‘Hillary’ Director Nanette Burstein Challenges Audiences to Rethink Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hillary Director and Executive Producer Nanette Burstein speaks with Awards Daily’s Jalal Haddad about her documentary of one of the most well-known and polarizing figures in American politics. 

Director and documentarian Nanette Burstein was challenged with the seemingly impossible task of tearing open the fresh wound of the 2016 election to revisit one of the most contentious periods of modern America, a period we are still living through and processing. How does someone take a story so fresh in all our minds and tell in a fresh, emotionally rewarding way?

Approaching Hillary, she first expanded the scope of the story and paired the election with over fifty years of Hillary Clinton’s life as a student, a young person in love, a lawyer, a wife, a First Lady, and as a Senator. She also widened the narrative to be about the women’s movement: how Hillary was affected by it and how she, in turn, affected it. Burstein was the first filmmaker given access to hundreds of hours of campaign footage, and most importantly, she was able to sit down with Hillary Clinton herself uninterrupted for seven days.

Nanette Burstein spoke with Awards Daily on what that process was like crafting a story that the American public already thinks they know so well. She also talks about convincing audiences to reexamine what they think they already know about one of the most polarizing figures of our time. She offered what it was like to interview Clinton herself and convince her to open up in a way we have never seen before. We also discussed how her experience with the docuseries shaped how she herself views politics and elections, especially as we end a primary season that began with a record number of female candidates.

Awards Daily: I’m curious on how Hillary, the docuseries, came to fruition? When did you decide you wanted to take a deeper look into Hillary Clinton’s life and why is now the right time to do that?

Nanette Burstein: The project came to fruition because, during the election, Hillary’s campaign filmed a lot of behind the scenes footage and afterwards one of the women who filmed all of it wanted the footage to be used in a documentary after the election. Hulu expressed interest, and that’s how I was brought in. I wanted to widen the story to make it about her life and incorporate thematically the women’s movement and her history in politics. Given that she is one of the most polarizing women in history, at least in modern history, I wanted to unpack that.

As far as timing, now more than ever we are a very polarized country. Converging all of those elements, there was an opportunity to understand her in a larger context.

AD: The film chronologically goes through fifty years of her life while constantly weaving in the footage from the 2016 election. How did you and your team decide on how you wanted to structure the story? Did that structure evolve throughout the filmmaking process?

NB: It did evolve dramatically. Early on when I was going through the hundreds of hours of footage, I came up with the idea of telling her whole life story. From the get go, I wanted the documentary to tell us who she was as a person because one of the accusations we’ve seen thrown at her so many times is that she is so guarded and that we have never gotten to know her.

One theme that kept popping up was that the past and present are always telling about each other. So I came up with a treatment and structure to merge the past and present. Within these two timelines we merged, it was also important that we told them chronologically.

AD: Good or bad, Hillary Clinton is someone that just about everyone in this country has a strong opinion on. From a storytelling standpoint how do you keep this story fresh when everyone already thinks they know everything?

NB: Well, first, I think it helps that no one had seen that footage. Second, the biggest complaint about Hillary Clinton is that some people feel like they don’t know who she is. They may have heard her story, but they’ve never been able to access her sitting down like this and talking about her instincts and her opinions. That keeps it fresh.

AD: As you were going through all of the archival footage was there anything that particularly surprised you?

NB: There were a lot of things. I knew a lot about her, but it was basically the Cliff’s notes version of her story. I didn’t realize how entwined she was with the women’s movement and how it affected her at the same time that she affected it. Then there were all of the smaller things and individual decisions that impacted her life like having to change her wardrobe, the sacrifices she made in Arkansas, and the intricacies of that love story. It made me think a lot about her life and those choices and how things would have gone differently.

Interviewing her and hearing her opinion on things was a really interesting experience. Until I spoke with her, I didn’t realize just how contentious of a battle she had over healthcare when she was the First Lady. Hearing that story made me realize just how dramatic it was. She was also very candid with me on what she felt some of her mistakes were throughout her career. I asked her what she thought her biggest one was and that answer surprised me. She said that she should have never been on the healthcare task force because it created too much noise. That was interesting to me because that was a moment in her life that is career-defining. A lot of people can’t be that introspective and honest.

AD: Was there any topic that you had a hard time getting her to open up about?

NB: I think she had a hard time talking about her marriage, particularly the infidelity. She knew I was going to ask about it, and she agreed to talk about it but she kept brushing it off to another day. It’s a hard experience to go through. She has written about it before, but it’s an entirely different thing to talk about it on camera. It’s so personal and she is such a private person.

AD: How many days total did you spend with her for the interview?

NB: Seven days total, about three or four hours a day.

AD: You also were also able to sit down with a lot of big and influential names from throughout Hillary’s life. There was only person that you didn’t sit down with even though she had a large presence throughout the footage, Hillary’s longtime staffer and friend Huma Abedin. Was she someone that you tried to speak with that was not interested in sitting down or was it a conscious decision?

NB: No, I did seek her out. She and I are actually still in touch, and she actually became a good friend. She is still Hillary’s right-hand person, but she has gone through her own trauma in front of the camera that we all witnessed. She didn’t want to live through that again.

AD: Story-wise, was there any topic that you found the most challenging in terms of storytelling or finding the right angle to approach?

NB: What was really challenging were the first couple years of the White House and her time as the First Lady. There were so many things that happened, so many scandals. It was complicated. There were a lot of discussions trying to figure out what to include and how much to include while being forthright. That took the most amount of time to craft.

AD: Is there a specific moment that you hear about the most from audiences?

NB: People will often come up to me with specific quotes like “She was never of her time…” and things like that. What I found the most interesting were the details that shocked people when they came up and spoke with me. A lot of people brought up the fact that there wasn’t a women’s restroom on the senate floor until the 90s. It wasn’t that long ago, and we didn’t have that many female representatives in our government. It’s shocking.

People were also surprised by how accessible she is in the documentary, how forthcoming she is. People were surprised by how open she is about her marriage both the love story and the scandal as. It shocked people how open Bill himself was in the documentary, how candid he was about his flaws. People also opened up to me about how painful it was to re-live election night and all of the emotions they went through.

AD: Did you find a lot of people were almost afraid to start the docuseries out of fears of reliving through that trauma again?

NB: Yes, absolutely. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to open it up and make it more than just about the election. I thought there was a bigger story to tell and I also didn’t want to make it too hard for people. It’s painful, I mean it’s still too painful for me. I think those wounds are still fresh for half of the country.

AD: Speaking of our current election, now that you’ve gone through the process of studying Hillary Clinton’s life and campaigns, what kind of influence did it have on the way you watch our current election? We began this primary season with a record number of female candidates. Did you notice any patterns from before from either the way they were perceived by the American public or the way they were covered by the media?

NB: Having studied this entire process, it revealed a lot of things, and one thing that stood out especially while watching now is the constant never-ending media analysis. Watching that unfold throughout this election was very telling about ourselves, especially about our own subconscious bias.

You can also see how things are changing. We began the primary with a record number of women running for the nomination, and as time moved ahead, it was down to two men. We also have Joe Biden promising to pick a female Vice President, and that in itself is something we’ve never seen. We’ve only ever had two female VP candidates before, neither of which made it to the White House.

When Elizabeth Warren dropped out, she was asked if gender was a factor in this election. She said, ‘That’s a trap question for every woman. If I said it was, they would say that I’m whining and if I said there wasn’t I’d be lying.’ Women candidates are expected to answer these questions all of the time, and they should not be the ones having to answer that. Hillary had to deal with that a lot. Until we actually have a woman in the White House, any woman running for office is going to be asked these questions. Once we get women in these positions of power, it will alter their way of thinking.

Until then it is a hurdle we have to overcome.

Hillary, the four part docuseries, is available to stream on Hulu.