Original-Cin Q&A: Pam Anderson Doc Director on His Subject’s (Not So Surprising) Brilliance

By Bonnie Laufer

Get ready to meet a Pamela Anderson you haven’t seen before.

The fabled Canadian blonde bombshell is ready to pull away the curtain, not only with her new memoir, Love Pamela, but also in a raw and fascinating new documentary, Pamela, A Love Story. It starts streaming on Netflix Tuesday (January 31).

Our Bonnie Laufer spoke with director Ryan White about getting this doc ready for the world to see and what he learned about Pamela Anderson that truly surprised — and impressed — him.

ORIGINAL-CIN: Congratulations on all your success. I am a huge fan of your documentaries, but especially the one on Dr. Ruth. What an absolute gem! What was it like having all that time with her?

RYAN WHITE: It truly was an honour. I love Dr Ruth. She's like my surrogate grandmother and at this point you should see my voicemails on my phone. I have a completely full inbox because of the abundance of voicemail she leaves me. She's very, very special.

O-C: And now, Pamela Anderson. How did you meet her and get the ball rolling on this documentary about her life?

RW: It's not like I roll in Pamela's orbit in any way. I didn't know her until we started making this documentary. I was born in 1981, when Pamela was the most famous person in the world. I didn't know anything about her except for that sort of public caricature of her and her role on Baywatch and in Playboy.

The idea was pitched to me by our producers Josh Braun and Julia Nottingham, who's in England and had gotten access to Pamela. They thought I might be a good fit as a director. Honestly, I said no in the beginning because I had this image in my head of Pamela as this larger-than-life caricature. I just came with all these preconceived notions that in the end were totally wrong but I'll admit them, where I just assumed she would care a lot about how she's perceived and have a lot of agents and managers and publicists around her that would care about what a film about her would look like. I usually say no to a lot of celebrity documentaries, mainly because I find the more famous the celebrity, the less appealing it is to me. They said, ‘Just jump on a Zoom with her and see if you guys are a good personality fit because we think you're really going really like her.’

O-C: Clearly, that changed your opinion of her.

RW: Oh absolutely. After our initial meeting on Zoom in 2021, that's where all of those preconceived notions were blown up. Look, I'll be honest. I didn't even know Pamela was Canadian. I think most Americans don't, unless you're a massive Pamela Anderson fan and you really know her background. I think because she was our California beach babe, we just assume that's where she's from. It was super-interesting to me right off the bat that she was doing the Zoom from a small island in Canada, where she had grown up and she's telling me she had bought her grandma's house on this ranch there on the water.

She was so incredibly different from what I expected that I just remember thinking, ‘This is going to surprise the hell out of people.’ I keep hearing that from people who watch the film, we really did not think that's who the real Pamela Anderson is: that she's pretty awesome.

O-C: People who watch this who think they know everything about her will learn things. As you were working with her, you were given access to a lot of footage we've never seen before. Pamela appeared to be very open with you but is it true that she just didn't want to see what you were doing and gave you carte blanche to do whatever you wanted to do?

RW: It's totally true. Brandon, her son, produced the film so he was involved but as far as Pam went, she never interfered. I remember the first time we went to Canada, and we tried to watch as many tapes as possible. There were hundreds of VHS tapes in this attic in her beach house there. We went up on a ladder and there were dozens of crates filled with tapes and journals. She hadn't cataloged any of it. She didn't even know what was up there because she doesn't go up there. But Brandon was there with us and so we just voraciously tried to get through them all. We went and got a TV and VCR at a pawn shop, and we watched as much as possible in the two days that we were there.

We took back what we could from that first trip in a carry-on suitcase because obviously we weren't going to check it. Pamela felt very comfortable because Brandon was going with us so she knew the custodianship of that footage was with her son because she didn't know me that well at that point.

Then, of course, over the next year when she trusted me a lot more we actually drove back a cargo van from Vancouver Island to Los Angeles because we had so much archival that was mostly the journals and diaries because she has so many.

She would open up a safe and it would be stacked to the top with journals and she would say, ‘I have no idea what those are but you're welcome to take them.’ She had made the decision that she wasn't going to use her diaries and journals to write her memoir. I thought that this was a really amazing storytelling device. If we had her voice reading some of these excerpts, it would really make the documentary valid.

O-C: Boy, did you ever end up with a treasure trove. I mean, who keeps every single diary that they wrote since they were a kid?

RW: I think Pamela had a few screws loose in the sense that she's so open. Why would you ever give access to all of your diaries and journals? I can't imagine how embarrassing that would be for anyone to have strangers read your inner thoughts from your entire life. But that's Pamela. She's unapologetically herself in every way.

O-C: Was it hard for her to watch the finished product?

RW: She actually just watched the film the other day. That was the moment she found out about all of those diary entries. She hadn't seen any of that archival footage minus the few tapes that we have her popping in during the movie. So that's when she saw it all for the first time and how it was used. She was remarkably controlled, especially for a celebrity of her stature.

O-C: She has weathered so much through the years, and we see a lot of this in the film. Including her choice of men, and how many times she's been married which she addresses as well. But she seems to kind of blow it all off (even during some horrific interviews) and laughs like it’s almost a defense mechanism. I'm wondering, when the camera wasn't rolling, was she breaking down?

RW: It's interesting because I saw this a lot with Dr. Ruth as well when I was making that film. Someone who's had an incredibly hard life like Dr. Ruth — I mean, what is worse than being a Holocaust survivor and losing your entire family? But, Dr. Ruth was very similar in the sense that they are the ultimate optimists. They are romantics in every way and I don't just mean romantic love. They are always so hopeful, both of them. They both have that same I would call it a defense mechanism, but I think it's a survival mechanism.

With Pamela I get that. I feel like it was revealing in itself how she reacts to certain things. I didn't feel the need to see her break down or have my Barbara Walters moment. I like watching people survive and survive the way that they've chosen to survive. Pamela was 100% on camera the exact same way she was off camera. In fact, I think often Pamela didn't even know when we were rolling the cameras or when we weren't because she's not really a performer. She was very difficult to direct in some ways because of that; she's not like an actor that knows when the cameras are rolling or knows where they are knows she would never put a microphone on.

We were always just following Pamela around her property as she talked and I think she was very unaware of what was being recorded. So no, you never you never really saw Pamela break down until that Hulu show, Pam & Tommy came out. That really rattled her because she truly didn’t know it was coming out and was so upset that it was made without her consent.

O-C: At the end of the day, her greatest achievements are those two boys and how much they love and support her. How hard was it for Brandon and his brother Dylan to see this stuff about their mom?

RW: Dylan watched it for the first time with his mom so the two of them watched it together. I know it was an emotional experience for both of them. Brandon being a producer watched cuts along the way and I remember at times having to pause the film looking over at Brandon, because we would watch the cuts in my office with tears streaming down his face because his mom is so open and raw and she's willing to share some of those horribly traumatic moments that, as a son, you would never find out about except if your mom was doing a documentary or writing a book. And they didn't know these things that she went through as a child. But I have to give Brandon a lot of credit because he weathered that storm and he understood that his mom being this vulnerable and raw was going to help the audience understand the fully functional Pamela.