Maria Munoz Rivera |
Madrid (EFE).- Michael J. Fox became a big star thanks to the series “Family Ties” and the film saga “Back to the Future”, but at only 29 years old he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. All this is told in a documentary that opens this Friday and that “is, above all, fun,” says the actor.
The diagnosis made him enter a spiral of consumption of pills and alcohol from which he managed to get out with the support of his wife, Tracy Pollan, who played his girlfriend in the series and with whom he will celebrate 35 years of marriage this summer.
Since that 1991 in which he found out he had Parkinson’s, the actor continued working – his character as lawyer Louis Canning in “The Good Fight” is memorable – and he has used humor to face everything because he considers that “laughter is the greatest tool ”.
“Of course, everything in life has its share of stress, breaking down or sadness, but I am interested in looking for the fun part of things, humor is universally human, and that is very powerful,” explains the actor in a virtual conference on his documentary, which arrives this Friday on the Apple TV platform.
An icon for viewers of the 80s and 90s, the 61-year-old actor assures that everything he has experienced, including the illness he suffers from, has fostered his feelings “and the creativity necessary to tell stories”, even if they are about him. same.
The film, presented at the South by Southwest film and music festival in Austin (Texas), covers more than four decades, since he landed with just eighteen years of age in Los Angeles to look for a life as an actor with hardly any money and training.
The actor has had “a lot of time to reflect on lived stories and think about how to tell them.” In the film, Fox, who was diagnosed in the early 1990s while filming the third part of the “Back to the Future” trilogy and with a media profile in full swing, flees from victimhood when dealing with a disease with which he lives for 35 years.
An 80’s movie
“I was tremendously excited by the idea of making a documentary that was like an ’80s movie; fun, with great music and marked aesthetics, something different from what is usually seen on the screen now”, says David Guggenheim, who directs the film and considers Fox “a true genius”.
For the director, Fox is a person with a fun nature, and also someone with whom the viewer can empathize easily, as he has already shown in books such as “A lucky man” or “There is no better time than the future”.
“Before reading to you, I felt apathetic, until I found your story; He is full of optimism, and of course there is pain in his story, but his attitude is to look for the bright parts of life ”.
Guggenheim avoids pigeonholing the film into a single message, to leave it up to the viewers’ interpretation, although he does highlight the optimistic tone. “The first conversation I had with Michael marked me, because he made one thing clear, and that is that he flees from violence; there are problems, but there is never violence in their stories.”
Despite having become an icon for his performances and although he is clear that “obviously ‘Back to the Future’ was an essential point” in his life, it is another aspect that has marked Fox in his career. “All the people I’ve worked with have marked me more, in the end I only make movies, I couldn’t say otherwise.”