Michael J. Fox hopes Apple+ documentary exploring Back to the Future stardom and Parkinson's disease will leave ‘people feeling emboldened'

It explores what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease, the synopsis reads.

And if there was ever a time to tell his truth about his decades-long battle, Fox, 61, believes it is now, having retired from acting in 2021 due to declining health.

“I think with all that I’ve experienced the last few years, the avenues I have with which to express my creativity, or just get my feelings out, have kind of diminished in a way,” he begins with candour.

“I can’t do certain things I used to do, but I can tell stories and the stories I know best are my own stories,” he muses, having written four New York Times bestselling books, the most recent being No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality in 2020.

“I found as I told them to people, that they related to them and understood them, which in turn, informed me in ways that I wasn’t aware of.

“So it just became this communal storytelling cycle that involved people outside of my world. It was really exciting. That’s the definition of creativity – and that’s what I do.”

The film, then, comes after a chance meeting with Guggenheim some years ago after which the 59-year-old said he was compelled to learn more about the actor’s life through his hit memoirs.

“I thought about how much fun it would be to make a documentary with that 80s vibe, a popcorn kind of movie, with music and big ups and big downs, and a hero careening through a crash course,” the filmmaker remembers, with the feature incorporating documentary, archival and scripted elements.

“The key, it seemed to me, would be to stay true to Michael’s voice, to that tone that first grabbed me. To let Michael lay it all out with his innate humility and humour and utter lack of self-pity.”

In all the conversations that followed, Fox was “a totally open book”, he remembers, recalling his matchless humour. “The only thing he ever asked of me: no violins.”

On board with the concept, Fox and his wife Tracy Pollan star, as well as offering access to their family life (the couple have four children) to chronicle personal and professional triumphs and travails.

“It seemed like it would be pretty simple: I wouldn’t have to record much dialogue because it already existed in the form of the audiobooks. Davis could take a couple of pictures from the archive and the attic and other pre-existing audio, and he’d have a movie,” says Fox, who adds that the piece is informed by his books but not bound by them. “Though it wasn’t actually that simple…”

“My original idea was that there would be no talking heads in the movie, no people speaking to camera,” recounts Guggenheim. “But I decided to sit down with Michael, as an experiment. Mostly, I thought, for research. But we ended up meeting six or seven times over a six-month period.”

Though never with a list of questions, he insists, rather, “what you see in the film is just a conversation between two people. And those interviews became the heart and soul of the movie”.

He recalls leaving Fox’s office after their first meeting: “I had just interviewed a guy who has an incurable disease, but as I walked away all I could think was, ‘I want what he has’. In this life journey that Michael’s taken, which often went in the wrong direction before it went in the right direction, he found some wisdom that speaks to me.”

“It is incurable. That’s the very definition of it. And it still doesn’t scare me,” Fox insists. “When I was younger, I fought the idea. I was diagnosed when I was 29. When the doctor first told me, I said, ‘That isn’t going to happen to me’. Good things happened to me. But then this bad thing did.

“The first 10 years or so, I got locked in that place, a good place, by not allowing anyone else to define my reaction to it,” he follows. “Parkinson’s didn’t just kick me out of the house; it burned the house down. It went after me really hard.”

How did he deal with it? “By not paying attention to it. In the last three years, I broke both femurs. I had one shoulder replaced. I broke my face. I broke my hand. I broke a lot of stuff. And I realised, I could die from this, which does freak me out. But I can deal with it if it comes up.

“My biggest fear is to become incurious.”

There seems little chance of that happening, with the Emmy and Golden Globe-winner having never let up, his optimism and energy as infectious as ever.

In 2000, Fox launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which is now the leading Parkinson’s organisation in the world. It has raised more than 1.5 billion dollars.

As for a takeaway message, “I hope people feel emboldened by possibility and appreciative of the people around them”, Fox concludes.

“I always say that Parkinson’s is a gift that keeps on taking. But it is a gift. There’s lots to learn from it.”

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie will be in cinemas and streaming globally on Apple TV+ on Friday May 12.