The Me You Can't See Director Dawn Porter on What Led Prince Harry to Go Through Therapy on Camera
A little more than two months ago, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry made headlines around the world with their shockingly candid sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey. Now, Prince Harry is teaming up with the queen of American television once again, only this time, it's as co-creators and executive producers of a new mental health–focused docuseries on AppleTV+ called The Me You Can't See.
“Now more than ever, there is an immediate need to replace the shame surrounding mental health with wisdom, compassion, and honesty,” Oprah Winfrey said in a statement about the film, which premieres on the streaming platform today. “Our series aims to spark that global conversation.”
At the helm of the series are directors Dawn Porter (Gideon’s Army, John Lewis: Good Trouble), and Asif Kapadia (Amy). Ahead of the show's debut, Porter spoke with T&C about the pressures of directing Oprah, what led Prince Harry to go through therapy on camera, and how the pandemic changed the series.
What led you to take this project on?
When Oprah calls you answer. Of course I wanted to work with Oprah. She's the queen, but it was really exciting to work on something that is so important to so many people, but so misunderstood. And I felt like the team that we put together, the first qualification was being empathetic and being open-minded. And that's how we compiled a team of story producers, producers, of researchers, we have an incredible advisory team. So the way that Oprah had put together the team to do this series, that felt like something that I really want it to be a part of, and I really wanted to contribute to.
The conversations in this docuseries are about sensitive, emotional topics. How did you make people feel comfortable with the process?
That's what documentary directing is. It's your job to figure out how you can both really listen to people and be respectful. I think it's important with a topic like this that we were never pushy. The people that we found through our amazing story team, they wanted to share.
And every single person, when I would thank them, they said, "We wanted to do this" because they didn't want anybody else to go through the pain that they had experienced. They felt it was worth it because they had each been through so much. And, I've never had an experience on a documentary project where every interviewee said the same thing about their motivation: that no one should go through what they had experienced.
So we worked really hard to understand conditions, to be empathetic, to not judge, and also, to interview people in private, and over time. We had multiple interviews with people. Even when we had to pivot during pandemic, we let the relationships build and let the subjects take them where they wanted them to go.
This project started before the pandemic, how did COVID change the series?
COVID changed a lot. We had really just started to get into the production side of filming. And then we had to pivot.
We couldn't travel. We had stories lined up overseas that became impossible. We had to figure out who was comfortable being in person. Were we comfortable being in person? We also had plans for more filming that couldn't happen. So we had to really lean into the stories where we felt we had good, full stories. We didn't want anyone to feel their story was not given a full treatment. So we leaned deeper into the stories that ultimately made it into the series.
We expected this to be hard. We didn't expect it to be this hard. The thought it might be hard to get people to open up or, invite us into their lives. That wasn't hard. What was hard were the mechanics of it, because for something like this, you want to be intimate with people. You want to be in a small space. So we had to figure out the logistics, but once we did, we never looked back. We knew what we were doing was even more important because the whole world was experiencing mental health stress. I feel like this will speak to even more people than had we finished it without a pandemic.
When we first started, we were like, are people going to get it? Do we have to make people care? And now everyone has experienced loneliness, depression, anxiety. Should I go out? Should I not? Do I wear a mask? Do I not? Where do I send my kids? How's my job? The whole world, every person in the entire world, has this shared stressful experience. I would not wish the pandemic on anyone, but I'm happy that we're coming out in this time.
Tell me about the decision to have famous people’s stories and non-famous stories documented in the series in equal measure.
It was really important to us that we be more than boldfaced names. And our mantra working on this series was everyone has a story. So we wanted to show that mental health is part of the human experience. Mental stress doesn't know if you are wealthy or famous; it just knows that you're a person and you've experience some kind of physical or emotional stressor.
So we wanted to show that whether you are a Prince or a media mogul, or a refugee boy in Greece, the commonality that we all share that, human condition, means everyone can be affected by mental health stressors, but everyone can be helped too. We wanted to show a range of experiences, but also that it all starts with conversation. Each story started with somebody saying something's happening to me and I need help.
Why is this project so important to Oprah and to Prince Harry?
Both Oprah and Prince Harry had very personal and deep feelings about destigmatizing conversations around mental health and mental wellness. This was really important to both of them, and so they were extremely hands on. We had meetings every other week. We would look at footage of different possible participants. We would talk through their stories. We would talk to what each story would bring to the series, and that also led to both of them participating. They were seeing in real time how our subjects were opening up, and then they both really opened up too, so I'm really proud of that, that they were so involved and it was such a collaborative effort for our team.
Tell me a little bit about the decision to have Harry go through therapy on camera.
Asif Kapadia [who is also directing the docuseries] was working really closely with Harry, and it was really interesting because we were working on the series for so long that we knew a lot about what Prince Harry was doing to maintain his mental wellness. And when you have Oprah Winfrey and the best advisers on the planet, you get access to a lot of the best research and the best medicine. Harry he volunteered, he was game for trying something. And we thought well, we have the opportunity to film this [therapy] and maybe this is something that will work for some people, maybe it won't, but the idea is that you don't tick a box and you're done, mental wellness is an ongoing pursuit. You have to continue to try new things and to push yourself, and his volunteering to try something was a great way to emphasize and underscore that point.
What was the experience of directing Oprah like?
It was really important to me as a director to let her rest. The reason that she's such a great interviewer—and she is the best interviewer on the planet—is because she makes her guest feel comfortable, like they're in good hands. And so I wanted to give her that experience, to let her just respond and not have to guide the conversations. She was up for it. She was trusting, she was open. She said she enjoyed it, and that's the best compliment you could ever have. It's from the queen of interviews, and she enjoyed her interview. So I will forever be proud of that. I'm like, shoot, I should have of recorded that.
She's incredibly smart. She reads so quickly that she would send me texts saying, "Oh, you should read this, you should read this." I was like, how is she reading all of these books and articles and watching all these things? But her suggesting, "read this article" or "take a look at this," that helped me prepare for her interview because I knew what she was thinking about. One thing that was incredibly fun was going through the archives of the Oprah Winfrey Show.
You could see in real time the evolution of her understanding of the importance of mental health. And so that was a huge resource for me. If you grew up in America, you came home at four o'clock, you turned on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Right. That was all of our experience. She's somebody you feel like you know and so I had a good jumping off point. But it's really to her credit that she let herself be interviewed, and put herself in that position, with us for this series.
Did you think about Oprah’s sit-down interview with Harry and Meghan from earlier while crafting The Me You Can't See?
We used every bit of intel about them, but we were pretty far along in the edit [when the interview aired]. I think what you see in the Oprah Harry conversation is two people who are very comfortable with each other. And I think the fact that we had been having these conversations with them over time, you see their relationship, you see how well they get along, how interested and in-depth they want it to be with this series. So I see that as a product of the work they both put into their friendship as well as their professional relationship. But we were glued to the TV, just like everybody else.
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