My name is Abdi Latif Nahir. I'm the East Africa correspondent at the New York Times. I want my work to help our readers understand what's happening here in East Africa and see how it plays a role in the bigger picture. New York Times subscribers keep our journalist reporting from across the map to help you understand the issues shaping our world. If you would like to subscribe, you can do that at nytimes. Com/subscribe. From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For the last few years, one of the country's most celebrated filmmakers has tried to unlock the mysteries of one of the country's most celebrated musicians. According to my colleague, Times magazine Deputy Editor Sasha Weiss, the result is a cinematic masterpiece. So how is it possible that nobody will ever see it.

It's Friday, March seventh.

Sasha, welcome to The Daily.

Thanks so much for having me, Michael.

Hard to fathom it's your inaugural episode.

I'm delighted to be here.

I want to just acknowledge a certain awkwardness to the work we're about to undertake, which is we are going to be talking, you and I, about a very important film that none of us will ever see. Yeah. That's weird.

Totally.

But back when you thought the world very much would see the film, you became deeply invested in the story of it, and you have stayed invested in it for years. Simple question. Why?

Well, let's start with who it's about. My name is Prince. The supernova genius Prince.

And I've come to play with you.

It's a funny thing. I didn't come to this as a huge Prince fan. I came to it as a person who's deeply interested in him as a symbol. He was part of the wallpaper of my childhood. He is this-Literally or figuratively? Figuratively. But you hear him, you see him. He's this in the cultural imagination. He is an avatar of gender bending dreaminess, boundary pushingness, breaking categories. Sensuality.

Sensuality personified.

Sensuality, sexiness, but a uncategorizable sexiness. I think for a lot of people, he's at the top of the cultural pantheon. He's the icon of American pop music. He was a beautiful singer. He could play a million instruments.

When she kissed me, she knew how to get a kiss.

She'd all around I mean, his music is just transcendently great. It's like... Kiss. I just want your head to the time you're I mean, the songs of Purple Rain alone.

He was a world-eating genius.

It's like no subject could be as big, as mysterious, as fascinating as Prince.

Say a word about mysterious.

Well, I think Prince cultivated a mystery, right? I mean, he seemed saintly. He seemed spiritual. He was someone who changed his name to a symbol without explanation. There was a performance of a-Unknowability. Unknowability. Unknowability. I mean, that was part of the allure and part of the mystique. Also, he was extremely elusive. That was my interest in Prince. The other thing that drew me to the film was the person making it. Esra Edelman, who I really admired as a filmmaker. I think he's a once-in-a-generation talent, and I was really curious what it would be to see his mind tangling with Prince.

Well, tell me more about Esra Edelman and why he is such a once-in-a-generation talent.

Hey, Esra.

Hi, Sasha.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. I'm, I think, happy be here.

I've gotten to know Esra pretty well over the years of reporting this story, and we've talked a lot. He is extremely dogged and rigorous. He is extremely focused.

Again, you know my issues with this. It's like, I don't want to make this shit about me.

It's just very human, Esra. That's what I think. He can be intense.

What's his backstory?

From the time I I graduated from school where I wrote for a school paper, I always was interested in media and sports.

So, Esra started out in TV journalism and sports journalism, especially. Eventually, he started directing his own documentary films.

I'm self-taught. I just watch things. In some ways, I have the brain of someone who's trained on watching narrative films.

He brings a lot of rigor, and I would say also a lot of emotion and storytelling chops to these huge canvases that he takes on.

I do believe there's a way of informing, really informing, talking about things and having people learn, but do it in a way that also entertains them. I took that as my mandate.

But maybe the The last way to talk about his work is to talk about his best known film on O. J. Simpson, O. J. Made in America, which comes out in 2016 to great acclaim on ESPN. It wins the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film that year. Thank Big deal. Big deal. Got a ton of attention, and deservedly so, because part of its magic is that it takes an event that we all thought we knew. We had been over it a million times, and it gives it- We watched CNN. We knew the story. We knew that many of us watched it as kids and watch the car chase and remember it and remember the polarization around it, the way that I would say Black America and white America viewed the case very differently. What Esra manages to do in the film is to give a familiar, recent historical event a much broader context. Not only do you understand OJ, how huge he was, how beloved he was, how deep his downfall was. You also understand the context of race relations in California from the 1960s in to the '90s and even the early 2000s. You understand how many of the racial pathologies of our country run through this case.

It's this incredibly layered document where all of these different energies are drawn together to tell a new story. And Esra works on an enormous scale. The film is eight hours, and I think is widely thought of as one of the greatest American documentaries, one of the greatest American films that has been made in the last decade.

Okay, I very much now appreciate why the prospect of this filmmaker, this mystery unlocker, being applied to the subject of Prince, who remains pretty deeply mysterious, would be appealing to you. How does Esra Edelman become drawn to and ultimately undertake a documentary of the same scale, the work you just described, applied to Prince.

Well, it may be worth saying, for one thing, that this film was not Esra's idea originally. What do you mean? After the success of OJ, he's like the toast of the film world. He could do anything. He could do anything. When thinking about his next project, he gets a call from Netflix, and they have a very enticing proposition. They tell him that they have made a deal with Prince's estate that gave them exclusive access to Prince's vault. Now, the vault, which is how it's known among princeologists, is his personal archive, which was housed in Paisley Park, which was his home studio, fortress, Minnesota, where he lived and recorded and performed. It had who knows what. I mean, it was a treasure trove of archival material. The world itself is so tantalizing. So tantalizing. It's his vault. It's his vault. People knew of its existence. It was the proposition that it would be very hard for a filmmaker like Esra Edelman to say no to.

It's Prince. There was a vault of material. He is a mysterious figure whose story had never been told. For me, it really was trying to help fans and non-fans alike understand who this person is, and at the same time, in that understanding, help them understand his art more.

And what do they find inside this vault?

They find beautiful concert footage, some of which has never been seen before. They find band rehearsals, which at first seem really exciting, but there's hours and hours of it, just music, just him playing music. They find some unfinished films that Prince made, but it's basically all performance. What they didn't find is almost anything that was candid or spontaneous. Prince hanging out with his friends, Prince on the off Riders, Prince talking shit with the band, Prince writing music, composing music. I mean, he was a great songwriter. His process, nothing. When they would find the beginning of something or the suggestion of something, there was a little bit of footage Prince horsing around with his girlfriends, for example. But the footage was scratched. It seemed like someone had tampered with the tape. They came to the conclusion that it might have been deliberate, that anything that was candid that was still around had been damaged.

The vault, for all intents and purposes, and perhaps on purpose, was empty. What does he do?

He does what he always does, which is to start to interview people intensively. He wants to talk to all the people who knew Prince well to try to understand what was driving him, what was he thinking about, what were his dorments, what were his successes. He seeks out everybody in Prince's world, from to bodyguards, to family members to dear friends to many, many collaborators over the years.

Look, somebody who was around him for decades and met with us before we started filming, basically was like, Good luck.

What he and his team begin to find is basically another locked door, another wall.

People who were around him were not at liberty necessarily to talk freely and publicly whether they wanted to or not.

People are very reluctant to speak candidly about Prince. They're protective. Some people seem scared.

Even in death, people were reluctant because I think it's a natural inclination of some people whose names were made because of their connection to them. So do I want to sully that through talking honestly? But at the same time-It's not that unusual in a way for a world famous celebrity, for people not to want to talk about them, but it was very intense, and it seemed across the board, universal, this reluctance.

Asr and his team started to wonder, what's the big secret here? Is there some secret that people won't tell us? In fact, after many, many years of really persuasion and building trust.

At the same time, people had a lot to say once they sat down because they had not really talked openly about him.

People slowly did begin to talk.

You start to investigate who the person was, and you realize there are these chapters in his life.

At a certain point, he had interviewed enough people, over 75 people, to start to get a clearer picture of Prince and to be able to marry a narrative of Prince's life from the beginning, really to the end where he died in a very mysterious way with this footage that was in the vault. It's not that there's a secret, but there's a complex, tortured, deeply traumatized person alongside the musical genius. Eventually, Esra had what he felt was a solid cut of the film, and I was able to watch it.

What did you think?

It's a masterpiece.

What makes you say that?

Well, one of the things the film does so well is tell the story of Prince's childhood. It's maybe worth saying that it doesn't unfold the story in a linear way. It accumulates through the interviews through all of the different people he speaks to, his lovers, his sister, his friends. What you see is a picture of a boy. First of all, he had, according to several testimonies in the film, a troubled relationship with his There was violence in the home. His parents split when he was a kid. First, he was living with his mother. She then remarried, and two people in the film say that Prince told them that when he was a kid, his stepfather shut him in a room or a closet for six weeks.

Wow.

He came out changed.

How could he not?

How could he not? Then when he was 12, his mother kicked him out of the house and sent him to live with his father. He was very close to his father. His father was a musician, and he was a very religious man. He was a strict man, an authoritarian parent. He found Prince in a room with a girl a couple of times, and he, too, kicked Prince out when Prince was 14 years old. He was an abandoned person. That abandonment and the dissolution of his family and the feeling of neglect, according to the many people who knew him, was a real through line in his life. This drove Prince to his own unstable familial and love relationships. One pattern that you see in the film over the course of Prince's life is that he would assemble families around himself in the form of collaborators and bandmates, but he would always really challenge those relationships to the point of breaking. He was distrustful. He was demanding. A couple of his close collaborators say that when they asked for a raise, Prince said to them, If you really love me, you wouldn't ask me for a raise.

He was really controlling with his girlfriends. With one girlfriend, he tried to prevent her from seeing her family and from making phone calls at a certain point. He wanted- Sounds like locking somebody in a room for six weeks. He wanted control.

Basically, this is a portrait of this is something of a psychological cliché, but someone who was hurt, who goes on to do some real hurt.

Yes. I think what you see unfolding in the film is someone also at war with himself. On the one hand, just overwhelming creativity that was pouring out of him and a desire to have people participate in that, but a constant pushing people away. He was a great elevator of women, for example. He had many famous female collaborators, but many of those collaborators testify to the fact that he could be not only controlling, but put them down and diminish them and make them feel worthless. He could also be physically abusive. You hear from a girlfriend of his, a collaborator, Jill Jones, who talks about a moment when she flew into a jealous rage and Prince hit her and never apologized. Her anguish, many years later, is just totally vivid for the viewer.

I wonder if you can explain, and I'm sure the film attempts to do this, how all of that pain, that anguish, all this biography influences and is ultimately responsible for Prince's music?

Well, there's a great moment in the film where he's singing the Beautiful Ones. You can find performances like this one online. One of the refrains is... Do you want him? Do you want me? Because I'm on to, yeah. Do you want him? Or do you want me? Because I want you. It's the song of Yearning. He is just giving a wild performance of a screaming and keening and falling. When I heard his yelps and his cries, I always thought it was about sexuality and sexual yearning, romantic yearning, but I was able to hear it in a different way, and partly because one of his bandmates is telling me, I hear her voice on the film telling me this was the central problem of his life, this problem of abandonment. Do you want me? You could hear the pure pain in it. Then suddenly, Prince's screaming feels also like grief. It's not just sexuality. It's also grief. It's also pain, and it's authentic. I understand that the song contains all of it. It's this richness, and you understand what's feeding the performance, and that when he's there on stage, yes, he's, I'm sure, aware of what he's doing and in control of what he's doing, but he's also possessed and channeling all of this complexity through his body and through his voice.

I just hear his music completely differently now. The layers are so much deeper. The movie is an answer to a cultural question that I think has been vexing us for a decade or more, which is, what do we do with great artists who are extremely flawed human beings? The answer that the movie offers is that we basically It fit with their contradictions. Prince was, on the one hand, a genius, an original of a generation, an original of a century. I mean, he's a Mozart of American pop. With a mind that was teeming with music and ideas, he was also controlling. He could be abusive towards his lovers. He was deeply vulnerable. He was a person who crossed boundaries and contained multiplicities, and Edelman is asking us to sit with that for nine hours and take it all in and allow ourselves to pity him sometimes, allow ourselves to adore him and worship him, and allow ourselves to criticize him, and to sit with the wild brew of who Prince was, and also to make the argument that knowing this enriches our understanding of the art he made. It deepens our understanding of the art he made.

It deepens our love of it because we know where it comes from, or we know something about where it comes from and how he transforms the raw material of his selfhood into something transcendent.

We'll be right back.

I use New York Times cooking at least three to four times a week. Sam Sifton's Miso chicken is, quote, better than rotisserie chicken, according to my six-year-old.

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I start expanding my horizon a little bit. I also read the comments, seeing how I can simplify, substitute. It just makes it that much easier.

Those little tiny snapshots, they make your mouth water a little bit.

One of my college roommates and I stay in touch by sending each other's recipes. It is literally 88% of our text thread. My dad, he's a subscriber as well. We all go back and forth sharing recipes. I'll usually tune them over some pictures of what I actually made. If I didn't have New York Times cooking, I think I would be a lot more stressed for weeknight meals.

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Hey, it's Eric Kim from New York Times cooking. Come cook with us. Go to nytcooking. Com.

Sasha, I think we've arrived at the moment in this conversation. We've held it in suspense long enough where you just have to explain why it is, how it is that this masterpiece is never going to be seen. Seen by anyone else, how that's possible, what the story there is.

As part of the original agreement that Netflix struck with the Prince estate for access to the vault, the estate was going to have an opportunity to review the film for factual accuracy. As Randleman welcomed this. He's a journalist. Nobody wants to get anything wrong. Nobody wants to get anything wrong. You can review the film for factual error. Now, in the years that Esra spent working on the film, there were these ongoing, complicated legal battles over Prince's estate, in part because Prince left no will. The estate changed hands. It changes from being overseen by a bank in courts in Minnesota to now being overseen by a lawyer who used to work for Prince in the '90s, members of his family, and a music company. The new people in charge watch the film, and they submit this list that's 17 pages long with all kinds of and queries and objections, almost none of which have to do with facts. They have to do with things about Prince that they don't want included in this documentary. Edelman, it makes a few changes to try to compromise with them, but he's not going to change, for instance, one of Prince's collaborators talking about how when he became devout and extremely religious, he asked her to renounce her homosexuality before he would collaborate with her again.

He's not going to take out an assessment of his album, The Rainbow Children, which was widely shared at the time that there were anti-Semitic lyrics. He's not going to take out elements of the story that are sad or unfortunate or portray prints in a negative light because they're part of the story and they're part of the arc. He's not going to allow extra journalistic facts to determine the shape of his film. This back and forth continues for many months, and the estate manages to hold up the film on questions of length. They claimed that they had agreed to license music for a six-hour film and no more. This was no simple thing. To cut this film by three hours would be... The metaphor that I keep thinking of is unnaughting a handwoven Persian carpet. Extremely difficult to disassemble. It would be like starting all over. But also it wasn't ever clear that this would satisfy the estate anyway because they had made their strong objections to the project very clear. So the project seemed to be in an impasse. And ultimately, last month, Netflix comes out with the following statement, The Prince Estate and Netflix have come to a mutual agreement that will allow the estate to develop and produce a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince's Archive.

Translation, Esra Edelman's film is dead. He's cut out. It's thrown away. If there's ever going to be a film, it's going to be a film made by the estate.

Wow. Sounds like Netflix basically sells out Esra Edelman after all these years and says that some family-made version of a film might someday replace what you have described as this masterpiece.

Well, All of the parties have been tight-lipped about the situation for contractual reasons, but that's my sense of it. The day after this news came out, I was able to talk to Esra.

Well, it's a grim day Yeah, it's a little sad. It's a little sad.

He was devastated.

This is a real film. It's called The Book of Prince. It's nine hours long. It's a product of a lot of people's hard work and blood, sweat, and tears. Caroline Waterloo Tomorrow Rosenberg, Nina Kristic, Brett Grunato.

We were talking a little bit about the estate's rationale or what we perceive as the estate's rationale. He thinks it's absurd.

I have no interest in putting on a film that is factually inaccurate. Like, oh, so the estate gets their opinion about the film put out for the world to see after they're getting their way, which is the film getting killed, and the film gets slandered in the process.

That's not The lawyer for the estate said to Esra at one point in this process, he fears the film will do generational harm to Prince.

The film would do generational harm to Prince. What does that mean?

The argument was…

The sense, and it's to That a film that fully exposes the motivations and the biography of this artist will hurt his reputation for a generation.

I just want to translate that phrase. Yes, I think the fear is in a cross way, this will get Prince canceled.

He was a jerk.

He was a difficult boss. He was mean. That it would demystify this icon. Fundamentally, they're concerned about their bottom line.

I do believe the irony is this film would be great for Prince, and I think it would serve the estate and its bottom line tremendously.

But I think, Esra sees it the opposite way.

What do you see when you visit Paisley Park? Oh, this is where a guy lived, but what you see is now a museum that's full of rooms that are named after albums. There are rooms that are full of his shoes. There are rooms that are full of his outfits. But there's really no mention of sex. There's really no mention of religion. There's a glossy thing that's being promoted for monetary gain. This image that we continually need to traffic in of this person who wore glitzy outfits and glitzy shoes and made all this work, all which is true. But it's so much deeper, his struggles between good and evil in himself. This struggle that you see in the music and the art and then how it played out in his life. It's like, how can you not want to tell that story?

He thinks that a complex, meaningful engagement with Prince. That's the story deepens our relationship with him and revives his legacy. I totally agree. Prince is present, but it's not like he's a vital figure in the culture right now. I bet anything that if this film had come out, there would have been a whole huge discourse around Prince and a complex one and an interesting one. I think it would have brought him again to the fore of the cultural conversation. When Esra did show a very small group of people an early cut of the film as he was working on it, he saw that reaction.

Almost invariably, whatever people's responses are through the trajectory of this life and this story, they all come away being like, Oh, my God, I love this guy. I want to listen to more of his music. This is why I believe this is short-sighted.

That's the estate side of this. What does Esra make of Netflix's role in all of this?

Well, Esra declines to discuss Netflix, but in my own reporting around the unraveling of the deal, I think Netflix bears a lot of responsibility for what happened. I think that when Esra started making this film, it was a heyday of prestige documentary. Netflix was producing high-profile, really rigorous documentaries that were in the mold of some of the things that Esther does, really intense investigations, journalistically important. They made the film Icarus, which is about the Russian doping scandal during the Olympics that won the Academy Award. In the years since, documentaries have been transformed, and Netflix has been transformed. The executive who originally hired Asra has been let go and new leadership was brought in. They've leaned further and further into certain kinds of documentaries that were skirting away from journalism much more toward entertainment. True Crime, celebrity documentary where celebrities began to be producing partners.

Megan Markle comes to mind.

Megan Markle comes to mind. David Beckham. I mean, there are lots of them now. They're becoming a global empire. They're one of the largest and most important players in the documentary world. They're the arbitors in some sense of what documentary films are, the direction that they're going in. Now, they're just generating tons of content quickly, cheaply, deeply, formulaically. The painstaking, long-gestating project like Esra's is not the currency anymore. I mean, they still make some really good things, but they're able to make a lot more things that aren't that good, but that a lot of people watch. Meanwhile, Esra's film is all tied up in this complex legal battle.

For all those reasons, it's easy for Netflix to walk away from.

That's my sense. I mean, I interviewed one person familiar with the company who said, why would they want to be tied up with this legal fight when they could just go make 10 more reality shows about real estate, when they could make 10 more celebrity documentaries where they're partnering with the estate. I think for them, the great art versus making a whole bunch of stuff more readily cost-benefit analysis, my sense is that ultimately they stand by the film.

Let's just assume for a moment that Netflix is in the business of doing what's good for Netflix and Netflix's audience. Would Netflix be right to assume that what as our Edelman has created here might not actually necessarily be what its vast audience wants?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's possible that that's their calculation, that they're making a pure look at the numbers business decision. I think that's possible. We'll never know because the film isn't being given a chance to be put in front of an audience. But I think Esra would totally disagree with that idea.

I believe that people can handle the truth in an honest portrayal of a brilliant artist and at times a flawed human.

One argument that was aird when I was talking to people who had seen the film, talking to some people who hadn't seen the film about even the idea of the film. One thing that was said was essentially an argument about Black genius left to stand as celebrated. White rock stars of similar stature are not...

Exposed to the same level of scrutiny?

Yeah, are not exposed to the same level of scrutiny. Why can't we let Prince stand as a monument before we start to take him apart? What What do you make of that argument?

I make a lot of things of it. First of all, it is born out of a complicated history of a country we live in. I understand the desire to have our Black heroes be celebrated for who they are and certainly on par with their white counterparts, whose talent and accomplishments they match and/or outdo. But at the same time, I reject the argument, first and foremost, because A, if I were making a film about David Bowie, I would set out to do the same exact thing that I did with Prince. Who was this person? Why did he change characters, what was going on in his life at all those times. Was I sensitive, by the way, as a Black man taking on a Black subject, knowing that people might think, Oh, my God, why are you tearing this person down? But also, why Why is warts and all such a terrible concept? Why is it not okay to know about a human? Especially, again, we get to have it both ways. You just want to love his art but have him remain unexamined. But if we examine him and you maybe are going to appreciate that art that you love so much even more, you might appreciate the struggle.

By the way, this guy got kicked out of his house when he was a teenager. He lived in the basement of his best friend. He created himself a whole cloth. His will, his drive as a person, as an artist, the struggle he went through that a guy, yeah, he happened to also be a genius, is unparalleled. That's also what the movie is about. Why can't we hold two truths together? It's not that hard. These things go together. His genius, by the way, would not have wrought prints, would not have created prints. Genius alone. No, genius plus drive plus trauma. Those are the things that created Prince. Why is that a hard thing? Why can't we handle that? Why can't the world handle that? I don't understand it. As far as this argument of we- I think, Esra believes that for audiences to be given this rich, chewy thing to engage with about this major icon would be satisfying for them.

I want to ask you a somewhat provocative question This was an effort to demystify someone who to a large degree wanted to be unknowable. This outcome, as tragic as it must seem to Esra Edelman, and clearly to you as someone who sees it as as a masterpiece. Is there any cruel, poetic justice here that this controlling artist who curated his image so carefully is going to remain, because of what happened here, unknowable, that he is weirdly getting the last word on what we all get to see of him?

Yeah, I mean, I did often feel reporting this piece haunted by the presiding spirit of Prince and feeling like he was messing with all of us. So I think, yes, there's a cruel poetry to it all. On the other hand, Prince, at the end of his life, was opening up a little bit more. The last hours of the film actually are about this. They're about a series of concerts that he gave, lofi, piano and a microphone, natural hair, where he was singing and talking and starting to talk about some of his pain, his childhood, his regrets, his loves. It's still vealed and perfumed, but it's more raw, and the style of performance is more raw. He also was undertaking the writing of an autobiography.

There was something happening.

I think he was changing.

Maybe he did want to be more known.

I think in some sense. I mean, look, probably on his own terms. But there's the question of what Prince would have wanted, and then there's also the question of what's good for the culture in some way and what's good for the legacy of a person like Prince. Actually, after the news of the film being finally killed, broke, Jill Jones, who's the girlfriend that I was talking about before, who was one of the people who appears in the film talking about Prince's abuse of her with a lot of pain, posted something that I thought was incredibly moving about what's wrong with this film not coming out. She was very in favor of the film coming out. Why? Well, let me read you a little bit of it because I think she says it really beautifully. She says, Prince was a man who lived under the weight of expectation, both his own and those of the world that adored him. He built a persona so larger than life that it became a prison, a gilded cage, one he could never fully step out of. He knew that revealing his true self, stripped of the carefully crafted persona, would lead to rejection.

In a way, he was right. The recent choices made by Netflix and his estate only reinforce this truth. The world is unwilling to accept Prince as a man, only as a myth. Without the elaborate stagecraft, without the veil of mystery, his humanity is deemed insufficient. His struggles, his journey, his sacrifices, all the elements that shaped him will remain obscured. Instead, the world will most likely receive a sanitized, polished version of Prince, in quotation marks, a carefully curated illusion that erases the depth of his reality. I thought that was something really extraordinary coming from someone who had been hurt by Prince, who saw some of the worst of Prince. But she can hold that against, A, his greatness, but B, these layers of pain that prevented him from being known. She's saying, Let's look at the whole thing, because that's the way to really appreciate who this man was.

What she really seems to be saying is to deny the world this film is to deny this man's full humanity and to hide it away. That only reinforces the idea that there's something wrong wrong with being what all of us are, which is damaged and complex, and that this whole journey means that revealing the fullness of that experience is somehow intolerable.

I think that's exactly right. I think humanly, not only artistically, we have to make room for what's broken in us. That's part of the story. Sometimes it's the center of the story. That's what Edelman has done here. I find it really bitterly ironic what Jil Jones is saying that maybe in some way, one of Prince's deepest fears was that he would be seen and people would run away scared. That's what's happened. This leaves Esra in a existential limbo. I know he's thinking a lot about his future as a filmmaker.

We are only as strong as our own shoulders, after all. It's like, Am I built for it? I might be built for it as a person, but am I actually any more built for it. Trust me, it's not like this is a loss of innocence. I thought the world was great and people do the right things for the right reasons. But when it happens to you in this way, you're like, Okay. It It does change you a little bit. It does harden you.

A question in people's minds may be, Where is the film? Where does it exist? Is the film itself in a vault? It's in a hard drive somewhere?

I think the film exists. I mean, I assume it exists on Netflix somewhere. I mean, this is the thing. Now it is like I would go back and change the last shot of the film to... There's a motif in the film of Prince made a few documentaries or shot a bunch of stuff. And so each time, though, he decided, based on where he was at in life, that they weren't going to actually ever be seen. So they went back in the vault. The point is, everything goes back in the vault. You try to make a film, it goes back in the vault. So I would now, if I could change the film, the last shot would be this whole thing going back in the vault, and the vault door would close. And that's a wrap.

Esra, thank you so much.

You're I'm always going to be here. You're welcome. I always enjoy talking to you, Sasha.

You, too.

Well, Sasha, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. President Trump is suspending tariffs on most imports from Mexico and Canada for the next month in a concession to the country's leaders and to the US business community, which fears that tariffs will cost them money. Mexico's President, Claudia Sheinbaum, celebrated the news saying that Mexico's cooperation with the United States had, yielded unprecedented results. And on Thursday, California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, broke with other top party officials by saying he objected to the participation of transgender athletes in women's sports.

Would you do something like that?

Would you say no men and female sports? Well, I think it's an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that.

It is an issue of fairness. It's deeply unfair. Would you speak out against this- Newsom, widely seen as a potential Democratic candidate for President in 2028, made the declaration during an interview with the conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk at a moment when Democrats are wrestling with how to respond to President Trump's victory and the reality that the party's position on social issues like trans participation in sports is unpopular with many voters. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Asta Chhatharvedi, and Diana Wyn. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Brenda Clinkenberg, was fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Alishiba Itu, and Diane Wong, and sound design by Alishiba D2. It was engineered by Alyssa Moxley, with help from Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansberg of Wunderly.

That's it for the Daily.

I'm Michael Bebar. See you on Monday..