Kanye West’s Teen Documentarian Reveals Real Reason for Filming His Downfall

The director of the hotly anticipated, unauthorized Kanye West documentary In Whose Name? has given his first public interview ever.

Nico Ballesteros was 18 years old when he began following the rap star around with a camera in 2016 – which he continued doing for six more years until 2022.

The period Nico filmed included Kanye’s hospitalization after a mental breakdown, as well as the dramatic disintegration of his marriage to Kim Kardashian.

He also covered Kanye’s career implosion after a string of anti-Semitic outbursts, including praise for Hitler and a vow to go ‘death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.’ 

Now Nico has whittled his more than 3,000 hours of footage into In Whose Name?, which he retained creative control of – meaning that Kanye, who now goes by Ye, was unable to determine how he was portrayed in the final product.

Despite the dramatic content, Nico has maintained: ‘I didn’t make this to tell a story of descent or unraveling,’ in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

The Daily Mail has contacted a representative for Kanye for comment. 

‘I made it to tell a beautiful, deep story of an American figure. We live in such a headline-based society, so I believe this is the body text underneath those headlines. I’m not trying to persuade anyone. I want it to be like a Rorschach test,’ he added. 

The documentarian added: ‘I was there as a journalist, documenting. It never really broke the fourth wall for me. I had a profound sense of empathy and he was always polite to me — even a kind of mentor, at least creatively.’

Kanye does not own any of the footage and did not pay Nico for documenting his life, allowing the director to preserve his creative freedom. 

Nevertheless when he saw the completed movie, he texted Nico: ‘That doc was very deep. It was like being dead and looking back on my life.’

Nico made a point of distancing himself from Kanye’s political statements, saying: ‘I don’t support antisemitism, obviously, or hate speech. He and I don’t share the same views…. We’re human. That’s really where I’m at. He’s a person – he’s a human.’

The documentary – a vérité project without talking-head commentary – did cover some of Kanye’s political interventions in the film, including filming him as he drove to the White House for a 2018 summit with US President Donald Trump.

En route to the meeting, Kanye was on the phone hectoring Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner: ‘I need to go in the exact way that a foreign dignitary would go. I’m not going to step outside and put my life in danger. I put my life in danger by wearing the hat and I need to be loved and respected as such.

‘Because there could be someone out there that could be trying to take a shot at me. There’s people who potentially want to kill me for wearing this hat. If I get killed for wearing the hat in front of the White House, you’re not going to win any midterms.’

Nico also showed Kanye going off his medication for bipolar disorder – an illness with which he now claims he was incorrectly diagnosed.

His emotional rollercoaster onscreen includes emotional flare-ups that unnerved his then-wife Kim and mother-in-law Kris Jenner.

Kanye was filmed talking about sleeping in a bulletproof vest, about conspiracies against him and about attempted ‘mind control’ by those in his orbit.

Kim was left in floods of tears as she fought with him about his controversies, saying: ‘You’re going to wake up one day and you’re going to have nothing.’

‘Never tell me I’m going wake up one day and have nothing,’ retorted Kanye, with whom Kim has four children. ‘Never put that into the universe.’

Nico has now also defended the decision to offer an uncensored view of Kanye’s psychological crises, exposing his personal problems to public scrutiny.

‘When he was meeting with Pharrell, he said: “This documentary is about mental health,”‘ Nico recalled in his new interview. 

‘That was like the first week or so of me filming inside the office. So I was very aware of that being an element. I knew that was what I was signing up for.’

Kanye would emphasize to the director how important it was that the film ‘show all the sides of who we are, both the dark and the light,’ Nico said.

Nico became a teen documentarian after attending a ‘life-changing’ class on the genre at his arts high school in his native Orange County, California. 

Then in 2016, he caught the livestream of Kanye’s Life of Pablo launch at Madison Square Garden, and the viewing experience ‘was a calling. I was like: “This is the world I want to go into and make a documentary on.”‘

Nico insinuated himself into Kanye’s general sphere by working strenuously in fashion and music, including for Off-White, the apparel brand by the rapper’s late protégé Virgil Abloh, with whom Kanye ultimately became estranged.

Then Kanye’s previous documentarian quit and Nico was hired, a development the budding filmmaker regarded ‘as a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment — I got the golden ticket. It was like stepping into Andy Warhol’s Factory.’

He added: ‘It was an education: Let me see how he talks to Spike Jonze, how creative ideas actually come to life. He told me: “When you film, you’re not just documenting, you’re also understanding what it could be.” That’s when we started to talk.’

They bonded over their fascination with Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and during the filming process Kanye would drop references to There Will Be Blood and The Aviator – both movies about visionaries who start to fray psychologically.

In the turbulent trailer for In Whose Name?, Kanye declared: ‘I’d rather be dead than to be on medication. Either they destroy me or I destroy it.’

Kim, who was shown arguing with Kanye and sobbing in the sneak peek, at one point appeared to compare their crumbling marriage to ‘a sad dream.’

At the end of the trailer, Kanye defiantly proclaimed: ‘You know the best thing about being an artist and bipolar? Anything you do and say is an art piece.’

It remains unclear whether the movie will feature Kanye’s current wife Bianca Censori, whom he tied the knot with in December 2022 after the filming period. 

Nico has shared that he first started taking footage of his own life at the age of eight -possibly contributing to the meeting of the minds between him and Kanye.

‘For a shy kid, the camera became both a shield and a window, a way to channel my introspection while still engaging with the world. Ye has always had someone filming him too, a lens between him and the noise,’ Nico told the Hollywood Reporter.

‘Maybe that’s why we understood each other without saying much. I was able to fade into the background, stay present, the camera always rolling, catching moments outside the public performance.’

The movie will be independently released next Friday, September 19, at what Nico has announced will be ‘thousands’ of AMC movie theaters.