��ɫ��

Reubens, he says, wanted to direct the documentary, but others advised against it. That’s when he entertained Wolf as director and began those talks.

Wolf quickly learned, “He was very rebellious and slippery. He wouldn’t follow my lead with questions. He would make funny facial expressions, and it was a competitive dynamic.”

Through 40 hours of interviews, however, Wolf was able to get an idea of who Reubens was and what kind of impact Pee-wee Herman had on him.

In the HBO documentary, “Pee-wee as Himself,” Reubens discusses his early inspirations, his fame, his foibles and, briefly, his brushes with the law. Arrests for indecent exposure and possession of pornography may have dominated news cycles in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but they were not a “point of interest” for the documentary.

“Paul wanted to set the record straight, which I always said to him, ‘What happened to you was definitively unfair,’” Wolf says. “But I became aware of how enduring that memory is for so many other people.” Ignoring it wouldn’t have been right, so Wolf uses television footage from the era to show how it played in the media. He gets Reubens to weigh in, too, and explain how it affected him.

Because the interviews were contentious, Reubens cut ties with the filmmaker at one point and said the project was off. Wolf showed him 45 minutes of the film and Reubens admitted it was excellent, “but there was other stuff going on behind the scenes that I was unaware of.” Reubens had been diagnosed with cancer and didn’t know how much time he had left.

When the project got back on track, Wolf still had more Q&A sessions to do. “I had exhaustive questions that I intended to ask him and I hoped and prayed that I would have the opportunity to do that.”

On the way to Los Angeles to resume the interviewing, Wolf got a call from an HBO official who asked if an Instagram post was real — that Reubens had just died as the result of cancer.

“I was in total, total shock,” Wolf says. “How could someone that you’ve spoken to for literally hundreds and hundreds of hours keep a secret like this from you?” Reubens’ publicist and friend then called and said the actor had recorded something for the documentary — “he ran out of time.”

Wolf went to the publicist’s office and she played the audio. “It was devastating, but I had to figure out a way to use that, not in a sensational manner,” Wolf says. “The week before we were locking the picture on the film, I put that audio where it lives now and we all agreed it was the right way to bridge to the ending of the film.”

As much as the documentary is exhaustive, it’s probably not the last word from Reubens. In “Pee-wee as Himself,” Wolf shows a huge warehouse where Reubens’ collections are stored. They include film from his early days, set pieces from “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” photographs, a treasure trove of items that amused him. “We had an opportunity to film a lot of that stuff,” Wolf says, “so I know the estate has plans.”

Of the material included in “Pee-wee as Himself,” the most powerful concerns Reubens’ early relationships and his sexuality.

“Pee-wee’s Playhouse” emerged in the 1980s, “the height of the culture wars,” Wolf says. “Pee-wee is an anomaly: an experimental performance artist is making a children’s television show with 100 percent creative freedom on a major network. That’s remarkable. Pee-wee is a beacon of risk-taking, of doing something that hasn’t been done before, of building a new world. It’s becoming harder to do that in our media ecosystem, but we also are operating in times of intense censorship. I hope people can cut through that and still do things like what Paul did in his time.”

“Pee-wee as Himself” airs on HBO.