Poehler doesn't believe Ball was looking for "glory and credit" as a woman making history in Hollywood. As a director, neither is she.
"The Director's Chair" is a series highlighting those at the helm of the biggest projects in TV and movies.
Perhaps the most powerful moment in "
During a 1965 tape-recorded interview with Ladies' Home Journal, journalist Betty Hannah Hoffman asks Ball whether she thinks her work onstage doing vaudeville with Arnaz is what caused her to miscarry one of her early pregnancies. Ball pauses for a moment before responding, "I don't know."
In an interview with Insider promoting the film, Poehler said the moment was "just so indicative of how people dealt with pain" at the time because "trauma" wasn't a term that was "spoken, said, or written."
"A lot of people during that era had a lot of experiences that shaped them without them knowing," she said, adding that she thought the question was probably "a very painful one to ask a woman" at the time.
Poehler said she felt "empathy" for Ball and Arnaz at that moment.
"They would both know that was part of the gig," she added of the invasion of privacy. "They certainly wouldn't consider themselves victims in any way."
In the same interview, featured in the documentary, Ball casually tells the story about how she learned she was pregnant because gossip columnist Walter Winchell had "a spy in the lab" and announced it on his radio show before even she knew about it.
It's as if she was used to learning intimate details about her own life through the radio. Her private information was divulged quite often on Winchell's show at the time. In 1953, for instance, he announced that Ball was a registered communist over the radio, which at the time could've jeopardized her entire career.
Poehler told Insider it was those instances that birthed one of her most important goals for the film — which was to "let Lucy and Desi speak" for themselves. She was able to do so with the help of the couple's daughter,
Poehler said she wanted to depict the "very long dance" between Ball and Desi Arnaz, which lasted from the moment they met on set at RKO Radio Pictures in 1940 to Arnaz's death in 1986.
The couple had been divorced for many years by the time Arnaz was dying of lung cancer. But their daughter says in the film that her mother's last words to her father over the phone on November 30 — the 46th anniversary of their wedding and days before Arnaz died on December 2 — were, "I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you … I love you."
However long it was, Ball and Arnaz's dance together was often a struggle. As a woman and a Cuban immigrant, they were two minorities in show business blazing trails.
Poehler's film can't, and doesn't try to, hide that fact, but it depicts a beautiful dance nonetheless.
Ball didn't care about breaking glass ceilings
"I Love Lucy," which aired from 1951 to 1957 on CBS, was one of the first sitcoms filmed in front of a live studio audience. It made history in 1952 when it incorporated Ball's real-life pregnancy with her son, Desi Arnaz IV, into her character's storyline.
Behind the scenes, Ball next made history in 1962 when she bought her ex-husband's interest in Desilu Productions — the production company they founded in 1950 — and became the first female president of a Hollywood studio.
But it's stated very clearly in "Lucy and Desi" — and reiterated by her daughter in various interviews — that Ball would not have wanted credit for the ways in which she was breaking the glass ceiling as a woman in the television industry.
Poehler told Insider she felt like she'd "gotten to know" Ball throughout the process of making the film and learned that being given credit was not something that particularly "drove" the comedy icon.
"It wasn't what inspired her — that kind of glory and credit. It just wasn't what she was looking for in the journey of life," Poehler said of Ball.
Poehler says she feels lucky to learn from 'incredibly talented women,' including Ball
It became clear that the "Parks and Recreation" star had far more in common with Ball than the fact that they were both female comedians.
The "Mean Girls" alum founded her own production company, Paper Kite Productions. And she's directed four feature-length films, including "Lucy and Desi."
But Poehler was slow to point out the ways in which directing had been more difficult for her as a woman than it would've been for a man.
"Any new job brings you an incredible amount of learning," she said. "I don't know if it's necessarily gendered learning, but it's definitely learning of every kind. I've been very lucky to be able to work with incredibly talented women, to learn from them and learn with them."
No matter what work they're doing, Poehler said, women "all know the ways in which we have to learn to take up space and to ask for what we want."
She acknowledged that she found directing incredibly "stressful" much of the time because — like with 2019's "Wine Country" — there was constant pressure to fight the light, get the shot, and solve the latest production problem to pop up.
When she succeeded, she said, her sets were often filled with the "carbonated laughter" from "pulling it off" — and that's what drives her.
And that certainly sounds like something Ball could appreciate after all the work she put into bringing joy to America's living rooms, much as Poehler does today in front of and behind the camera.
Poehler's documentary depicts how Arnaz and Ball's 'long dance' of love lasted until death
In a clip from one of Ball's appearances on "The David Frost Show" in the 1970s, featured in "Lucy and Desi," Ball defines the word "love" not as a feeling that one's partner "can do no wrong" but a feeling that she "would do anything in the world" to make someone happy.
By this definition, "Lucy and Desi" proves Ball and Arnaz loved each other until they were parted by death — even though that meant letting each other go long before then.
"I Love Lucy" is the brainchild of Ball. When approached with the idea that her radio show, "My Favorite Husband," could be turned into a sitcom for television, she convinced CBS executives that her real-life husband, Arnaz, should play her on-screen love, too.
It was an attempt to make sure that she and Arnaz, a musician and war veteran, would get to spend time together while working after spending nearly a decade of their
The show's success directly led to the creation of Desilu Productions. But as Lucie Arnaz explains in an interview for "Lucy and Desi," as the company grew bigger, her parents grew apart. Desi Arnaz began working too much, drinking too much, and getting caught with too many other women by the tabloids. Ball became preoccupied with rehearsing.
"The only reason that 'I Love Lucy' exists is because they wanted to be together so they could have a family and make the marriage work," Lucie Arnaz says in the documentary. "So they made this show. Now, the rest of the universe has it, and they never got what they wanted."
That is one way to look at the bittersweet reality of Desi Arnaz and Ball's marriage.
Another truth is that the lovers never really ended their partnership thanks to the legacy of their shared production company — even when Arnaz formally stepped away from it.
Poehler told Insider Americans tended to believe that celebrities "just fall off a cliff" when they're not on TV anymore. So one of her goals for the film was to make people aware that the couple kept making TV history after they took their final bows as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo on "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," a series of one-hour specials that aired from 1957 to 1960 after "I Love Lucy" ended.
Desilu Productions went on to produce some of the most iconic TV shows outside the sitcom genre, including "Star Trek" and "Mission: Impossible."
While they wouldn't consider themselves historymakers, there's no denying that Arnaz and Ball were two remarkable people.
"They're two disruptors, outsiders, people who come in and not only take over the system, infiltrate the system, but become the system," Poehler said. "Their story's really romantic."
"Lucy and Desi" is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.