One Last Look at the Old Kanye West

He’d been getting calls from reporters looking for comment on Ye’s situation; he changed his phone number, got off social media. He went home for Thanksgiving, drove north to Carmel and stayed at the La Playa, the resort hotel where Steve Jobs unveiled the prototype of the Macintosh during a retreat with his Apple development team in 1983; the ensuing celebration, which involved alcohol, a beach bonfire, and skinny-dipping, got Apple banned from the place for almost 30 years.

It was there that Ballesteros decided he needed to get out of the country. “I feel like in order to tell this story,” he told his team, “I need to get out of America, because it’s such an American story that I need to reset.”

So Ballesteros, Russell, and a third friend-turned-story-editor—a theater actor and writer named Shy Ranje who Ballesteros had met in 2019 and bumped back into years later—packed everything (the hard drives, a server, some ultra-wide monitors) into padded Pelican cases and took everything to a house in the jungle down in Costa Rica, where they worked on the movie for an entire year.

This was partly a security measure; in the wake of Ye’s public implosion, plenty of media outlets would probably have killed to get their hands on 3,000 hours of unedited Ye footage. (When I meet Ballesteros, all that material is under lock and key in a vault in Beverly Hills, like in the Gatlin Brothers song about all the gold in California.) But why Ballesteros and Co. felt it necessary to get this far away—why they decided to take their hard drives to the fucking jungle for a year—is harder for everyone involved to explain.

“I don’t know if there really is a cohesive, sensible answer,” Jack Russell says, when asked why they couldn’t have just moved their operation up the 405 to Pacoima and put their cell phones in a drawer. “It was not, in hindsight, super logical or easy, as far as transporting the hard drives and computers. That was a big part of the story in the beginning—just, logistics.”

“It was just this big thing,” he says. “We set off into the world. I think we did it for the story, in some ways. I wouldn’t say I could say that for Nico, but it felt that way.”

“I was honestly just really inspired, I guess you could say, by people like Kanye,” Ballesteros says, “and [his] idea of, ‘We gotta go to Hawaii to make the album.’ So, I was like, ‘We got to go to Costa Rica.’”