Chrissie Hynde spent months talking into a microphone for a documentary about her own band. She has no intention of ever watching it.

That's what she told Steve Pond at TheWrap's studio during the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival, where "Pretenders" had its world premiere. The film, directed by Joss Crowley, traces the band's rise and its long, strange survival, built largely on Hynde's own voice and archival footage stitched around it.

"I haven't watched it, and I won't watch it," Hynde said. "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."

According to TheWrap, Hynde never particularly wanted a documentary made about her at all. What changed her mind, she said, was learning that someone else was already planning a film on the band. If her story was going to get told regardless, she figured she'd rather be the one telling it.

One motivation stands out in what she told TheWrap: getting James Honeyman-Scott his due. The band's early guitarist died of heart failure linked to cocaine use when he was 25, and Hynde said his name almost never comes up in conversations about great guitar players, despite the influence she says he had, not just on the Pretenders' sound but on guitarists well outside the band.

"He's never mentioned in any of those lineups of best guitar players and he's a huge influence," Hynde said. "That was maybe one of my motivating factors really for me. And I hope he is now."

Making the film around someone who didn't want to be filmed created its own problems. Crowley told TheWrap that Hynde made clear early on she wouldn't sit for a camera, so the crew pivoted to audio-only interviews and leaned hard on archival material instead, a task complicated by the fact that Hynde said she'd kept almost nothing from those years herself.

Two breaks changed the film's fortunes late in production, per Crowley's account to TheWrap. The team tracked down tapes shot while the original lineup was touring North America and managed to restore that footage. Separately, Crowley connected with Stan Tippins, the band's original tour manager, who eventually agreed, after what Crowley described as a good deal of persuasion, to open up decades of personal diaries he'd never mentioned before.

"That was a huge moment for me because it opened up a world from inside that I obviously wasn't part of," Crowley told TheWrap. "As a documentary maker, that was a gift from the documentary gods."

The film's TIFF lineup of talking heads reads like a rock history footnote come alive: Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Viv Albertine, Nick Lowe, Johnny Marr, all weighing in on a band whose frontwoman would rather not sit through the finished cut. No distribution date has been reported yet. For now, "Pretenders" exists as a festival premiere and a director's account of chasing down diaries nobody knew existed.