Bill Gates hopes a TV series on his work will engage more people to help solve the problems he’s working on. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Bill Gates — and what goes on inside his head — is coming to Netflix.
A three-part docuseries called “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates” will air on the streaming television channel and, according to Netflix, offer “unprecedented access to Gates as he pursues unique solutions to some of the world’s most complex problems with the same level of optimism, curiosity, and fervor that inspired his original vision for Microsoft.”
The series was directed by Academy Award-winner Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “He Named Me Malala”) and is set to premiere Sept. 20.
The Microsoft co-founder left the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant in 2000 and with his wife formed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He told Entertainment Weekly why he agreed to the idea of a film about his work.
“Davis had the idea of making a documentary that looked at the big projects I take on that are risky and might not happen otherwise, and that was interesting to me,” Gates said. “It may seem counterintuitive to make this documentary while we’re still in the middle of solving these really hard problems, but I’m hopeful that maybe more people will get engaged in some of these issues and help solve them. I hope this documentary leaves people optimistic that big problems can be tackled.”
Deadline reported that the series will include interviews with Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as their friends, family and partners in philanthropy and business.
Guggenheim told EW that while sometimes his documentaries are seen as films about issues, to him they’re about people he finds fascinating.
“Bill Gates has always been a compelling figure, but what makes him such an interesting person to think about right now is the way in which his optimism and pragmatism drives his approach to problem-solving,” the director said. “When I thought about topics to cover, I knew I didn’t want to make a promotional piece about his work. Instead, I opted to focus on the tougher, more complex problems that nobody wants to think about, like sanitation and nuclear energy. Bill chose to take these issues on, even knowing that he might fail, and I had an instinct that seeing him wrestle with these intractable and frustrating problems would reveal something interesting about him as a person.”
