With her
severe pageboy bob and eye-shielding sunglasses, Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, has
attained near-mythical status in the both the publishing and fashion
industries. Dubbed “nuclear Wintour,” she’s widely thought to be the
inspiration for uber-bitch boss Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. But filmmaker R.J. Cutler wants us
to know there’s more to the fashion-mag mogul than pointy words and killer
instinct. With documentary The
September Issue — a
cinéma vérité chronicle of all the blood, sweat, and tulle that goes into
making Vogue’s largest, most luxury-crammed issue
of the year — he shows us a Wintour who also nurtures the career of a young
designer, idolizes her father, and suffers from the knowledge that her more
humanitarian-minded siblings dismiss her work as “amusing.” She shares the
spotlight in the film with her worthy adversary, creative director Grace
Coddington, a former model (and 21-year Vogue vet) who’s responsible for a hefty
chunk of the magazine’s most inspired photo shoots. The week of The September Issue’s French premiere, I chatted with
Cutler via phone.
I’d imagine this film will come as a surprise to people who
expect Anna to be Miranda Priestly. I’ve had a lot of different
opportunities to screen it, and a lot of fashion-industry professionals, people
who have worked with Anna, people who know her well, people who know her
personally, have said to me, “My goodness, you got her.” So many people at Vogue
have said, “I can’t believe they let you see it. You saw it.” And that is
deeply gratifying to me, obviously. There are two things you want to hear as a
filmmaker from your subjects: one is that it’s true, and the other is, “Now
that you’re gone, we miss you.” Those are the things you aspire to. And the
reason you want to be missed is you want this experience to have been something
that people have poured themselves fully into.
How hard was it to get Anna to participate on camera? The
one-on-one moments with her seemed revelatory, but they feel sort of sparingly
sprinkled throughout. Hmm. I accept that read of it, but that’s not
my experience. You know, we shot 320 hours over seven and a half months. We
were with Anna constantly, and what you see is what I’ve selected as part of
the narrative I’m telling. The story that resonated for me is the story between
Anna and Grace. Anna is in there exactly as much as I wanted and needed for the
film.
There seems to be a very clear contrasting dynamic between
Anna’s and Grace’s approach to things, as we see Grace’s artful, ’20s-inspired
photo shoot competing against the celebrity-focused Sienna Miller photo shoot
Anna commissioned. I would describe it as an apparent dichotomy.
Because the truth is that Grace has enormous business savvy and Anna has
enormous artistic sensibility. And the real relationship is a symbiotic
relationship, even though they appear to be polar opposites. That’s part of the
beauty of it — that opposites attract, even need each other. And that’s what
you have here.
Do people find Anna mysterious partly because people find
the fashion industry itself so mysterious? Well, yeah, it’s a
specific industry. People are larger than life. There’s a great theatricality.
It’s very public. The stakes are very high. It’s something that people are
talking about. Anna herself has been so instrumental in the merger of fashion
and power and celebrity and global industry, so she’s part of it all. And part
of her influence and success derives from the fact that she is a bold-faced
name, and she’s got a thick skin, and she stands up for what she believes in.
There’s a mysteriousness to her, even as she has enormous influence over a lot
of people who play a prominent role in the fashion industry, and who themselves
are bold-faced names.
You’ve used the phrase “minister of fashion for the world”
as a way to describe Anna Wintour. Could you elaborate? Well, what
I’ve said about Anna is that she is the descendant of the minister of fashion
in the court of Louis XIV. When the finance minister persuaded Louis of the
importance of luxury being one of the great French exports to the world, it was
the minister of fashion who would make the decisions as to what that year’s
fashions would be — where the hemlines would be, et cetera. Anna is clearly the
direct descendant of this person, in terms of the role that she plays.
Anna was one of the first fashion editors to put celebrities
on her covers. Do you think she was seeing the writing on the wall, or do you
think she helped pave the way for our obsession with celebrity culture? Well,
the only answer to that question is “Yes.” [Laughs] There’s another question
that’s similar to that, which is, does the power derive from her position as
editor in chief of Vogue, this 118-year-old magazine, many of
whose editors have been enormously influential throughout the fashion industry
and business world? Or does it derive from who Anna is? And once again, the
answer is “Yes.” Is she sphinx-like because it increases the impact of who she
is, because she sits in the particular seat she sits in? Or is there a shyness
there that she’s turned into an asset that enables here to have a protective
position, as she sits in this position of power? Once again, I believe the
answer is “Yes.” … And it works in these films to live in the
contradictions and the multiple simultaneity of different truths. Whereas, in a
Hollywood film, your Miranda Priestly is just going to be your Miranda
Priestly. Maybe for a second, she’ll get a little vulnerable. But that’s a
certain kind of storytelling. This is a different kind of storytelling, where
the more complex, the richer the experience is. And the truer.
