Marc Maron Cries at SXSW Sharing How Sharon Stone Helped Him Channel His Grief Over Lynn Shelton Into His Acting

“I should have been dead at the end of that!”

Those were comedian Marc Maron’s first words following the premiere of the feature documentary about him, “Are We Good?,” at the SXSW Film & TV Festival on Tuesday. The film, directed by Steven Feinartz, covers the full breadth of Maron’s career, from his start in the 1980s as a cocaine-fueled acolyte of stand-up Sam Kinison through the rapid success of his comedy podcast “WTF.”

“I thought, it’s amazing this guy still alive,” Maron joked as he took to the stage of the ZACH Theater in Austin following the premiere. “Because usually that’s a movie about a guy that died already.”

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Death was understandably on Maron’s mind: The majority of “Are We Good?” focuses on how he’s processed his grief after his girlfriend, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, died suddenly of an undiagnosed blood disease in May 2020. Picking up a year later, Feinartz shadows an often irascible Maron as he attempts to piece together a stand-up routine about Shelton’s death, leading up to his acclaimed 2023 HBO special “From Bleak to Dark” (which Feinartz also directed).

Maron could be a reluctant subject, at times berating Feinartz off camera for relentlessly filming him over multiple years. Mostly, though, he is as candid and self-revealing in “Are We Good?” as he is on “WTF” — a quality on ample display during the Q&A. 

A woman in the audience who Maron introduced by saying she “knew Lynn” asked him, “What are things about the way Lynn led her life that continue to inspire you?”

“I’ll tell you a story that happened recently,” Maron said. “I don’t know if I can get through it without crying.” 

Last fall, Maron said, he shot a film called “Memoriam” in which he plays an actor with a long, somewhat lackluster career who, after getting diagnosed with stage four colon cancer, becomes obsessed with getting into the Oscars In Memoriam montage. Sharon Stone plays Maron’s ex-wife, a far more famous and successful actor, and in their one big scene together, both characters wind up breaking down crying.

“Now, I’m not confident actor, and I’m dealing with Sharon Stone,” Maron said. “I get to set, and she’s full Norma Desmond. I mean, it’s in a mansion. She’s got a turban on. And I walk on the set, I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck, this is real.’ We do two takes, and I feel like she just handed me my ass. I go into my trailer doing like Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck is happening? I can’t fucking do this!’”

Once he could pull himself together, Maron shared his anxiety with Stone, telling her that he’d probably need to use the menthol sticks that induce tears.

“She goes, ‘Whatever you’ve got to do. But I know what makes you cry.’ I said, ‘What, you’re talking about Lynn?’ And Sharon Stone says, ‘Yeah. Look, you just do the scene to Lynn, and I’ll make sure she’s here.’”

As the audience audibly sighed, Maron said, “Right?!”

It wasn’t thinking about the loss of Shelton, however, that Maron said ultimately helped him with the scene. 

“What got me there was that, you know, Lynn always — she believed in me,” he continued, welling up with tears. “The idea that she would get so much joy and excitement out of whatever I was doing — that made me cry with Sharon Stone.”

In a more lighthearted exchange, when one man began his question by noting that he’d seen Maron do stand-up in a tiny club in Austin in 2011, the comedian immediately jumped in with a vivid recollection of that specific gig. One of the few people in the audience that night, Maron said, was Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, who then hired Maron on the spot to play a soccer coach in a Sprint commercial she was directing the next day. When Kopple enlisted Maron to help her induce a range of emotional responses from the kids in the ad, Maron said to one of them, “Do you like ‘Harry Potter’? He dies in the next movie.”

“The crew wouldn’t even sit with me at lunch,” Maron said.

Eventually, he pivoted back to the audience member, who told him that Maron’s openness about his own grief helped the man process the death of his mother.

Maron smiled. “Well, you’re the guy I did it for.”