One Last Look at the Old Kanye West

By then Ballesteros had attracted his own coterie of culture kids, people he trusted and had tried to bring along professionally, he says, “in the same way that I saw Virgil develop people, in the same way I saw Ye develop people.” One of them was Jack Russell, another aspiring filmmaker who’d moved to L.A. from Idaho a few years earlier and pestered Ballesteros with replies to his Instagram stories until finally Ballesteros broke down and said, Let’s meet.

Ballesteros was renting a tiny house in Pacific Palisades, steps from the beach; they called it The Dojo. Toward the end of Ballesteros’ time with Ye, he and Russell became roommates there, and Russell took it upon himself to start logging and organizing all of Ballesteros’ Ye footage, which at the time was stored on over fifty different LaCie hard drives scattered around the Dojo.

“That was my job,” Russell says, “because no one wanted to do it. Nico, basically, psychologically, couldn’t do it. He was like, ‘I just can’t relive my own life in totality again. It’s just so overwhelming.’ So I was like, ‘I’ll do it. I’ll watch it all, label it all, put it all in order, figure out which hard drive it’s on, make sure it all links together.”

In the summer of 2022, after taking about five months off from filming the movie, Ballesteros went to see Ye, who was staying at a hotel in Los Angeles. He didn’t film; they just talked. Ballesteros told him about the footage he and Jack had been logging, acting out scenes: And then you said this, and then Jacques Herzog said this. And Ye listened, and then said, “We got to start filming again.”

Ballesteros said, Definitely.

The last leg of the journey might have been the most intense phase of the process. “We would go to London, and then we’d be back in LA, and then we’d go to Paris, and we might go back to London. We’d go to Tennessee and then we’d be back in LA. We went back and forth between Europe and LA, I kid you not, probably 20 times in the span of three weeks, or something wild like that.” Ballesteros remembers sleeping on a lot of planes, touching down in three or four time zones over the course of a few days; things got pretty blurry.