Unmasking Anna Wintour: R.J. Cutler On His “September” Subject

by Peter Knegt (August 27, 2009)
Unmasking Anna Wintour: R.J. Cutler On His “September” Subject
Anna Wintour and R.J. Cutler at a screening of "The September Issue" at the Temple Theatre in Park City. Photo by Peter Knegt

“I had no relationship to this world before the film,” “The September Issue” director R.J. Cutler told indieWIRE earlier this week. “I’ll be honest with you. To me Vogue was a magazine that my Mom read when I was a kid that I just couldn’t find my way through. I couldn’t even find the table of contents. There were just too many damn ads in there. And it smelled funny because of all those perfume samplings. I read Sports Illustrated and National Lampoon. You went through a couple of ad pages and there was the table of contents and you were on your way. I could not understand Vogue for the life of me.”

Obviously, things have changed. Cutler is now in the midst of a six-week, worldwide promotional tour for “Issue,” a documentary chronicling Vogue editor Anna Wintour, her relationship with her colleague and “the world’s greatest stylist” Grace Coddington, and the creation of said issue of the magazine. The film opens in New York this Friday, and then rolls out in both North America and an impressive slew of territories around the world - each eager to have “Issue” debut in its titular month. Cutler took a moment out of his schedule to talk to indieWIRE about the film, which is coming off an extensive run in the festival circuit that began at the Sundance Film Festival back in January.

Cutler quickly made it clear that his childhood stance on Vogue and the industry it represents has changed.  “As I started to learn,” he said, “I started to get more and more curious, more and more excited, and more and more aware that this world is so central to so many things.  We all buy clothes. We all put on clothes in the morning. The choices we make when we put those clothes on has a great deal to say to the world about who we are. This industry is not only in and of itself a $300 billion global industry, but it drives other industries, from textiles to shipping to advertising to publishing… There’s so much that is driven by fashion.”
A scene from R.J. Cutler’s “The September Issue.” Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

And so much in fashion is driven by Anna Wintour.  Famous for her pageboy bob haircut and frequently-worn sunglasses, and infamous for her demanding, “ice-queen” reputation, Wintour has become a fashion icon in her own right. And while Cutler’s film doesn’t exactly refute that infamy, it certainly sheds light on the more hidden aspects of Wintour’s personality - most predominately the incomparable passion she exudes for her work, and the complexity of her long-standing - and in it’s own way, loving - relationship with Coddington.

“Anna is absolutely a unique figure in popular culture,” Cutler said.  “It’s certainly a great thing for the film that there’s so much excitement and curiosity about her. And then, people come to the movie and their curiosity is sated, but they also have this whole cinematic experience of watching a movie about Anna and Grace. To me, it’s a great buddy film and people are really, really responding to that. They come in hoping to see Anna at work, and learn about Anna, and see the glasses come off, as we have said. But what they get, in addition to all of that, is this very rich movie experience about the relationship between these two women.”

The origins of that experience came when Sadia Shepard, one of the film’s producers, sent Cutler an article she had read in New York magazine and said to him, “I wonder if Anna Wintour would be interesting to you as a subject.” Cutler read the article and certainly came to find Wintour quite fascinating, but didn’t think that meant he was going to make a movie about her.  And then he met her.

“She was many of the things that’d I heard, and not many of the things that I’d heard, and so many things I hadn’t even thought she would be,” he said. “And I was just very struck. She was clearly brilliant and focused, and knew her mind.  And the people around her were focused in a way that was really exciting. You could feel an intensity in the Vogue environment.”

The conversation Cutler had with Wintour that day, which he describes as about both the filmmaking process, and about the idea of structuring the film around the September issue, proved a productive and surprisingly undemanding beginning for the project.

-This story continues on page 2-

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posted on August 27, 2009
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