system. He said Gates made himself “an
open book.”
“In the beginning I said, ‘Look, I’m going to
ask you every question I have on my mind. I’m
not going to be worried about being overly
sensitive,’” Guggenheim said. “I didn’t go home
ever thinking, ‘God, I was too scared to ask that
question.’ I asked him everything.”
For greater insight, Guggenheim interviewed
Gates’ sisters, journalist Nicholas Kristof, tycoon
Warren Buffett and Gates’ wife, Melinda, who
comes across as smart, funny and an occasional
foil to her husband. The Gates’ three children are
shown but weren’t interviewed.
Each episode in the series introduces three
huge global issues the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation has tackled recently — safe
sanitation technology, polio eradication and
nuclear power — and then switches back in
time to see how Gates solved other complex
issues in his life as a younger man.
“The series doesn’t do a traditional cradle-to-
grave portrait of him. He wasn’t interested
in that. I wasn’t interested in that,” said the
filmmaker. Instead, he wanted to find out the
source of his relentless optimism and his push to
do all these great things.
After spending so much time with Gates,
Guggenheim said the popular perception of him
as a cold, dispassionate thinker isn’t true. Gates,
he found, is the first person in the family to cry
at movies.
“The truth is, what I’ve learned about Bill is he
is very passionate and emotional. But he puts
those emotions to the side,” he said.