Academy Award winner Morgan Neville is one of the most prolific documentary filmmakers of our time. And his third feature in just five months is about to be released. “Lorne”, on “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels, will open in theaters on April 17th. It’s Neville’s latest collaboration with Focus Features, the distributor of the director’s docs on Pharrell Williams, Anthony Bourdain and Fred Rogers.
In 2014, Neville earned the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for “20 Feet From Stardom”, a look at the lives and careers of background singers. Distributed by A24, “20 Feet” was one of three music-themed docs to win this Academy Award in a four-year period, joining Sony Classics’ “Searching For Sugar Man” and A24’s “Amy”, about Amy Winehouse. This trio of films certainly kicked-off the modern-day trend of musician documentaries, a catalogue that grows and grows by the month.
After the success of “20 Feet”, Neville went to Netflix for one of those music docs, “Keith Richards Under the Influence”, before spotlighting Mr. Rogers with “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” I met Neville the night he and that film won the top prizes at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards in November 2018.
Neville’s excellent “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain” was released in 2021. “Steve!” (about Steve Martin) debuted on AppleTV+ in early 2024, and brilliant Pharrell Williams LEGO animation doc “Piece by Piece” opened later that year. Most recently, Neville presented “Breakdown: 1975” (an examination of the movies of that year, narrated by Jodie Foster) on Netflix and the powerhouse “Paul McCartney: Man on the Run” on Prime Video.
You also probably saw Neville’s name in the credits as a producer or executive producer of several other docs in the past six years, including “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana”, “The Painter and the Thief”, “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song”, “Mickey: The Story of a Mouse”, and Andy Kaufman documentary “Thank You Very Much”. There’s quality to all of Neville’s projects and I always look forward to what he’ll be a part of next.