So exciting, I can’t wait to see this one! I have 5 double passes to see The September Issue (released on 20 August 2009) a funny, intimate and surprising look at Anna Wintour and her team as they create the September issue, the most important issue for the year. To go into the draw email me by Thursday 20 August 9pm,  (info@melbournefashionista.com.au) with the heading ‘The September Issue’ with your name and address (you must be a subscriber too - so join on up).

 

The 2007 issue of Vogue was and remains the biggest ever, weighing over four pounds, selling thirteen million copies, and impacting the $300-billion global fashion industry more than any other single publication. At the eye of this annual fashion hurricane is the two-decade relationship between Wintour and Grace Coddington, incomparable Creative Director and fashion genius. They are perfectly matched for the age-old conflict between creator and curator. Through them, we see close-up the delicate creative chemistry it takes to remain at the top of the ever-changing fashion field.

Click on more to read an interview with the Director (sent to me by the distributor).

 

AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR/PRODUCER R.J. CUTLER

What was your inspiration for the film?

I first thought about doing a project about Anna Wintour and Vogue when I read an article in New Yorkabout the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Ball, the annual fundraising gala that Anna Magazine oversees. It created such a fascinating portrait that I couldn’t help but be compelled. I knew who Anna was, of course, that she was a formidable and controversial figure in the fashion world, but I didn’t know much more about her than that. I’m always looking for subjects who care a tremendous amount about what they’re doing and are doing it as well as they possibly can under high stakes circumstances. Certainly this was the case with Anna Wintour.

So I called Vogue and went to New York and I had a couple of meetings with Patrick O’Connell, Anna’s Director of Communications. Nothing quite panned out, but I had a sense that eventually something would. Sure enough, a few weeks later the phone rang and Patrick said Anna has an idea, can you come out here the day after tomorrow? It was like being summoned to see the Queen. I like to joke that I was able to convince her to do this film by making her think that it was her idea, but the truth is that focusing on the September issue as a structure was indeed her suggestion. She said it was something she had always thought would make a great subject for a film. We talked about my approach, the fact that we don’t come in with an agenda or a thesis, instead our process is observational. She got it and we agreed to work together. When I said that I would have to have final cut, she said, “My father was a journalist, I’m a journalist, I totally understand.” I was glad that she got it, that she knew I would have to have final cut, but I was also struck by the fact that she spoke so openly about her father. I thought there’s definitely something here, and I suspected that if I followed that thread it would lead me to a rich place.

Once Anna and I had agreed to work together, it still took another year to get all of our ducks in a row. We had to negotiate a contract with Conde Nast Publishing-it was highly unusual for them to have a camera crew present for almost nine months. And about that time, our good friends from A&E IndieFilms took the risk and came on board and agreed to finance the film and serve as executive producers. Needless to say, that was the critical piece to making everything work.

What was the biggest challenge? How did you get them to commit?

Every film that you make is going to have its own specific world with its own unique set of challenges, and the world of Vogue was no exception. Sometimes the challenges are obvious. Like when you’re making a film about people who are really fashion conscious and are wearing expensive, delicate clothes, you can’t put lavs and transmitters on them all day long. You’re going to need to record everything with a boom, and you’re going to need an awesome Sound Recordist, which is why we brought Eddie O’Connor on board.

Sometimes you’re faced with a challenge that’s made even more difficult by the fact that first you have to figure out what it is before you can set about overcoming it. At Vogue, for instance, we were filming a group of people who had been working together for years, in some cases for decades. They worked together with a fluidity that was almost deceptive. They communicated with nods and glances, not with grand pronouncements. When we first started filming there, we were stymied. When did that decision get made? How do you know that story’s happening? Who cut that photo spread? It was baffling. But then we realized that the creative process at Vogue is in the gestures, the glances, the conversations that last five seconds. It’s not that they sit down and they say okay now we will be creative and discuss what we’re going to do. Once we realized that, our jobs became much easier. We knew what we were filming.

But the biggest challenge that we faced in making The September Issue was the fact that people in the fashion world are very suspicious of cameras. They’re used to a camera being the enemy, something that is prying and looking to catch you in a compromising position, something that’s judging you. And of course our presence is the opposite of that, our cameras are there not to judge but to observe. Convincing the people who worked there that we weren’t like other people with cameras was a huge challenge.

Ironically the person we had the greatest amount of difficulty with at the beginning of the process was Grace Coddington. As you know from seeing the film, she ended up playing a very pivotal role in the movie, but Grace’s mistrust of anyone with a camera is sort of fundamental to who she is. And she didn’t waste a second making that clear. The first time we encountered Grace she said, “Get away from me.” The next time I saw her, we were at the Chanel show in Paris and she said, “Anna isn’t even here, why do you even have to come around?” She was not happy at all. Later that day, André Leon Talley said to me, “What did you do to Grace?” 

Eventually we were able to win over Grace and the entire team at Vogue. Which brings us from the specific challenges of this project to the fundamental challenge you face on every film: Earning the trust of your subjects. And the way you do that is by being who you say you are. You’re fortunate to be invited into a world, in this case the world of Vogue, but you have to remember that it’s their world not yours. And you must believe fundamentally that the story belongs not to you but to the subjects, and that they are sharing it with you. Philosophically, you believe that this is a collaboration, and that informs everything you do. And if you are truly there to see things as clearly as possible, rather than to satisfy an agenda of your own, and you act in accordance with these fundamental beliefs, then your subjects will come to recognize that in you and you will have earned their trust.

How many hours did you shoot? What was the challenge of editing?

We shot over 300 hours on the film. That’s a lot of footage. We filmed for 8 months. The footage all had to be screened, chronicled and documented. And then we had to figure out our story. When people ask about the process of discovering story, whether it’s in production or post-production, I like to tell the story of this interview I saw with the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky when he was at the height of his powers. He had won a bunch of Stanley Cups in a row, he was the greatest scorer in NHL history, there appeared to be no end to what he could do. And the interviewer said, “Tell us Great One, how do you do it?” And Gretzky said, “Oh it’s quite simple. I just follow the puck.” And I remember thinking, “Of course Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player the Earth has ever seen– everyone else in the rink is slapping at the puck with their hockey sticks, trying to get it to do what they want it to do. Gretzky is following the puck and going where it wants to go.”

And that’s what the process of making these films is. It’s a process of learning to follow the puck. You can’t make the puck go where you want it to go, because you’ll never be able to make your film. You have to follow the puck and let it lead you. And the puck, of course, is the story. So when we’re in the field, we can’t go in there and say, I’m here to prove Anna Wintour is this, I’m going to show she’s that. You have to go in asking, “Who is she? Who are the people around her? What’s it like to work here?” You go in with that question mark, you go in with that curiosity. And you discover Anna and you discover Grace and you discover relationships and you discover history and you discover themes. And you discover the story. You find all of that, you don’t know it when you show up. You follow it moment to moment while you’re shooting and then you get into the editing room and you discover it all over again. You look at all of the footage that you shot, you watch it over and over again, and it reveals itself to you. And you try to see it as clearly as possible, even though you’ve been watching it over and over again for weeks and months. God bless Azin Samari, our editor. She has this remarkable gift of being able to see things with absolute clarity no matter how many times she’s seen it before. And she has a poet’s instinct for combining different moments to create a deeper truth. And, believe me, that’s really hard. It’s hard to be able to see things as clearly as possible. And that’s the challenge. Sure, there are concrete challenges, you know, can we put the Met Ball in? How do you get through all the fashion shows in the beginning? How much Andre do we put in the story? How much Thakoon? How do you establish who these people are? How much history do you put in? What’s the ratio of interview to verite? What kind of music do you use? Certainly those were concrete challenges. But anyone who edits verite films has the challenge finding the story, the challenge of following the puck, and for us that was the greatest challenge as well.

What is your favorite scene?

I love being in the Vogue office, being in the hallways, in the meetings, the moments in Anna’s office, I love all that. I’m a big verite fan. And of course, I love the scenes with Andre Leon Talley. And I love the way the film breaks the fourth wall, especially towards the end of the movie. I’m also a huge fan of the way Bob Richman shot this film, the combination of intimate verite with those beautiful vistas of New York and Paris and the world of fashion. But I think probably the material I respond to most emotionally are the scenes that involve Anna confronting her family relationships. The scenes with her daughter Bee; the scenes where she’s talking about her dad and her relationship with him; the footage that we see of Anna as a younger woman. And most of all the sequence towards the end of the film, where Anna is reflecting on her relationship with her siblings and we see her at home with Bee, and we see her as one of the things she is in addition to an awesome, fearsome, Editor-in-Chief: a single working mom. Then we see her frustrated with her work, unhappy with the way the issue is going, contemplating the end of her career. In that one sequence, I think, we see a connection between work and family and history and her place in the world; we see her as a powerful business woman, as a sister and as a mom, and for me it all really comes together. 

What were you most surprised about?

I didn’t realize just how prominent Anna Wintour’s position in the fashion industry was and the more I got to observe it, the more surprising I found it. You know, you can make a hit movie without Steven Spielberg’s blessing, and you can publish best-selling software without Bill Gates’ blessing, but you can’t really be a be a successful fashion designer right now without Anna Wintour’s blessing. And remember this is a rapidly-growing 300-billion dollar global industry. Anna is such a singular figure, the way that every once in a long while individuals in various industries can be. And it’s remarkable and surprising when you realize the scope of her power and influence. And this phenomenon is only enhanced, I think, by the fact that she’s a woman in a very public industry where the knives are kept sharp. Who’s to say how much of it is Anna and how much of it is Vogue, but indeed she occupies a unique position.