The black SUV rolls towards the White Home, carrying Kanye West to a gathering with President Trump that’s already destined to change into a media circus. Within the backseat, carrying a crimson MAGA cap pulled low, West leans into his cellphone, phrases tumbling out in a torrent to Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner.
“I need to go in the exact way that a foreign dignitary would go,” he insists. “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.”
Beside him sits Nico Ballesteros, a teen from Orange County, digicam in hand, worn down by months of near-constant filming and preventing to maintain his eyes open.
For Ballesteros, the SUV experience that morning was simply one other second in a blur of fixed journey and filming. Within the years that adopted, he continued to shadow Ye throughout continents — Asia, Europe, Africa and again — by means of lodges, personal jets, studios, arenas, vogue reveals and household fights, his digicam all the time recording. By the point he lastly stepped away in late 2022, he had amassed greater than 3,000 hours of footage, now formed into his debut movie, “In Whose Name?,” an unbiased documentary opening Sept. 19 on greater than a thousand screens.
“I would film 15, 18 hours sometimes, and the rest of those hours I was in transit,” says Ballesteros, now 26, seated at a nook desk on the Chateau Marmont. Lanky and soft-spoken, he carries a mixture of gravity and nerves — this being the primary interview of his life — as he remembers six years shadowing probably the most well-known males on the planet. “There was so much lack of sleep that I wasn’t always consciously thinking about what was going on. My wrist would be collapsing with the camera in my hand and I’d have to jolt myself back. From the White House, we literally went straight to Uganda.”
In contrast to most superstar portraits, “In Whose Name?” has no shiny packaging, no speaking heads and, most unusually, no enter from its topic. What emerges is an unvarnished chronicle: flashes of imaginative and prescient and vulnerability, spectacle and self-destruction, all captured by means of the lens of a younger cameraman embedded in Ye’s orbit. It drops viewers right into a interval when the rapper and vogue mogul pinballed between euphoric bursts of creativity and really public collapse — a stretch that price him his marriage to Kim Kardashian, his billion-dollar company partnerships and far of his cultural standing.
As soon as a cultural lodestar, Ye now occupies a much more polarizing place: embraced by a loyal fringe, shunned by former collaborators and largely exiled from mainstream music and vogue. In February, he reignited international outrage by retracting a previous 2023 apology for his antisemitic remarks and launching into an hours-long tirade on social media — declaring he was a Nazi, professing his love for Adolf Hitler and insisting, “I’m never apologizing for my Jewish comments.” In Might, he launched a single titled “Heil Hitler” on SoundCloud, complaining on X that the track had been “banned by all digital streaming platforms.” Weeks later, he claimed on X that he was “done with antisemitism,” writing, “I love all people. God forgive me for the pain I’ve caused.”
It’s in opposition to that backdrop that “In Whose Name?” arrives, however Ballesteros stresses he by no means got down to make a take-down. “I didn’t make this to tell a story of descent or unraveling,” he says. “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.”
Ye has no artistic or monetary stake within the movie. Ballesteros, by no means on his topic’s payroll, retained possession of the footage — a outstanding truth given how fiercely Ye has fought to manage his personal picture. But Ye has tacitly given it his blessing: After watching the completed minimize, he texted Ballesteros, “That doc was very deep. It was like being dead and looking back on my life.” (Representatives for West didn’t reply to a request for remark for this text.)
“I was there as a journalist, documenting,” Ballesteros says. “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.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
Ballesteros grew up in Orange County with a digicam virtually all the time in his hand, much less out of Hollywood ambitions than a means of constructing sense of the world. A lower-middle-class little one of divorce, he earned a spot at 13 within the movie program on the Orange County Faculty of the Arts, a public constitution college in Santa Ana for artistically inclined college students. By then, he was already treating filming like a each day apply. A documentary class in highschool proved transformative. “That class was life-changing for me,” he says, his dialog dotted with references that vary from Andrei Tarkovsky and Hunter S. Thompson to Vice movies and YouTube creators. “It pulled me into storytelling rooted in reality. I fell in love with it.”
“It was a calling,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is the world I want to go into and make a documentary on.’”
From there, he embedded himself within the vogue and music worlds Ye drew from, directing music movies and taking pictures for manufacturers like Off-White till, when Ye’s longtime documentarian left, he was a pure match to step in. At first he was simply one other physique behind a digicam, taking pictures the occasional occasion. However quickly he was invited into Ye’s day-to-day orbit, following him into workplaces, studios and past.
“I viewed it as a ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ moment — I got the golden ticket,” he says. “It was like stepping into Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was an education: Let me see how he talks to [director] Spike Jonze, how creative ideas actually come to life.” That curiosity, he believes, was what West picked up on. “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.”
The stakes shortly turned clear. When West was hospitalized in late 2016 for exhaustion and what was termed a “psychiatric emergency,” hours after canceling the rest of his tour, Ballesteros sensed the gravity of what he was getting into. “I was like, oh, this is much more deep,” he remembers.
It additionally raised an uncomfortable query for a first-time filmmaker: What are the ethics of turning such vulnerability into artwork or taking advantage of somebody’s psychological well being struggles? From the outset, although, Ballesteros says West knew he meant to make a documentary and infrequently framed it round his psychological state. One in every of their earliest connections was a shared curiosity in Freud and Jung, giving Ballesteros the sense the movie would all the time be as a lot a psychological excavation as a chronicle.
“When he was meeting with Pharrell, he said, ‘This documentary is about mental health,’” he remembers. “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.”
Whereas the final word goal of the footage was not totally outlined, West emphasised that the whole lot was honest sport. “One time he went to the dentist to get his teeth cleaned and I obviously didn’t go in — I was just in the car,” Ballesteros says. “His security came out to get me and I go in, and he’s like, ‘Hey, why’d you stop recording?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I thought you wanted privacy.’ He’s like, ‘No. Never stop recording unless I tell you to.’”
The occasional occasions West spoke immediately in regards to the movie had been usually in shorthand, referencing motion pictures like “The Aviator” and “There Will Be Blood,” portraits of males whose genius curdles into obsession and insanity. It was a glimpse of how he appeared to border his personal story. All through, Ballesteros says, Ye pressed the necessity to “show all the sides of who we are, both the dark and the light.”
Ye shares a second with daughter North in a scene from “In Whose Name?”
(AMSI Leisure)
“In Whose Name?” doesn’t flinch from the darker turns. Ye is seen proclaiming himself free after going off his treatment, solely to spiral into rants about conspiracies in opposition to him. He describes sleeping in a bulletproof vest, rails in opposition to associates that he fears try to emasculate him and lashes out with bursts of rage and paranoia that depart these round him — together with then-wife Kardashian and her mom Kris Jenner — visibly shaken. Ye usually returns to the language of “mind control” and slavery, satisfied that docs, companies, even members of his circle are working to direct his life.
Together with quieter moments, like a reflective go to to his childhood residence in Chicago, the digicam additionally catches him repeatedly clashing with Kardashian over his conduct. “I’ve been crying all day — it’s just this bad dream that’s not ending,” she tells him in a single scene after his White Home go to. “I’m not about burning bridges with companies. You’re going to wake up one day and you’re going to have nothing.” He snaps again: “Never tell me I’m going wake up one day and have nothing. Never put that into the universe.” (Representatives for Kardashian didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
Alongside Ye’s bursts of artistic and religious inspiration — from a sweeping plan to construct an ecologically sustainable metropolis in Wyoming to his gospel-infused Sunday Service performances that drew hundreds — the movie tracks the controversies that torched his profession. The Paris runway present the place he despatched out fashions in “White Lives Matter” shirts. The late-night tweet promising to go “death con 3 on Jewish people.” The interviews that adopted, laced with antisemitic tropes about Jewish management of media and cash.
“I can literally say antisemitic s— and Adidas can’t drop me,” he’s seen boasting. Not lengthy after, Adidas did precisely that, erasing his billionaire standing and far of his cultural standing.
By the autumn of 2022, Ye’s empire was in tatters: Adidas minimize ties, different company companions adopted, CAA dropped him as a shopper and his marriage ended. The fallout is plain — and ongoing — however Ballesteros is cautious to separate his movie from West’s phrases and actions. “I don’t support antisemitism, obviously, or hate speech,” he says quietly however firmly. “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.”
Kim Kardashian, heart, in an emotional confrontation with Ye in “In Whose Name?”
(AMSI Leisure)
After stepping away from Ye’s world, Ballesteros was left with hundreds of hours of footage and no clear plan for what to do with it. In Costa Rica in 2023, he tried to decompress whereas sifting by means of the mountain of fabric. On the lookout for a backer, the untested filmmaker turned to Simran A. Singh, a veteran music lawyer who had shifted into producing, together with the upcoming Netflix documentary “Selena y Los Dinos,” which premiered at this 12 months’s Sundance and attracts on never-before-seen footage from the late singer’s household archive.
At first, Singh was hesitant to get entangled. Netflix had solely lately launched “Jeen-yuhs,” a sprawling three-part 2022 chronicle of West’s rise, and Ye’s latest public conduct made the prospect even tougher to abdomen. “Honestly, I was reluctant — another film about Ye?” Singh says. “Especially when he was saying a lot of antisemitic remarks. One of my partners is Jewish and I have a lot of close friends who are Jewish, and I would never want anyone to think I stood behind that.”
What modified his thoughts, Singh stated, was seeing the fabric itself. “What I saw was raw, unfiltered access you almost never get with anyone of this stature,” he says. “And when I met Nico, I saw what it could be. I really believe he can be the next big director of his generation.”
Singh spoke with a number of distributors and platforms, however many had been cautious of potential backlash. That hesitation pushed him towards releasing the movie independently. “In complete transparency, we’re self-distributing this under my banner,” he says. “I didn’t want to deal with corporate bureaucracy and editing that could lose the integrity of the film. We’re David versus Goliath here. My wife is an EP as well, and we’re extremely bullish. We believe it’s meant to be seen in community and to provoke conversation.”
The movie’s title factors to the larger questions Ballesteros hopes it raises. With its spiritual overtones, “In Whose Name?” nods to the trimmings of religion that always surrounded West but in addition asks one thing broader about authorship and accountability. “It’s posing the question: Who are we serving and why?” he says.
Ye chats with Elon Musk in a scene from “In Whose Name?”
(AMSI Leisure)
On the Chateau Marmont, Ballesteros blends right into a nook desk in a leather-based jacket, nursing an iced Americano, trying youthful than his age and extra reserved than one would possibly count on from somebody who spent six years shadowing Ye’s each transfer. For him, the movie’s launch is each an ending and a starting. He’s growing documentary and narrative function tasks, although he’s maintaining the main points below wraps.
“I want to keep refining the pipeline for documentary filmmaking and keep innovating in the space,” he says. “But I also want to move into scripted work — films that deal with themes of power and maybe the American dream as a through line.”
For six years, Ballesteros lived inside what he calls Ye’s “reality distortion field,” a world the place entry, consideration, wealth and creativity bent the foundations of unusual life. Stepping again into his personal world was certain to really feel jarring.
“Seventy to ninety percent of my life throughout those years was with him,” he says. “When I wasn’t with him, it was disorienting. I just felt the weight shift when I was in that world versus out of that world.”
The dissonance lingers even now. Requested if he’s nonetheless a fan of Ye’s work — if he can separate the artwork from the artist after witnessing a lot turmoil up shut — Ballesteros pauses earlier than selecting his phrases fastidiously. “I’m digesting that,” he says. “I’ve given so much to this project from a cultural lens, from a subject lens, I’m just not focused so much on his music. But I think he obviously is very talented, and the word ‘genius’ — I think we could definitely attribute that to the scope of some of his creative endeavors. Without a doubt.”
He stresses that, even at Ye’s lowest factors, he by no means felt personally consumed by the chaos.
“I always felt like I was there as a journalist, documenting,” he says. “It never really broke the fourth wall for me. I had a profound sense of empathy but it was something that was separate from me. And he was always very polite to me — even like a mentor, in terms of creativity.”
Ballesteros has come to see the venture by means of the lens of one other cultural determine well-known for bending actuality to his will.
“Like Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots looking forward,” he says. “You can only connect them looking backward.”
