charlie Sheen, then known as Carlos Estevez? For sure. This is one of my favorite aspects of the entire story is that we knew that Charlie Sheen was Martin Sheen's son. But I think that in modern ideas of children of actors or celebrities, you have this sort of very different look at what it is. Whereas then it was like this bohemian artistic kind of like weird Malibu culty thing where they were picking up Super 8 cameras and wanting to be their dad on an artistic level. And I just like love the idea that like Charlie Sheen was the guy that was making movies before all of these other guys.

13:22He was the one that picked up the camera with Chris Penn. Chris Penn inspired Sean Penn to get into these things. And they were just like these little, these little shits running around Malibu, like blowing up each other's heads with squibs. And so I think that more than anything, probably Martin Sheen's career path as an actor showed Charlie the mechanism of like what movie making is. There is one anecdote that I'd be happy to share that didn't end up in the film that I always thought was really poignant, but just didn't fit in the grand scheme of all the sort of reasons why Charlie might be who he is.

13:55but Charlie went to Magic Mountain with his dad and he remembers being there at about age 12 or something like that. And his dad was approached by three women who all asked his dad if they could kiss him on the lips. They just went up to him and they said, you're Martin Sheen, can we kiss you on the lips? And Charlie Sheen is sitting there looking at this moment and thinking, hold on. So my dad goes and puts himself on screen and people watch it. And this is what they want from him when he does that? Like, okay.

14:25Rebecca Lavoie:Awesome, right? I do think that there's like twofold where it's Charlie. Charlie really sort of developed an appreciation for just making things and making movies because of his dad, but then also understood the spoils of that life that he could probably have because he was kind of an awkward kid and, you know, had all these things that he might want to overcome as a kid. And I think that that probably gave him a little bit of a confidence boost. We were able to see a bunch of Charlie's childhood because they had the Super A camera and they were making these little mini movies. What did you think when you first saw the footage that you had to work with to sort of show the life of Charlie Sheen?

15:01This was like the coolest thing ever. And it's, again, another blessing of why I was able to work with him early and figure this out, because those were just boxes of film. They'd never been processed. They'd never made those movies. They'd never edited those movies.

15:15Rebecca Lavoie:We started instantly with, all right, here's how much time we have. Here's our cast. Here's the plot. So-and-so has done something to this person. And so this guy has to seek revenge. God bless his sister. His sister basically kept this family archive and she had the film rolls and she had the boxes of the pictures and she had all the things that Charlie might eventually want to come for and she had them for us. So I was able to basically just get a box of Super 8 film, go to a processing company, have them process it for me and digitize it and then just discover this, like discover all of these things.

15:56And the great thing too is that Charlie was able to discover a lot of them for the first time, but also remembered them. He's like, oh, that's that movie where I do this and that. And like, this is the greatest stuff. Like the little things of like them creating slates that say starring Charlie Sheen, but staring is spelled bra, starring spelled staring and Charlie is spelled Chaley. And they're like, it's like this, their slate and just, you know, seeing Sean Penn and seeing Emilio and seeing Chris Penn and seeing George Clooney and all the people in these films that had quite literally never been processed or made was like an incredible opportunity because it was almost like I got to like edit the films for them as though they would have done it when they were eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, you know?

16:36So this is like this, I don't even know how to describe it other than that. It's super cool.

16:41Rebecca Lavoie:He does have this one friend who's not famous, Tony Todd. Can you talk about him and that relationship? Yeah. I mean, Tony, you know, again, we've talked a lot about the people that are in this. He's the The only person that's in the show that is there with Charlie start to finish. If you really think about, obviously, his brother would be. But like, you know, he met Denise later in life. He met Brooke later in life. He's got even Sean Penn. It's like they kind of had their own pathways forward. But Tony, from Little League Baseball all the way to today, when we're talking, has just never not been Charlie's best friend.

17:15and I found that to be like just such a important relationship to acknowledge because Tony has never been a drinker or a drug user he's actually he never even had a drink he's just not been him he you know grew up in a different part of the city and they bonded over sports and they just never they always had each other and you could argue as they got older that maybe the relationship because of Charlie's behavior could have become something that you have to like put a microscope too, but Tony was always there. You know, Tony was always there for him. He was always down the hall. He didn't want to see anything bad happen to him.

17:48Rebecca Lavoie:And of course, in the back of my mind, I always thought that, oh man, one day I'm just going to walk in that room and he's just going to be gone. He's going to be gone. And I don't know how I would be able to take that, but

18:05Rebecca Lavoie:I just couldn't leave. I couldn't leave. And I don't think he wanted me to leave. I can't say this with any kind of like, you know, certainty, but I do think that with what Charlie was going through, having someone like Tony there is a big reason why he's alive, like without question. Yeah, because there were signs very early that substance misuse was going to be an issue for him. Right. And Tony was there through all of it. Yeah. I mean, preteen, we're talking about with Charlie, I think when he really started first experimenting and sort of understood that he could get out of his own skin and feel something different and that that never left him.

18:37And Tony just represented, I think, somebody that would allow Charlie to think about how can I make better decisions? Because he wasn't looking at Tony and saying like, he's supporting me, he's enabling this, any of those things. And he would also just be like, Tony is so warm and he's so loving. Like, I've gotten to know him a bit. And like, you just sort of feel this kind of, you want to do your best for Tony. And so, I mean, it obviously took Charlie a long time to get to this place. But without Tony, I don't know if he would be. And I think he'd say that too.

19:11Rebecca Lavoie:One of the people I was surprised to see pop up in the documentary was Denise Richards, with whom he had a very significant, longstanding and sort of table turning relationship. Can you talk about that relationship and that interview? Denise is someone who I have grown quite fond of and also someone who I was really surprised and happy just personally that she was willing to sit down for this because of their history. At least the first thing I ask her is like, I'm surprised that you're here. Like people are going to be surprised that you're here. And so one thing I've learned about Denise and then also Charlie by Proxy and by that relationship is that there's a sort of a strength and a loyalty that exists because they have been through those things together.

19:51They share children together. They have this experience that no one else will ever actually understand, even though they think they do. And even though they've put their own ideas on top of it. So it's created sort of a loyalty between the two of them that I respected quite a bit. It's sort of like, yeah, we've been through hell and back, but like we got each other's backs. I'm going to show up for Charlie. I'm not going to show up for Charlie to like make sure he's got another career ahead of them. I'm going to show up to tell the story because that's what he's asking me to do.