Bream: I was grilled for 6 hours by the director of the controversial Prince documentary

Ezra Edelman did his homework.

The documentary filmmaker had piles of clippings in front of him. Apparently, he had read every article this hometown music critic had ever written about Prince. That’s hundreds of them, dating back to 1977.

For his six-hour authorized Netflix documentary about the Minnesota music icon, Edelman was determined to do a deep dive, asking everything and anything about Prince. His interactions with me, his religious beliefs, his drug use, certain concerts, my 1984 unauthorized biography of Prince. Edelman interrogated me on a June afternoon in 2021 at the former Alfred Pillsbury mansion near the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

His producer had requested four hours. The inquisition lasted six hours. With one brief break.

A crew of eight worked behind the scenes. Edelman, my interrogator, was the only person I could see. The set was closed. No visitors — not even a makeup person because COVID-19 protocols were in place.

I’d been hesitant about doing the interview. When Prince died in 2016, I appeared on CNN, CBS and countless other outlets. Two days later, I stopped granting interviews unless I knew the questioner. Over the years, I’d been burned by TV producers whose footage ends up on the cutting room floor and by “journalists” saying they were writing a magazine article and it turned out they were penning a book.

Edelman ended up with something he hadn’t planned — an extra-long nine-hour documentary that may never be released because of objections from Prince’s estate, as the New York Times detailed in a lengthy story on Sept. 8. I have not seen the documentary.

I was suspicious of Edelman. First of all, Netflix was originally working in 2018 with director Ava DuVernay, whose vision was to make a Prince documentary literally using his speaking voice. He had given a limited number of interviews in his career, and most of the time he wouldn’t let print journalists record the interviews, not even take notes. I had two taped interviews with Prince from the late ‘70s, and DuVernay’s producers wanted them. I never trusted these producers, and I never shared the tapes.

DuVernay exited the Prince project for “creative differences” in 2019. Edelman, best known for the Oscar- and Emmy-winning 2016 documentary “O.J.: Made in America,” came on board with his own vision. Not necessarily a Prince fan, he wanted to learn as much as he could — warts and all — before framing his planned six-part documentary. He had access to all the unreleased recordings, concert footage and ephemera in Prince’s vault.

After producer Tamara Rosenberg emailed me in May 2020, it took a lot to persuade me to sit for an interview. There were several phone conversations and more than 30 emails exchanged. Who else were they talking to? Why should I trust Edelman when I didn’t trust any other reporters?

Eventually, I relented after receiving positive reports from Prince insiders whom Edelman interviewed. Our original session was canceled because COVID numbers spiked in the Twin Cities. More than a year after the first pitch, I sat for an interview. I was not paid for my participation.

Edelman, 50, could make “60 Minutes” look like amateur hour. He probed deep. He knew his stuff without looking at his notes.

Once or twice, he had to hand me an old article to refresh my memory. Some things, though, I recalled in vivid detail.

At one point, Edelman asked about a scene Prince filmed with me at the old Met Center in Bloomington for a 1982 movie, “The Second Coming,” that never came out. I described the scene in minute detail, down to what I was wearing.

“Have you ever seen the scene?” Edelman asked.

“No.”

Edelman pulled up the scene on his iPad.

“What do you think?” he asked after I watched it.

“It was just the way I described it.”

Edelman seemed disappointed. He was hoping for a “wow” reaction.

Did I sense where he was going? What his angle was? No. He was all over the place. He seemed to be looking for great emotion on camera, and this stoic journalist didn’t give it to him. I could sense Edelman’s frustration. He had expectations, and I didn’t meet them.

Edelman pressed me about times Prince was less than cordial — OK, rude — to me, like when he burned my review of the so-called symbol album on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in 1993 (note: unbeknownst to Prince, I was in the studio audience) or when he blasted me with his squirt-gun guitar at the old St. Paul Civic Center during the Purple Rain Tour in ‘84.

Edelman was hoping for an angry reaction. Instead, I was flattered that Prince paid attention to me and my work. I told the filmmaker, “You learned to roll with it with Prince. He was unpredictable.” Edelman had predicted a different reaction from me.

I wasn’t being protective of Prince, but I didn’t have any tea to spill, either. And some stories are for me to tell, not Ezra Edelman.

Prince’s estate — now controlled equally by Primary Wave and Prince Legacy LLC after his surviving siblings sold their shares — is reportedly objecting to some of the specifics, such as coroner’s photos, in the nine-hour documentary, thus preventing its release, per the original contract with Netflix.

“We are working to resolve matters concerning the documentary so that his story may be told in a way that is factually correct and does not mischaracterize or sensationalize his life,” Prince Legacy said in a statement on Sept. 9.

On Thursday, Londell McMillan of Prince Legacy LLC took to X to share some of his thoughts on the situation. “I will not permit ANYONE (ex’s, musicians, engineers, friends, family, enemies) hurt or falsely portray Prince (and we all know he had his ways) Everyone does… We look forward to sharing his balanced story,” McMillan said in one of eight tweets.

Is Edelman trying to do a hit job with his exhaustive documentary that might never come out? No, he’s trying to give a full portrait of a very complicated, very private, very controlling genius, who relished being mysterious, elusive and inscrutable. But Prince was human, flawed like all of us. It could take more than nine hours to explore the many facets and personae of the singular Purple One. But, in death, as in real life, we may never get to truly know the real Prince beyond his music.