Filmmaker R.J. Cutler said Martha Stewart expressed her unhappiness with his documentary Martha directly to him but he refused to change it despite her stating that they had a “collaboration contract” and calling the film “lazy.”
On the latest episode of Matt Belloni’s The Town podcast, Cutler sat down to discuss the “blowback” from Stewart’s disparaging comments about the film, and said of the so-called collaboration clause, “I’d never heard that legal term of art before.”
“Guess what? Martha saw the film and she told me what she thought about it,” he said. “It wasn’t surprising to me that she would have made a different film than I made. Of course. She gave me her feedback and she was upset that I didn’t make the changes that she wanted to make—but this is the process.”
Prior to Martha’s October release, during an on-stage conversation with the Daily Beast’s Chief Creative and Content Officer Joanna Coles, Stewart said, “[The film’s second half] is more about my stupid trial, which was so unfair.” She went on to call out what she saw as “laziness” in the film on Cutler’s part, and criticized the director for not “collaborating” with her more on the film.
“You shouldn’t have a final edit, you should have a cooperative edit,” Stewart said, adding that when she expressed that she wasn’t fond of the documentary’s second half, Cutler “refused to change anything.”
Cutler, who also collaborated with Billie Eilish for the documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry and with Elton John’s husband David Furnish for Elton John: Never Too Late, said he always has the final cut, or final say on his films’ finished product.
“The subjectivity of being Martha Stewart in this situation, the vulnerability that you’re in, has to be responded to with empathy and support,” Cutler said in response to Stewart’s comments. But “it doesn’t mean it has to be responded to with changes to the film.”
“Martha understood that there was a process, and we engaged in that process,” he continued. “Martha would have liked me to have a different response to that process but I didn’t have a different response,” he said, acknowledging that he would 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, believe me.”
One idea from Stewart that Cutler didn’t love was that she wanted the whole film scored with rap music. “I didn’t,” he said. “Martha felt the whole thing should be scored differently, [but] the score is extraordinary.”
The disagreement between the pair doesn’t seem to have ruined their personal relationship too much, as Stewart and Cutler promoted the film together despite her public comments. She’d previously said cheekily that their time at Telluride to screen the film was “good.”
But Cutler revealed that he’s not excluded from the notoriously icy mogul’s cutthroat attitude. “I will tell you that Martha expressed herself fully to me in her text messages,” he said. “She called me once and said there was something she needed a favor for—and I said ‘Of course, Martha, I’d be happy to do it, but you need to be nice to me.’ And she said, ‘Oh never mind, I’ll ask someone else,’ and hung up the phone.”
