R.J. Cutler: Still 'Bullish' on Docs, Bring the 'Bank Robber Mentality'
The Emmy-winning director on what he learned from D.A. Pennebaker, and how he navigates big personalities like Martha, Wintour, Cheney & Eilish
All week, I've been having conversations with some of the smartest people I know in this industry to talk about the state of the business, including Lorenzo DiBonaventura and Colin Callender. These are people who have accomplished big things in their time and continue doing so, and who have, notably, built careers with longevity, and more importantly, have the ability to share their thoughts uncensored today.
My third maven is the Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler. Born in Great Neck, New York, Cutler began his career in the theater and on public radio before coming to documentary film. He started his doc journey alongside legendary documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, producing the pair’s seminal 1993 political doc The War Room. In the years since, Cutler has won acclaim for his frequent, no-holds-barred portraits of culture figures, including Anna Wintour (The September Issue), Vice President Dick Cheney (The World According to Dick Cheney), Billie Eilish (Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry), Elton John (Elton John: Never Too Late), and Martha Stewart (Martha). Showing no signs of slowing down, Cutler, 63, even found time last year to direct an Apple TV+ docuseries on the Los Angeles Dodgers’ victory over the New York Yankees in the World Series.
Perhaps that’s why Cutler sounds so positive about the documentary business in our conversation below, where he tells some pretty great tales about the inherent conflict between subject and director, and the tension that comes when having final cut while working with outsized personalities such as Stewart, Cheney, Carville and Wintour. The director explains why the genre has been able to withstand the ebbs of the industry, and the way aspiring filmmakers know they’re ready to become directors (and yes, that includes his advice on returning camera equipment to Amazon after 29 days).
Richard Rushfield: So how’s the documentary game today?
R.J. Cutler: I’m an optimist. I’m bullish. I’ve been a bullish optimist in the documentary business since 1992 with The War Room. But it’s always been a complicated business. Documentary filmmakers are outsiders to the entertainment industry, and we’re always coming at it from a side angle. The first day I met D.A. Pennebaker (known as “Penny” to friends), he said to me, ‘If you’re going to be a documentary filmmaker, you’ve got to have a bank robber’s mentality. You’ve got to travel light and always be ready to make a run for it,’ and that’s the case. It attracts and requires people who are incredibly industrious and crafty, not just as artists and storytellers, but also as businesspeople.
Do you think part of the problem in the early streaming era, people were cashing in, so they didn’t have to be bank robbers anymore? It became, for a while, much more of a factory, or a casino where the jackpots were constantly going off.
I do. If you have a 10-year perspective on the documentary business, you have one point of view. But if you have a 20- or 30-year perspective on the documentary business, you have a different point of view. In 1992, we were unable to sell The War Room. It was sold to October Films after many months of attempting to sell it for an extremely low figure, so low that I don’t want to say. Seventeen years later, we could not sell The September Issue at Sundance, despite screenings that sold out. I think we had nine screenings because the audience kept coming. We finally sold it to Roadside Attractions for the same amount we sold The War Room for.
Those films weren’t a slam dunk immediately?
To Roadside, it seemed like a slam dunk, but Roadside Attractions was one of those crafty, industrious distributors that didn’t have a lot of money to give you up front. They had to wait for the other people to pass, and those people did, and then they came in, and they saw the potential, and they got behind it in a big way. But, documentaries have always been risky, and that’s why I say, if you have a 30-year perspective on it, you remember a time when every film that went to market was taking a considerable risk. It required a certain amount of vision. In retrospect, it might seem like, ‘Who wouldn’t back the War Room, who wouldn’t back The September Issue?’ But none of the big distributors wanted them.
And you think of those as the moments when the theatrical documentary industry was relatively healthy.
It was robust. But it still required a certain amount of sturdiness. You knew you were in a risky place, and you hoped that you would also have a television sale that would back it up or something. But the business then grew. What we asserted in those days — that this is a popular art form with an audience, and we just have to reach it — was proven true by the streamers. I used to go to film festivals and run into Ted Sarandos when Netflix was a red envelope company, and Ted would say to me, ‘The War Room is one of the most popular films that we have. Our membership loves it. They love documentaries.’ So, it didn’t surprise me when Netflix started producing original programming that one of the first things they turned to was documentaries. And what do you know? Their membership loved it. During the bubble years, when programming was at its peak, not unlike premium scripted programming, premium documentary programming experienced a significant boom. Now we’re in the post-peak years, and like all other sectors of the entertainment industry, it’s challenging. But we know the audience is there. We know they respond to great work. We know there’s potential even in the theatrical space, even though there are bumps in the road. We see evidence with the films that attract audiences in theaters, but we also know that on streaming services, you can attract huge audiences to a movie like Martha. We’re told that between 30 and 40 million people watched that movie.
That’s got to be your lifetime theatrical audience combined times…
…Times multiples, yeah. But I mean, with that audience, what is called ‘the Netflix effect’ is real. But again, to people like me who’ve been believing in this notion that this is a popular art form, it’s not a surprise. Penny used to say, ‘If Robert Redford and Paul Newman can be movie stars, why can’t James Carville and George Stephanopoulos?’ The streaming services prove that thesis to be true.
I want to take a tour through the many branches of your career and talk about, like, what you learned from them. You started working in the theater, which is a unique path to the documentary world.
Well, I came to it honestly. I was a kid who grew up with two passions: