James Carville Isn’t Thrilled About Being Right: “I’ve Become the Guy I Used to Hate”

Matt Tyrnauer had a cut of his new film, Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, ready to go on the day of the first—and only—2024 debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump. The Where’s My Roy Cohn? director and VF alum decided to hold a test screening as “counter programming” to the cable-news spectacle, unveiling his witty portrait of longtime Democratic political strategist James Carville. Much of the movie’s contents had been captured over the previous months, including Carville’s steady outrage at Biden’s decision to stay in the race amid grim polling. The timing of this first screening was poetic: Its subject was bracing for an awful night.

“Then minutes into the screening, James texts me and says, ‘I’m taking two gummies and listening to country music,’” Tyrnauer says now, with Carville smirking beside him in a Colorado hotel suite. Tyrnauer didn’t have to Google what Carville meant, or turn on the debate for context. He’d spent enough time with the man to know: “I thought, I have to change the end of the film.”

He was right, of course. The debate, an unprecedented disaster for Democrats, led to Biden’s decision not to seek reelection, and to Vice President Kamala Harris stepping in to lead the Democratic ticket less than four months before Election Day. Carville wasn’t gloating, but his months of obsessive warnings and scoldings across TV newsreels, podcast feeds, and op-ed pages had made him something of a pariah in Democratic establishment circles, filled with peers who’d rather he keep his mouth shut. This extended even to friends of Tyrnauer during the making of the documentary.

“A lot of Matt’s Hollywood friends and a lot of my close friends said, ‘But there’s no process for this, it’s too late, you probably had a good point five months ago,” Carville says now. “I said, ‘Look, if you know you’re going toward almost certain disaster, fuck it. You’ve just got to roll the dice.’”

Immediately after the debate, Tyrnauer went back to the drawing board. “We scrapped it—and then there was a twilight period where we didn’t even know whether Biden was going to drop out, so we kept revising, revising, revising,” Tyrnauer says. But when Biden ended his campaign, Tyrnauer quickly saw a new, clear narrative arc: “There was a sense of existential angst and terror, and James was, in my opinion, a lone voice—and a very brave one at that. James never retreated, and I was able to capture that in the film.”

Now playing in select theaters, Carville is much more than a ticking-clock, vérité-style examination of 2024 election panic. Yet that frame provides a vibrant, intimate glimpse into one of our most colorful political figures. We watch Carville in his home, taking calls all day with dangling headphones from a favorite chair, chatting away in his delicious Louisiana drawl. We observe a relatively quiet—and emphasis on relatively here—version of his once-hyper-public marriage to Republican consultant Mary Matalin. And we follow Carville back to his eponymous Louisiana hometown.

“Our production van got stuck in the southern Louisiana mud, and James was the engineer of how to get the van unstuck,” Tyrnauer says. Carville laughs and nods at the image: “Yeah, we’re mud people.”

This longtime talking head lives and breathes politics, as moviegoers learned the last time he fronted a documentary: 1993’s Oscar-nominated The War Room, which followed his stewardship of Bill Clinton’s successful first campaign for president. That movie’s legacy still looms here. The events of Washington DC affect Carville emotionally, get his mind running, and seemingly determine the entirety of his social calendar. There’s no small talk in the Carville house. “He’s in a very exclusive club in my opinion—someone who stayed famous for three decades, consistently,” Tyrnauer says. “It’s very rare, if you think about it. Elizabeth Taylor is in that club, Cher. He never had a comeback; he just was arcing in fame.”

“I think Matt captured something about me,” Carville interjects. He refers specifically to how the film unpacks his upbringing, and the ways it informed both his empathic political philosophy and his bulldozing personality. “I didn’t know anybody that wasn’t marginalized, okay? But I never thought of it in that sense,” he says. “Now I’m just hearing these people lecturing about that, but they don’t even have any idea of what they’re talking about, or what other people’s lives are about.” Carville doesn’t shy away from its subject’s recent controversial statements—recall “too many preachy females”—but uses them to paint a fuller, more complex picture.