“Pretenders,” the new documentary centered on the iconic rock band led by Chrissie Hynde, is world premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. According to the TIFF program, the documentary directed by Joss Crowley “chronicles the emergence, prominence and evolution of one of music’s most singular icons” and features extensive interviews with Hynde and commentary from Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Viv Albertine, Nick Lowe and Johnny Marr, along with plenty of archival material.
And while Hynde’s interviews make up the backbone of “Pretenders,” she isn’t all that interested in watching the finished product.
“I haven’t watched it, and I won’t watch it. I’m not that keen on sitting around and not telling my story. I had to do it, just talking and talking and talking. I just got through it,” Hynde told Steve Pond at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
Hynde said she was never “keen” on doing a documentary, but that somebody else had already made a film on the band and Hynde figured that if other people are going to tell her story, she might as well tell it too.
“There’s aspects of the band that I wanted to bring back to the attention,” Hynde said.
One of those aspects was the involvement of James Honeyman-Scott, an early guitar player with the band (he died from heart failure relating to cocaine when he was just 25). “He’s never mentioned in any of those lineups of best guitar players and he’s a huge influence,” said Hynd. “That was maybe one of my motivating factors really for me. And I hope he is now. Anyone that’s played in the band since was influenced by him and they all said how important he is not just to the Pretenders sound, which clearly he was, but lots of guitarists in and outside of that band agreed.”
Crowley admitted that Hynde’s attitude towards the documentary made things trickier.
“The biggest challenge is that early on Chrissy made it clear she didn’t want to be filmed, which is a challenge in itself for a documentary maker. We decided that if we’re going to do that, we’re going to follow that setup and record audio only interviews. We’re going to need a lot of archive, but then at the same time, Chrissy had told me that she hasn’t kept anything, so it was going to be a lot of work and you don’t know what the yield’s going to be like of trying to find the archive,” Crowley admitted.
Still, there were some breakthroughs that happened late in the process of making the film that really helped.
“We found these really important tapes that were recorded when the band was together. The original band were together on tour in North America over a couple of weeks, and we were able to restore the footage,” said Crowley of footage you see throughout the film.
“And then another cam after meeting Stan Tippins, who was the band’s original tour manager, and when I went up to see him and I started to interview him, just as an audio interview, he started talking about his diaries, which I hadn’t heard about, and it took a quite a lot of persuasion and time with Stan for Stan to open up his diaries. When he did, that was a huge moment for me because it opened up a world from inside that I obviously wasn’t part of. As a documentary maker, that was a gift from the documentary gods.”
