Two years after the shocking victory of President Donald Trump and the devastating defeat of the first woman to come so far in the US Presidential Elections, Nanette Burstein met Hillary Clinton.
According to Deadline, Burstein was chosen to make a documentary for Hulu on Clinton based on behind-the-scenes footage shot by Clinton’s staff in 2016.
The four-part series titled Hillary premiered on Hulu in March. It has Clinton addressing everything from her role as a leading global feminist to her feelings after the loss to Trump. Padding the documentary are sections about Clinton’s role as Secretary of State under former President Barack Obama, her decades of experience with husband Bill Clinton, and her time in the US Senate.
“The people who followed me throughout the campaign were part of a small group of young videographers who were everywhere. They had total access. This project really started as a behind-the-scenes look at the 2016 campaign. That’s what I initially agreed to do because the campaign owned the footage. We had 2,000 hours sitting around. People said, “Well, there’ve been some really interesting retrospectives on campaigns. Since you have this footage, why don’t you look at doing that?” That’s what we originally decided to do. And that project itself then was run by Propagate. They decided to hire a director, and Nanette came out by far as their top choice,” Clinton told Deadline.
“It is such an amazing opportunity to show it. But I also felt that I didn’t want to just tell the story of the campaign, that that was limiting in scope and too soon, too raw. I just felt like, more than anything, there’s such a bigger story to tell if everyone agrees to it. So much of her life was both influenced by the arc of the women’s movement, and she influenced it. And never had I seen that more clearly in one personal story than in this. As a feminist and someone of the Generation X that was affected by the national spotlight of her career, this couldn’t have been a more important topic for me to take on. So it was exciting that she, when I explained the arc and the framework, was on board to be unfiltered and share her personal feelings about her entire life story,” Burstein added.
