When we decided we were going to do something with Clinton, we weren’t the ones to decide. But I always kept the idea of wanting to do a film about a man becoming president. But I just wasn’t able to continue with it and then unfortunately he got shot, so that was the end of it. Pennebaker : I had started a film with Bobby Kennedy years before. Going back to the making of “The War Room,” your initial aim wasn’t to follow the people behind the campaign, but Clinton himself, correct? The idea that Obama is doing a small film with Davis Guggenheim, shows you how similar it is - people want to know about who the candidates are. People are going to vote from their heart and their gut, as much as with their minds.Īnd people are reaching out in the same way. So a lot of the mantras from the Clinton campaign are still the same now. People are still going to vote for “the economy, stupid,” and health care is still a huge issue. I think it gives a good counterpoint to how much elections have changed and how much they’re the same in many ways. Hegedus : Originally we thought we were going to put it out before the last election. What do you, yourselves, make of the timing? It’s hard to find people that really care about you and your film and just the history of it. They are, for me, one of the most prestigious DVD companies. Pennebaker: Well, they were already distributing “Monterey Pop” and had done a terrific job on it. It’s a given why The Criterion Collection approached you to release the film at this time. Nobody wanted to say anything before the elections happened. Hegedus: I thought we would follow people around the way we did in “The War Room,” but it just became impossible because the film was going to be put out right before the elections on the Sundance Channel. So it changed the whole method of being able to have a kind of close attachment to people. People didn’t like to be filmed when they were on their cell phones because they didn’t know who was going to call them. For instance, in the old days you could follow people around with a camera and they would laugh and talk to you. And then we thought about it a lot because all the people that were in it, we were now filming, but they were totally in a different kind of mode. Pennebaker: When we did the follow-up, we of course watched it a lot. We watch it every now and then, but I hadn’t watched it for a while until now. There were so many interesting opportunities with Clinton being re-elected, Monica Lewinsky and everything else that ties into it. Hegedus: We tried to put out a DVD of it in the late ’90s, but we didn’t have a lot of control over the distribution of it. You two supervised the stellar high-definition transfer The Criterion Collection did on “The War Room.” Did that process mark the first time you had seen the film in a while? A New Academy Museum Podcast Revels in Hollywood Casting Coups and Untapped Trivia
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