Filmmaker R.J. Cutler on Capturing Martha Stewart’s Rise for Netflix Docu: ‘Her Story Has So Much to Say About American Womanhood’
By Cynthia Littleton
November 9, 2024
There’s a wrestling match that runs through “Martha,” the Netflix documentary that paints a vivid portrait of Martha Stewart.
Veteran filmmaker R.J. Cutler spars, mostly gently, with the doyenne of domesticity during the one-on-one interview sessions that anchor the narrative. At times Stewart comes alive in the retelling of aspects of her life; at others she seems to be enjoying the questioning only a little more than she would a deposition.
With her eighty-something insouciance, Stewart gives off the vibe that she’s putting up with it all because she hopes to get her larger story told to a new generation, and to have her legacy reconsidered by the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers who made her a superstar.
“Martha” mines a wealth of archival material on its subject to great effect. The film also does a good job of putting into contemporary perspective Stewart’s achievements and her firsts as a female business leader. Stewart hasn’t been shy about criticizing parts of the documentary which Cutler addresses in the conversation below.
Cutler could hardly have picked a more opportune time to examine the rise and fall and rise again [following her 2004 conviction and imprisonment for insider trading] of a powerful American woman – a girl from Nutley, New Jersey, as Stewart explains in the film. Directed and produced by Cutler, “Martha” hails from Cutler’s This Machine Filmworks and is also produced by Jane Cha Cutler, Alina Cho and Trevor Smith.
You have amazing access to your subject. How did you connect with Stewart to get her cooperation?
Martha crashed a dinner that my wife, Jane Cha Cutler, and I were having with our friend, Alina Cho who’s also one of the producers on the film. And Alina called and said, Martha Stewart would like to come to dinner. And we said, sounds great — what a fourth! And Martha joined us, and she and I spent the night talking about her story and her childhood and her early career and her time as a model and her time on Wall Street and so many things that were so fascinating to me. It became clear that she was at a point in her life where she was ready to have her story told, which is such an important part of the process for me. … I remember saying to her that night that hers was a story of American womanhood, and it had so much to say about American womanhood. And so we began a conversation, and she invited us over to her offices for a delicious lunch one day. Soon enough, we decided to make a film together.
Is she a producer or your business partner in any way in the film?
No. We spoke that very first night about the importance of my having final cut. You spend a year shooting these films and doing research, and another year editing them, and another year sharing them with the world. You want everyone to take the film seriously. And the film is taken seriously if the director has final cut. Martha was not a producer in any way. And she was fully on board with that. We’re all familiar with the fact that she’s had things to say about [“Martha”] publicly.
Is there anything you want to say in response to Stewart’s critique and observations about the film (as outlined to the New York Times).
It was incredibly courageous for her to trust me to make the film. I think that there are parts of it that are harder for her to see than others. I’m not surprised. There are ups and there are downs, and Martha is somebody who focuses on the ups, and who can blame her? She’s a survivor, and she powers forward and I think that makes certain parts of the film difficult for her. But it’s no surprise to me that if Martha Stewart were making a film about Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart would make a different film than if I were making a film about Martha Stewart. …You know, I teased Martha about it. I’ve sent her a bunch of the of the reviews and the celebrations of her that have come from the critical community. I teased her that she’s the only one who’s really given us a bad review. ….And so I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage to trust someone to tell your story. Martha – she fully committed, not only to an interview, but also her vast archives. She might have ended the film differently, or made the film differently. So, bless her, she’s entitled to her critique.
What were some of the things that were most revelatory as you got into the research?
There were a number of things that were striking. One is what a visionary she was. Here is a person who understood that content is king, long before that phrase was ever coined. When synergy was something to resist in the corporate world, Martha understood that synergy was the future and that it had extraordinary opportunity when no one else really had [realized this]. Long before there were influencers. Martha understood the power of the personal brand and the connection to the consumer of the personal brand. When high-end quality for the home was accessible only to the wealthy, Martha understood that there was no reason that it shouldn’t be accessible to all. These are visionary. We take these things for granted now, but the truth is that they all were a part of the vision of Martha Stewart. So that’s No. 1.
No. 2 is that as she pursued these her vision, at every step, there was a guy or a gang of guys who were telling her that she was wrong and she was unwilling to hear that. She went to Conde Nast, where S.I. Newhouse said to her, ‘I’ll make your magazine as long as you call it Conde Nast Living.’ And she said, ‘No, no, it’s got to be Martha Stewart Living, because I’m the center of this brand.’ S.I. said, ‘Well, if you want to call it Martha Stewart Living, I’m afraid I can’t be in business with you.’ And she said, ‘See you later.’ Who does that? It’s not just her steely nerves, but an understanding of her own vision and just her conviction. She saw it with great clarity. And there’s so many other examples.
Was she as ready to tell her story as you’d hoped?
She is not prone to looking backwards. She’s prone to charging forward. But we found ways. I did a number of Zoom interviews with her where she and I just talked for hours at a time. And then I did five days of interviews with her, eight hours a day, with a lovely break for lunch that the crew greatly appreciated. … And when she did have difficulty going places like the divorce or with her time in prison, she provided this incredible archive: Her letters to her husband, her prison diaries, and she pointed us to footage that was shot by a crew in the weeks between her conviction and her sentencing.
In the first wave of her career in media, what made Martha Stewart connect in that cultural moment?
Martha saw that in a changing culture, the one thing we’re all going to want to hold on to is the importance of home, the importance of family, the importance of celebration, the importance of ritual, the joy of a well-cooked meal. And she saw that while the culture was still kind of fracturing.
How did it get to Netflix? Was it a commission from the start?
No, no. We worked on it for a little while, and then brought it to them.
The documentary features a range of other voices commenting on Stewart but none are seen on screen, only heard via audio. Why did you make that choice?
It’s a great example of the how the editorial process can lead to formal discovery that illuminates the meaning that you’re seeking. We’re always looking for alternatives to talking-head interviews, because I want the films to live as much in the right brain as possible. … As I was editing the film, I found these interviews weren’t telling me about Martha in the way that I wanted to. The content was, but not the form of having these talking heads on screen, so we pulled out the talking heads and all of a sudden, Martha as a center of the film leaped forward in a way that was very exciting.
