Since the drop of his 2018 hit single “Old Town Road” – a single that propelled Lil Nas X into fame and, for some, infamy – Lil Nas X has been rattling the music scene. But this new documentary opens up a door to the life of Lil Nas X, born Montero Lamar Hill, that hasn’t been shown before. Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero (2023) depicts the events of the artist’s 2022 “Long Live Montero” tour; Yet, it is so much more than a Behind-the-Music exploration of Lil Nas’ music and career. Co-directed by Zac Manuel (This Body, Nonstop, Painted Lady) and Carlos López Estrada (Raya and the Last Dragon, Blindspotting, Summertime), Long Live Montero pushes the limits of the documentary genre in its innovative approach to capturing Lil Nas X both as a performer and as a person.
Everything one might want from, and expect of, such a documentary can be found here: there’s footage of his concerts across the country, interviews with family, and the occasional appearance from celebrities such as Madonna and Saucy Santana. Long Live Montero does more than capture Lil Nas X’s celebrity, however. In the span of its 96 minute run, Manuel and López Estrada’s documentary aims to dig deep into the psyche of its subject.
Monologues from Lil Nas X himself provide much of the framing for this film’s movement from the beginning of his 2022 tour to its end. Viewers hear from Hill as he speaks from his LA apartment, discussing the trials and triumphs of being an openly queer rapper in the United States. The inclusion of interviews with family and fans only deepens Long Live Montero’s plunge into the person behind the internet meme-ry. Tying this documentary together, further, is a fantastical, dream-like sequence of a fictionalised young Montero (played by Maximus Turner) being brought into the world of “Nas” by the “Wizard of Nas” (portrayed by Hodo Musa, Lil Nas X’s stylist and creative director for the “Long Live Montero” tour).
Outtake had the pleasure of speaking with co-director Zac Manuel about Manuel’s start in film, how he and López Estrada became collaborators, and Long Live Montero’s quest to capture a nuanced picture of Black queer life on film.
As I was reading up on your body of work, I saw that you like to focus on themes of Black masculinity, class identity and inheritance. With those interests in mind, how did you get into filmmaking?
Zac Manuel: It wasn’t a straight path. I went to film school in Southern California and when I got out, I really thought that I was going to do scripted film. And I did do a lot of scripted film, actually. I was directing shorts, and doing a lot of music videos, but I started working with another director as a DP [Director of Photography] and it got me really excited about this different mode of storytelling. I think I’m also a person who was constantly frustrated or impatient with the process of writing [laughs], and I’m also a very visual person. So there was something special about being able to go into a space to express my knack for visual storytelling with a camera, but also connect with people.
And it kind of struck this chord of spontaneous creation. We obviously do plan docs to a certain extent, but there’s also an aspect of it that’s totally spontaneous. I loved working with that kind of pressurised intensity of knowing what you want to get, but it being without your control. Then, it becomes even more important to really connect with people in order to do the thing that you set out to do. I was never like, “Yo, I’m going to be a documentary filmmaker,” but it started to scratch some interests of mine and for me, it was really nice to be able to, like, explore my home, explore aspects of my own identity, with other people and stories… I had a small film company back in New Orleans. We could just go out and start shooting, and there was a freedom to being able to create that way that I loved. I still love that.
There are so many beautiful places to film in New Orleans, like Tremé [a historically Black neighbourhood in New Orleans].
Zac Manuel: Thinking about the things I’m interested in, my mother worked in urban development for 35 years, and my father was a jazz musician. So that clash of infrastructural politics and culture making, I think you can see it viscerally in some parts of the environment here. Treme used to be connected to parts of Mid-city where I live, but was separated with the construction of an overpass in the late 50s, early 60s. So when you think about what that does to a culture and what it does to their local economy, what it does to business, and then how people have to recapitulate how they’re surviving in their own city without power, there’s so much to look at in these urban environments.
How would you say that your experiences have inspired your work with this documentary?
Zac Manuel: It became a little bit more about community in the way that we were telling the story. For me, being a Black man from the South, as someone who always kind of feels the push and pull between tradition, or the values of my parents, versus how I live my life, or my friends or my community, I thought that it was important to explore that with him, especially being someone that is so influential. But I felt a connectivity to his identity in a certain way, and had felt that this was an opportunity to explore Black masculinity and Southern, Black identity. Where you come from, who your family is, what your influences are, that push-pull of tradition versus personal truth… to do that as someone who is in a place of influence in the world… he [Lil Nas X] is able to create a feeling for other people, whether it’s a feeling of comfort, or fear, or repulsion. The ways he lives his life is a response to what he’s grown up with, and his music is how he processes others’ negativity and rejection of his queer identity and turns it into something that can no longer harm him. His humour becomes the shield. That was particularly important for me to portray.
How did you end up partnering with Carlos López Estrada on this film, and how did you come to work with Lil Nas X?
Zac Manuel: Carlos was one of the writers of [Lil Nas X’s] stage show, actually, when they were planning it. One of the producers, Saul Levitz, works with Carlos a bunch and called him in to like help to craft the show and the structure. And so I had worked with another producer, Caryn Capotosto, who produced the the film, who’s really great and a phenomenal producer. She was working with Sony at the time, and so when they kind of floated this idea around of capturing the “Long Live Montero” tour, I think she brilliantly thought that it can be more than just a tour capture. And so she called me and she was like, “hey, this could be a really incredible opportunity to make a film and to do a little bit more of a deep dive.” And so I was instantly excited about that.
Then, as I was on set working with Montero and his team, maybe halfway through production, Carlos came back on board to conceive of a couple of different aspects of the film, one being how we were going to explore the kind of dual nature story of [Lil Nas X’s] fans who go to his shows or who are affected by his music and how the parallels in their journeys of coming out, acceptance, and finding community. He also conceived of how to film this show that was really big and vibrant and theatrical and how to make something cinematic out of that. So we had like this really great balance of like, “I’m gonna be on the verite, running around getting interviews and stories,” and then Carlos is taking what I’m doing and putting this magical element into it, like these confessions with fans and but also doing this kind of magical element of you know, these confessional boots with fans and these runways and these fashion shows and taking this like these top line ideas and then like distilling that into into what he did, and then connecting that to these like these very personal moments. It was a really nice collaboration. We had very different spaces that we were working in, though we were in constant communication. It was nice to think about the film in these different ways and, then, once we got into the editing room, to start to connect them.
What struck me in watching the film is that not only those very personal confessionals from fans, but also the very nonlinear dipping into a world of fantasy. What inspired those fantastical, surreal parts of the documentary?
Zac Manuel: This is actually a funny story, because we, so we had finished the film. We preparing for TIFF [Toronto International Film Festival]. We were basically in final cut; we were like, alright, this is locked, like, let’s go into you know, finishing post. And Montero watched it and he was like, I want to do something. I want to try something I want to do a shoot in Atlanta with this young Montero. And I want to like you know, something that feels dreamy and something that feels like an exploration of my childhood. And so that like that kind of like dream sequence aspect with young Montero was Lil Nas X wanting to to basically direct something. Within like three or four days of [Montero] saying that, me, Carlos, Montero, and his team, we all flew to Atlanta. There was a kid [Maximus Turner] who was supposed to be in the tour. I think Montero really, really wanted to find a way to incorporate him, and it kind of just was this perfect spark of “let’s bring him back in and let’s create the sequence with him that explores, like your youth and a little bit more of, you know, a dreamy, kind of fantastical way.” So that was definitely a dreamy aspect of it. The other dreamy thing that we really played around with was butterflies, which was kind of a visual theme in his show, metamorphosis, transformation. So I remember pretty early on, I had been looking at the migratory patterns of monarchs from Canada to Mexico and realized that there were, there might be a small opportunity to catch them on the West Coast. And so it kind of worked out where we could like, have this stop in between in between shows to do something a little bit special. It was basically our one opportunity to catch a little bit of a lightning in a bottle.
What are some future projects you have in mind?
Zac Manuel: Carlos and I are talking about some things. His company Antigravity [Academy] is kind of pushing into a non-fiction direction as well, so we’re, we’re scheming up some things together. And then I’m finishing another feature that I started actually a long time ago. It’s a doc called Ghetto Children that follows the sons of three super influential rappers from New Orleans: Juvenile’s son, B.G.’s son, Soulja Slim’s son, all of whom have this like informal rap collective called the Ghetto Children. But it’s like a longitudinal coming-of-age story told within the world of New Orleans, gangster street rap. We shot for eight years together. It’s a story that is all about kind of the reverberations of our fathers or our parents and how the decisions that they’ve made, or the lives that they wanted to have or didn’t get to have, are reflected in our own lives. That story has been a long time coming, but I’m really happy to be finishing it up. And then I’m just starting on something new that’s in a similar space of thinking about ancestry and thinking about legacy and thinking about memories and what we hold. But as exploring that through my own family, but also through artificial intelligence. It seems like a kind of word that’s lost all meaning. But I think there is an interesting connectivity between how we hold on to memory and if it’s possible to revive memory or to archive, and to create something living from from what is not anymore. So not to give too much away, but that’s my latest exploration.
Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero is out now. It can be streamed on Max with a subscription.