For Ballesteros, the SUV ride that morning was just another moment in a blur of constant travel and filming. In the years that followed, he continued to shadow Ye across continents \u2014 Asia, Europe, Africa and back \u2014 through hotels, private jets, studios, arenas, fashion shows and family fights, his camera always recording. By the time he finally stepped away in late 2022, he had amassed more than 3,000 hours of footage, now shaped into his debut film, \u201cIn Whose Name?,\u201d an independent documentary opening Sept. 19 on more than a thousand screens.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would film 15, 18 hours sometimes, and the rest of those hours I was in transit,\u201d says Ballesteros, now 26, seated at a corner table at the Chateau Marmont. Lanky and soft-spoken, he carries a mix of gravity and nerves \u2014 this being the first interview of his life \u2014 as he recalls six years shadowing one of the most famous men in the world. \u201cThere was so much lack of sleep that I wasn\u2019t always consciously thinking about what was going on. My wrist would be collapsing with the camera in my hand and I\u2019d have to jolt myself back. From the White House, we literally went straight to Uganda.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unlike most celebrity portraits, \u201cIn Whose Name?\u201d has no glossy packaging, no talking heads and, most unusually, no input from its subject. What emerges is an unvarnished chronicle: flashes of vision and vulnerability, spectacle and self-destruction, all captured through the lens of a young cameraman embedded in Ye\u2019s orbit. It drops viewers into a period when the rapper and fashion mogul pinballed between euphoric bursts of creativity and very public collapse \u2014 a stretch that cost him his marriage to Kim Kardashian, his billion-dollar corporate partnerships and much of his cultural standing.<\/p>\n
Once a cultural lodestar, Ye now occupies a far more polarizing place<\/a>: embraced by a loyal fringe, shunned by former collaborators and largely exiled from mainstream music and fashion. In February, he reignited global outrage by retracting a prior 2023 apology for his antisemitic remarks and launching into an hours-long tirade on social media \u2014 declaring he was a Nazi, professing his love for Adolf Hitler<\/a> and insisting, \u201cI\u2019m never apologizing for my Jewish comments.\u201d In May, he released a single titled \u201cHeil Hitler\u201d<\/a> on SoundCloud, complaining on X that the song had been \u201cbanned by all digital streaming platforms.\u201d Weeks later, he claimed on X that he was \u201cdone with antisemitism,\u201d writing, \u201cI love all people. God forgive me for the pain I\u2019ve caused.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s against that backdrop that \u201cIn Whose Name?\u201d arrives, but Ballesteros stresses he never set out to make a take-down. \u201cI didn\u2019t make this to tell a story of descent or unraveling,\u201d he says. \u201cI made it to tell a beautiful, deep story of an American figure. We live in such a headline-based society, so I believe this is the body text underneath those headlines. I\u2019m not trying to persuade anyone. I want it to be like a Rorschach test.\u201d<\/p>\n Ye has no creative or financial stake in the film. Ballesteros, never on his subject\u2019s payroll, retained ownership of the footage \u2014 a remarkable fact given how fiercely Ye has fought to control his own image. Yet Ye has tacitly given it his blessing: After watching the finished cut, he texted Ballesteros, \u201cThat doc was very deep. It was like being dead and looking back on my life.\u201d (Representatives for West did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)<\/p>\n \u201cI was there as a journalist, documenting,\u201d Ballesteros says. \u201cIt never really broke the fourth wall for me. I had a profound sense of empathy and he was always polite to me \u2014 even a kind of mentor, at least creatively.\u201d<\/p>\n (Jason Armond \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Ballesteros grew up in Orange County with a camera almost always in his hand, less out of Hollywood ambitions than a way of making sense of the world. A lower-middle-class child of divorce, he earned a spot at 13 in the film program at the Orange County School of the Arts, a public charter school in Santa Ana for artistically inclined students. By then, he was already treating filming like a daily practice. A documentary class in high school proved transformative. \u201cThat class was life-changing for me,\u201d he says, his conversation dotted with references that range from Andrei Tarkovsky and Hunter S. Thompson to Vice videos and YouTube creators. \u201cIt pulled me into storytelling rooted in reality. I fell in love with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Restless and curious, with the brazen drive of youth, he began chasing subjects wherever he could \u2014 cold-emailing Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, working with a South African artist connected to Nelson Mandela\u2019s fight for freedom, taking the train to Los Angeles at age 15 to hunt for material. As Ballesteros\u2019 attention shifted toward fashion, hip-hop and the codes of youth culture, a 2016 screening of West\u2019s \u201cLife of Pablo\u201d<\/a> event at Madison Square Garden \u2014 part listening party, part runway show, live-streamed to theaters worldwide \u2014 hit him like a revelation. <\/p>\n \u201cIt was a calling,\u201d he says. \u201cI was like, \u2018This is the world I want to go into and make a documentary on.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n From there, he embedded himself in the fashion and music worlds Ye drew from, directing music videos and shooting for brands like Off-White until, when Ye\u2019s longtime documentarian left, he was a natural fit to step in. At first he was just another body behind a camera, shooting the occasional event. But soon he was invited into Ye\u2019s day-to-day orbit, following him into offices, studios and beyond.<\/p>\n \u201cI viewed it as a \u2018Charlie and the Chocolate Factory\u2019 moment \u2014 I got the golden ticket,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was like stepping into Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory. It was an education: Let me see how he talks to [director] Spike Jonze, how creative ideas actually come to life.\u201d That curiosity, he believes, was what West picked up on. \u201cHe told me, \u2018When you film, you\u2019re not just documenting, you\u2019re also understanding what it could be.\u2019 That\u2019s when we started to talk.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n