Martha Stewart has not been shy about her criticisms of R.J. Cutler’s new Netflix documentary about her, Martha. Stewart, who participated heavily in the doc, wasn’t crazy about the film’s music, for instance—she wanted rap, preferably from her friend Snoop Dogg, instead of the more classical score Cutler opted for—and seemed especially mad at the film’s ending, which she alleges makes her look like “a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden.” While she has had some good things to say about Cutler’s movie, especially its first half, which focuses on less-known aspects of her long career, she’s gone so far as to very publicly suggest she probably needs another documentary made about her, just to cover the full breadth of the Martha experience.
And while she’s been vocal all over the place (including in the New York Times), Stewart made this latest assertion from a real pop-culture pulpit, during a recent appearance on The Tonight Show. When asked about the film by Jimmy Fallon, Stewart begrudgingly noted that it’s “fine”, but added that “It left out a lot, so I’m going to talk to them about maybe doing version two. There’s a lot more to my life. I mean, you know, I’ve lived a long time and I just thought, you know, maybe we’ve left out some stuff.”
Cutler, who broke into the world of docs with his 1993 Oscar-nominee The War Room, has also opened up about the making of the film, albeit in a more diplomatic fashion that attempted to emphasize the fact that Stewart was his subject, not his co-director: “It wasn’t surprising to me that she would’ve made a different film that I made,” he’s said in interviews. “She gave me her feedback, and she was upset that I didn’t make the changes she wanted to make. But this is the process. It takes a tremendous amount of courage on her part to trust me, I respect that. In return, I share the film with her and have conversations with her about the film. If she has ideas that I think are good ideas and will help the film that I’m making, I’ll take a good idea from anybody.” (He also wasn’t budging on resisting her belief that the movie should have been scored by Dr. Dre, Snoop, or Fredwreck: “Martha felt the whole thing should be scored differently, but the score is extraordinary.”) Cutler hasn’t said anything about whether he, personally, would like another crack at Stewart’s life—his film feels pretty definitive about both her history, and her larger cultural impact—but even if he did, we doubt he’d end up ceding final cut (or even soundtrack control) to her a second time around.
English (US) ·