Amy Poehler can’t recall the first time she saw “I Love Lucy” as a child. The series, which starred Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, just always seemed to exist, she says.

“It felt like the show was always on,” Poehler says. “I don’t know if I remember the first time I watched it, but I am sure it was watching other people watch it, like my mom and grandmother.

“What is so special about it 70 years later is that with good art – and I would count ‘I Love Lucy’ as an example of that – people keep revisiting it in different points of their life, and they feel different about it.

“When I was young, it was kind of on, and it was like what you watched almost mindlessly. Then as I got older, I started really noticing Lucille Ball’s performance.

“And then I started watching the technique and how they made it, how they shot it, and the ensemble and the writing,” Poehler says.

Over the last 20 years, Poehler became a TV star herself with long runs on “Saturday Night Live,” where she co-anchored Weekend Update, and then as Leslie Knope on the much-loved sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”

More recently, she’s moved into directing and producing feature films, but when she was approached to direct a documentary on Ball and Arnaz, well, that was an easy offer to accept, she says.

“Lucy and Desi” arrives on Prime Video on Friday, March 4, a film that takes a comprehensive look at the lives and love of Ball and Arnaz. (“Being The Ricardos,” the Oscar-nominated feature film with Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as Ball and Arnaz is also on the streaming service.)

“Now, for this project, I was watching in a completely different way,” Poehler says. “And I imagine I’ll continue to watch it in different ways.

“It’s just this interesting loop of how the show just keeps coming back in people’s lives, and you know, here it is again.”

Discovering the tapes

While she was excited about the idea of telling the story of Lucy and Desi, she didn’t take the job until she’d thought about what she might do with it.

“I really wanted to figure out the way to do it creatively,” she says. “I mean, they’re a very well-documented couple. There’s just a ton of stuff on them.

“Once I figured out that what I wanted to do was tell their story, Lucy and Desi’s love story, in a kind of three-act structure, where we use the show to bounce back and forth between that, then it started to make sense to me,” Poehler says.

What she didn’t want to do was fill the documentary with interviews with cultural historians and other experts telling viewers why Ball and Arnaz were iconic or trailblazing geniuses.

“It’s wonderful, and I love to hear about the accomplishments, but I don’t always feel a connection to the story,” Poehler says. “But I found Lucy and Desi’s story to be so interesting. Just the way they related to each other throughout the lengths of their lives.”

To keep that authenticity in the film, Poehler and the filmmakers focused their interviews on people who had intimate knowledge of Arnaz and Ball. Their daughter, Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, is a recurrent voice; the couple’s son, Desi Arnaz Jr., also contributes to the film.

Entertainers such as Carol Burnett and Bette Midler are interviewed on camera. Both were mentored and befriended by Ball as young performers.

The Spanish-American singer-guitarist Charo appears, too. Her former husband, the bandleader Xavier Cugat, was a mentor to Arnaz after he fled to the United States after the Cuban Revolution of 1933.

But perhaps most significant are the voices of Ball and Arnaz themselves, which are in the film thanks to the discovery of hours of reel-to-reel and cassette tapes they recorded separately decades ago. The tapes had mostly been forgotten until now.

“A few had been found, and then a few were discovered in a very cool cinematic way, in a box in a closet and locked away,” Poehler says. “Those tapes were important because I really wanted Lucy and Desi’s voice to be the main voice in the film.

“I really want to keep them alive that way.”

TV role models

Making the film underscored some things Poehler already knew about Ball and Arnaz, including the couple’s innovations in how TV shows are made even today.

“I think the way we shoot television on a stage is very similar to what they were doing,” she says. “The studio, the cameras, it’s pretty wild how much they created right away what we still adhere to X amount of years later.

“I think they’re a great example of great writing and a really strong ensemble who were really humming,” Poehler says. “In those seasons when they’re really on their game, it’s just like a beautifully produced play.”

And Ball, in particular, remains a role model for comic actors who have followed, Poehler says.

“The thing I learned the most was I would watch Lucy do these really big physical bits, playing them very grounded and real,” she says. “So just that reminder that you can kind of go anywhere if you have a character, an actor that’s keeping their feet on the ground.

“Watching her play, she’s a great example to show no matter how surreal, unreal the experience is, you can always find truth in it and a way to play it.”

Back to life

Coming to the project, Poehler says she had roughly the same amount of knowledge of Ball and Arnaz and “I Love Lucy” as any fan.

“I was not a historian in any way,” she says. “I knew broad strokes. And I think honestly, I didn’t know much about Desi once the show was over, or the last act of their lives.”

Most of what people know is based on the decade of the ’50s when the couple were on TV regularly, watched and adored by millions.

“It’s just a tiny slice of what was a really interesting long life,” Poehler says. “So I’d like to think the film is for people who know just about that, who don’t come in feeling they’re real experts on either Lucy or Desi.”

Poehler wanted to make Arnaz and Ball feel like real people again, and in the final scenes of the film, as it movingly portrays the final days before Arnaz died in 1986, it’s clear that Lucy and Desi never really stopped caring for each other.

“What I feel excited about ‘Lucy and Desi’ coming out and people getting to see is this connection that I felt watching them,” Poehler says.

“This very human connection to the bigger question of what makes a successful life? What does partnership look like? And who do you want at the end of your life?”

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