“Many of us have a Rob Ford in our lives”: The director of Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem on the late politician’s bewildering legacy

It’s been over a decade since Toronto was caught in the throes of the Rob Ford crack-smoking drama—the most egregious of a multi-scandal story arc that made Toronto an easy target for late-night comedians and ended tragically with Ford’s death in 2016. Now, this chapter of recent history is being revisited in

Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem, a new Netflix documentary that presents Ford as a flawed yet sympathetic anti-hero who wrote the playbook on populist politics. Here, the film’s director, Shianne Brown, explains her quest to portray “the real Rob” and why Doug Ford (who just called the project “disgusting”) always seemed like the brains of the operation at city hall.

You’re a filmmaker from the UK who has done a lot of work on music culture. What drew you to a beleaguered mayor from Toronto? What all of my films do is talk about a moment in time. What can that particular musical movement or historical event tell us about the world we were living in then, and how does it inform the world that we’re living in today? Those are the questions that really drew me to Rob Ford’s story. I just felt like, several years on, there was still a lot to unpack.

Related: The weirdest mayoralty ever—the inside story of Rob Ford’s city hall

Did you follow the Ford drama at the time it was happening? I did. In the doc, you see some of the reporting and the footage that ran on Channel 4 at the time. A lot of people here in the UK know who Ford is, and I think there’s an argument that he put Toronto on the map globally, though not in the best way. I was a student when it was all happening, and I was only seeing the major headlines. I thought this was an opportunity to really dig in and go behind the scenes for a different take. I wanted to look back on the moment with recent nostalgia. You see footage of people using Blackberry BBM, which is of a certain moment. It was a different era, when you would track scandals on Twitter. He would get spotted in certain parts of the city, and that’s how the media would find him. I wanted to show how much things have changed in such a short period of time.

What do you view as the biggest change? It’s been 13 years, and I think a lot has shifted in that period in terms of conversations about mental health and addiction. Some of the jokes that you saw about Ford on late-night TV or in the media haven’t aged very well. In my film, I wanted to portray a multi-dimensional person who wasn’t just chaotic and doing crack cocaine with strangers. He was complicated. He was a family man. He was really struggling, but he also helped a lot of people. I want people to think of him outside of just the crack scandal. I also wanted to be respectful to the family so that, if they do watch this, some of the positive sides come out. We see Ford helping people get their cat down a tree and helping people in social housing.

The doc portrays Ford’s entry into politics as something he did to earn the approval of a withholding father. Where did that narrative come from? We spoke with quite a few people who informed that perspective. John Filion, who sat beside Ford in council, got quite personal with him. The impression he had was that a lot of what Ford was doing was to impress his father. And then Jerry Agyemang, Ford’s former driver and security person, spoke about how the death of his father really impacted Ford, how he really wanted his father’s approval and that’s probably one of the reasons he wanted to run for mayor. You never know. This is all what Ford had relayed to other people, but the dots connect.

Which interview subjects were you especially happy to get on board? I enjoyed talking to Agyemang as well as Tom Beyer, who was Ford’s longest-serving staffer. These are people who knew his softer side. Beyer worked on Ford’s mayoral campaign after he met him at a house party, so he really brought the perspective of who Ford was before he was mayor. Agyemang spent hours and hours with Rob in the heat of the scandal. He got emotional about just how few people knew the real Ford. He shared a story about Ford stopping into Subway to get a sandwich, and when he learned there was no driver to make a delivery to another customer, he brought the sandwich there himself.

These are people who liked Ford. We don’t hear as much from people who couldn’t stand him. Was that a choice? I think Josh Matlow was quite an opposing voice in the film. And then you have Filion, who set the agenda to oppose Ford’s mayoralty. I think that, because time has passed and because Ford died, people have softened to some extent.

I’m assuming you tried to get Doug Ford? He was aware of the project, but he’s the premier of Ontario, so I can understand why he didn’t participate.

Was he supportive? I mean, he declined to take part, but he didn’t try to stomp it out either.

Often in the footage, we see Rob in the foreground and Doug standing stoically behind the scenes. It almost feels like Rob is the affable frontman and Doug is the great and powerful Oz. That is the impression that I got speaking to people: Doug had a lot of power behind the scenes. It was Rob’s idea to run for mayor, but it was really steered by Doug. His office was next door, and he was kind of like the brains behind the operation.

Are there any revelations in your doc that you are particularly proud of? I think the part where the story is coming out and you see how the media had this story but at first nobody believed it. You have Robyn Doolittle, who was at the Toronto Star at the time, talking about the back and forth she had with the source of the crack-smoking video and the frustrations that came along with that process. It was just really interesting to see how everything unfolded behind the scenes.

I wouldn’t say the media comes off particularly well in the doc. There is definitely a sense of Ford behind hounded. So many of the journalists I spoke with talked about how crazy it was, so I really wanted that utter chaos to come through in the footage. But I think there is also a sense of how hard it was for the media to do their job. Doolittle talked about the death threats she received. David Rider talked about how the Fords declared war on the media, and in that we really see the parallels with the more recent “fake news” era.

You show footage of Ford demonizing the media, lying about the size of the crowds at his rallies, making fun of his enemies. Watching it, you have to assume Donald Trump was taking notes. I do show some footage of Trump meeting Ford in 2012, at a promotional event for the Trump Tower in Toronto. He hadn’t been elected yet, but I wanted to make that connection explicit. I don’t know if Trump was taking notes, but what I wanted to show was a playbook that starts with: deny, deny, deny. Then, when you get found out: lie, lie, lie. And then claim the media are out to get you. Then, finally, the admission. I don’t know if Trump was necessarily observing Rob Ford, but I think you see certain similar tactics: appealing to the idea of the silent majority, capitalizing on people feeling disenfranchised. It’s not just Trump. Here in the UK, we had Brexit, where leftist politicians weren’t necessarily listening to what was going on in the rest of the country. And we see examples of this kind of populism all over the world. It’s funny to think that, while this was happening, it felt like a story about political divisiveness. But compared to today…

Right. Is it weird that I kept thinking, Yeah, this is all so crazy to look back on, but it was also a simpler time? I think the world has become even more divisive. But the pendulum always swings.

What do you hope viewers take away from your work? I want to present the complex man behind the headlines. At the end of the film, Mark Towhey, who was Ford’s chief of staff, says that a lot of us have a Rob in our lives, and I think that’s so true. So many people are dealing with addiction privately, whereas Rob was doing that in public. I realize he was an elected official, but he was still a human. Coming to this story years later, maybe we can have a different understanding of what he was going through and show him a little bit more grace.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.