The black SUV rolls toward the White House, carrying Kanye West to a meeting with President Trump that’s already destined to become a media circus. In the backseat, wearing a red MAGA cap pulled low, West leans into his phone, words tumbling out in a torrent to Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner.
“I need to go in the exact way that a foreign dignitary would go,” he insists. “I’m not going to step outside and put my life in danger. I put my life in danger by wearing the hat and I need to be loved and respected as such. Because there could be someone out there that could be trying to take a shot at me. There’s people who potentially want to kill me for wearing this hat. If I get killed for wearing the hat in front of the White House, you’re not going to win any midterms.”
Beside him sits Nico Ballesteros, a teenager from Orange County, camera in hand, worn down by months of near-constant filming and fighting to keep his eyes open.
To the public, the October 2018 White House visit was a surreal collision of politics and celebrity. West — who once blasted George W. Bush for not caring about Black people, and who now goes by Ye — delivered a rambling, live-streamed 10-minute monologue that veered from hydrogen-powered planes to “male energy” to his own bipolar disorder, one that was instantly lampooned on late-night TV, parsed on cable news and dissected across social media.
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 — Asia, Europe, Africa and back — 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, “In Whose Name?,” an independent documentary opening Sept. 19 on more than a thousand screens.
“I would film 15, 18 hours sometimes, and the rest of those hours I was in transit,” 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 — this being the first interview of his life — as he recalls six years shadowing one of the most famous men in the world. “There was so much lack of sleep that I wasn’t always consciously thinking about what was going on. My wrist would be collapsing with the camera in my hand and I’d have to jolt myself back. From the White House, we literally went straight to Uganda.”
Unlike most celebrity portraits, “In Whose Name?” 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’s orbit. It drops viewers into a period when the rapper and fashion mogul pinballed between euphoric bursts of creativity and very public collapse — a stretch that cost him his marriage to Kim Kardashian, his billion-dollar corporate partnerships and much of his cultural standing.
Once a cultural lodestar, Ye now occupies a far more polarizing place: embraced by a loyal base, 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 — declaring he was a Nazi, professing his love for Adolf Hitler and insisting, “I’m never apologizing for my Jewish comments.” In May, he released a single titled “Heil Hitler” on SoundCloud, complaining on X that the song had been “banned by all digital streaming platforms.” Weeks later, he claimed on X that he was “done with antisemitism,” writing, “I love all people. God forgive me for the pain I’ve caused.”
It’s against that backdrop that “In Whose Name?” arrives, but Ballesteros stresses he never set out to make a take-down. “I didn’t make this to tell a story of descent or unraveling,” he says. “I 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’m not trying to persuade anyone. I want it to be like a Rorschach test.”
Ye has no creative or financial stake in the film. Ballesteros, never on his subject’s payroll, retained ownership of the footage — 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, “That doc was very deep. It was like being dead and looking back on my life.” (Representatives for West did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
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. “That class was life-changing for me,” he says, his conversation dotted with references that range from Andrei Tarkovsky and Hunter S. Thompson to Vice videos and YouTube creators. “It pulled me into storytelling rooted in reality. I fell in love with it.”
Restless and curious, with the brazen drive of youth, he began chasing subjects wherever he could — cold-emailing Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, working with a South African artist connected to Nelson Mandela’s fight for freedom, taking the train to Los Angeles at age 15 to hunt for material. As Ballesteros’ attention shifted toward fashion, hip-hop and the codes of youth culture, a 2016 screening of West’s “Life of Pablo” event at Madison Square Garden — part listening party, part runway show, live-streamed to theaters worldwide — hit him like a revelation.
“It was a calling,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is the world I want to go into and make a documentary on.’”
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’s 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’s day-to-day orbit, following him into offices, studios and beyond.
“I viewed it as a ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ moment — I got the golden ticket,” he says. “It was like stepping into Andy Warhol’s Factory. It was an education: Let me see how he talks to [director] Spike Jonze, how creative ideas actually come to life.” That curiosity, he believes, was what West picked up on. “He told me, ‘When you film, you’re not just documenting, you’re also understanding what it could be.’ That’s when we started to talk.”
The stakes quickly became clear. When West was hospitalized in late 2016 for exhaustion and what was termed a “psychiatric emergency,” hours after canceling the remainder of his tour, Ballesteros sensed the gravity of what he was stepping into. “I was like, oh, this is much more deep,” he recalls.
It also raised an uncomfortable question for a first-time filmmaker: What are the ethics of turning such vulnerability into art or profiting from someone’s mental health struggles? From the outset, though, Ballesteros says West knew he intended to make a documentary and often framed it around his mental state. One of their earliest connections was a shared interest in Freud and Jung, giving Ballesteros the sense the film would always be as much a psychological excavation as a chronicle.
“When he was meeting with Pharrell, he said, ‘This documentary is about mental health,’” he recalls. “That was like the first week or so of me filming inside the office. So I was very aware of that being an element. I knew that was what I was signing up for.”
While the ultimate purpose of the footage was not entirely defined, West emphasized that everything was fair game. “One time he went to the dentist to get his teeth cleaned and I obviously didn’t go in — I was just in the car,” Ballesteros says. “His security came out to get me and I go in, and he’s like, ‘Hey, why’d you stop recording?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I thought you wanted privacy.’ He’s like, ‘No. Never stop recording unless I tell you to.’”
The occasional times West spoke directly about the film were often in shorthand, referencing movies like “The Aviator” and “There Will Be Blood,” portraits of men whose genius curdles into obsession and madness. It was a glimpse of how he seemed to frame his own story. Throughout, Ballesteros says, Ye pressed the need to “show all the sides of who we are, both the dark and the light.”
“In Whose Name?” does not flinch from the darker turns. Ye is seen proclaiming himself free after going off his medication, only to spiral into rants about conspiracies against him. He describes sleeping in a bulletproof vest, rails against associates that he fears are trying to emasculate him and lashes out with bursts of rage and paranoia that leave those around him — including then-wife Kardashian and her mother Kris Jenner — visibly shaken. Ye often returns to the language of “mind control” and slavery, convinced that doctors, corporations, even members of his circle are working to direct his life.
Along with quieter moments, like a reflective visit to his childhood home in Chicago, the camera also catches him repeatedly clashing with Kardashian over his behavior. “I’ve been crying all day — it’s just this bad dream that’s not ending,” she tells him in one scene after his White House visit. “I’m not about burning bridges with companies. You’re going to wake up one day and you’re going to have nothing.” He snaps back: “Never tell me I’m going wake up one day and have nothing. Never put that into the universe.” (Representatives for Kardashian did not respond to a request for comment.)
Alongside Ye’s bursts of creative and spiritual inspiration — from a sweeping plan to build an ecologically sustainable city in Wyoming to his gospel-infused Sunday Service performances that drew thousands — the film tracks the controversies that torched his career. The Paris runway show where he sent out models in “White Lives Matter” shirts. The late-night tweet promising to go “death con 3 on Jewish people.” The interviews that followed, laced with antisemitic tropes about Jewish control of media and money.
“I can literally say antisemitic s— and Adidas can’t drop me,” he is seen boasting. Not long after, Adidas did exactly that, erasing his billionaire status and much of his cultural clout.
By the fall of 2022, Ye’s empire was in tatters: Adidas cut ties, other corporate partners followed, CAA dropped him as a client and his marriage ended. The fallout is undeniable — and ongoing — but Ballesteros is careful to separate his film from West’s words and actions. “I don’t support antisemitism, obviously, or hate speech,” he says quietly but firmly. “He and I don’t share the same views…. We’re human. That’s really where I’m at. He’s a person — he’s a human.”
After stepping away from Ye’s world, Ballesteros was left with thousands of hours of footage and no clear plan for what to do with it. In Costa Rica in 2023, he tried to decompress while sifting through the mountain of material. Looking for a backer, the untested filmmaker turned to Simran A. Singh, a veteran music attorney who had shifted into producing, including the upcoming Netflix documentary “Selena y Los Dinos,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance and draws on never-before-seen footage from the late singer’s family archive.
At first, Singh was hesitant to get involved. Netflix had only recently released “Jeen-yuhs,” a sprawling three-part 2022 chronicle of West’s rise, and Ye’s recent public behavior made the prospect even harder to stomach. “Honestly, I was reluctant — another film about Ye?” Singh says. “Especially when he was saying a lot of antisemitic remarks. One of my partners is Jewish and I have a lot of close friends who are Jewish, and I would never want anyone to think I stood behind that.”
What changed his mind, Singh said, was seeing the material itself. “What I saw was raw, unfiltered access you almost never get with anyone of this stature,” he says. “And when I met Nico, I saw what it could be. I really believe he can be the next big director of his generation.”
Singh spoke with several distributors and platforms, but many were wary of potential backlash. That hesitation pushed him toward releasing the film independently. “In complete transparency, we’re self-distributing this under my banner,” he says. “I didn’t want to deal with corporate bureaucracy and editing that could lose the integrity of the film. We’re David versus Goliath here. My wife is an EP as well, and we’re extremely bullish. We believe it’s meant to be seen in community and to provoke conversation.”
The film’s title points to the bigger questions Ballesteros hopes it raises. With its religious overtones, “In Whose Name?” nods to the trappings of faith that often surrounded West but also asks something broader about authorship and accountability. “It’s posing the question: Who are we serving and why?” he says.
At the Chateau Marmont, Ballesteros blends into a corner table in a leather jacket, nursing an iced Americano, looking younger than his age and more reserved than one might expect from someone who spent six years shadowing Ye’s every move. For him, the film’s release is both an ending and a beginning. He’s developing documentary and narrative feature projects, though he’s keeping the details under wraps.
“I want to keep refining the pipeline for documentary filmmaking and keep innovating in the space,” he says. “But I also want to move into scripted work — films that deal with themes of power and maybe the American dream as a through line.”
For six years, Ballesteros lived within what he calls Ye’s “reality distortion field,” a world where access, attention, wealth and creativity bent the rules of ordinary life. Stepping back into his own world was bound to feel jarring.
“Seventy to ninety percent of my life throughout those years was with him,” he says. “When I wasn’t with him, it was disorienting. I just felt the weight shift when I was in that world versus out of that world.”
The dissonance lingers even now. Asked if he’s still a fan of Ye’s work — if he can separate the art from the artist after witnessing so much turmoil up close — Ballesteros pauses before choosing his words carefully. “I’m digesting that,” he says. “I’ve given so much to this project from a cultural lens, from a subject lens, I’m just not focused so much on his music. But I think he obviously is very talented, and the word ‘genius’ — I think we could definitely attribute that to the scope of some of his creative endeavors. Without a doubt.”
He stresses that, even at Ye’s lowest points, he never felt personally consumed by the chaos.
“I always felt like I was there as a journalist, documenting,” he says. “It never really broke the fourth wall for me. I had a profound sense of empathy but it was something that was separate from me. And he was always very polite to me — even like a mentor, in terms of creativity.”
Ballesteros has come to see the project through the lens of another cultural figure famous for bending reality to his will.
“Like Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots looking forward,” he says. “You can only connect them looking backward.”
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