Street: What led you to make a documentary about Vogue and Anna Wintour? Cutler: Anna is this extraordinary cultural figure. She’s somebody who everybody knows, but nobody knows anything about. And so I was intrigued.
Street: Anna has this reputation for being something of an Ice Queen who is very reluctant to open up about both her life and her magazine. How did you get her to talk so freely about herself? Cutler: It’s a process — […] the secret is in the approach. The approach is to earn your subject’s trust. They have to believe that your goal is to tell their story truthfully. And then they trust you with their story and they open up.
Street: Early in the film, Anna mentions that she believes people are frightened of fashion. And we see her daughter and her siblings both reject fashion as being frivolous or nonsubstantial. As the director of this film, what’s your take on that? Cutler: My observation is that there is a tendency to dismiss fashion in the way that Anna is talking about it, [...] as frivolous, excessive, indulgent and inane, which it is. But it is those things simultaneously with it being an essential. Fashion is something that everybody is involved in. Every one of us puts on clothes in the morning. And the clothes that we put on say something about who we are.
Street: You had the opportunity to shoot at Vogue when they released the largest magazine issue ever published. Now, two years later, they’re down about 300 pages and the industry has changed fundamentally. Do you think that the great change in the magazine industry will make audiences see this film as dated? Cutler: These films always function on two planes. There’s the movie and then there’s the place or world that the movie takes place in. For any movie. You see The Godfather — it’s a story about the family, but it’s a story about a family in a very particular period of time. This is a story about two women, but it’s also a story about two women in a very particular time... Street: Is there anything that ended up on the cutting room floor that you wish you could have included? Cutler: No. This is the director’s cut. I had complete creative control with my financiers as well as with Anna. Vogue and Conde Nast have no involvement in the film financially or editorially. You could have given me a million dollars and I would not have changed this film. This is the way I wanted it.
