JACK OSBOURNE Discusses 'God Bless Ozzy Osbourne' Documentary In THE NEW YORK TIMES Interview

Ozzy Osbourne's son, Jack Osbourne, spoke to The New York Times about "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne", a feature-length documentary about the life of his father. ("God Bless Ozzy Osbourne" was Jack's idea, and he is one of the film's producers.) A couple of excerpts from the chat follow.

The New York Times: Your family and your father were fairly ubiquitous while "The Osbournes" was on television. Why make a documentary about him now?

Jack: I wanted to come back and, essentially, set the record straight. Since the reality show, Dad had got sober, and he's become a totally different person. I just saw it as an opportunity to show people who he really was. Not so much to make a movie about Ozzy, but more a movie about John.

The New York Times: At one point we hear Ozzy and Sharon tell their sides of a fight in which Ozzy very nearly killed her. Are you ever able to fully disconnect from the fact that those are your parents up on the screen telling this story?

Jack: It's weird, because I felt I was coming at it from a producer's point of view. When we were working on the project, I stopped calling my parents Mom and Dad. They were Sharon and Ozzy at that point. I almost felt like a spy for a little bit. I'd grown up knowing that story, and they never tried to hide it from us when were kids. That's not what I found hard. The Randy Rhoads stuff really chokes me up, just from the footage of Randy — it's one of the only interviews in existence where Randy is on camera. He's such an amazingly humble musician. His talents were just completely out of this world, and he got taken from us too quickly. It's gut-wrenching.

The New York Times: The portion of the film that deals with Randy Rhoads's death is told largely through archival footage. Were you unable to get your dad to talk about that?

Jack: I had some really good stuff with him. A couple times I took the camera and I would shoot it, me and him. And it was the one time that for some reasons our cameras completely flubbed up. It was amazing, the conversation we had was really powerful and deep, and we could never replicate it. That's when we found that footage from shortly after the accident. It must have been a year after the accident, and you can still see it's very fresh in my dad's eyes.

The New York Times: I think what shocked me most of all was the footage in which Ozzy disavows "Never Say Die". That's my favorite BLACK SABBATH album.

Jack: That's the only thing he asked me to take out of the film. I'm like, "You get away with it because you did that interview in 1982." He doesn't hate "Never Say Die". It was just back then, it was a year or two after he got fired out of SABBATH, so he's probably still pretty raw. I think it's probably better than "Just Say Ozzy". I mean, let's be real.

Read the entire interview from The New York Times.