Dick Cheney is going to appear in a new documentary about his career called “The World According to Dick Cheney” that will air at the Sundance Film Festival and then on Showtime. I sure hope this turns out to be fair to him as I’m a little worried that he’s being setup:
YAHOO NEWS – Director R.J. Cutler knows a few things about landing tough interviews, like prickly Vogue editor Anna Wintour and some of Bill Clinton’s campaign advisers. But nothing has compared to landing Dick Cheney, the former vice president and subject of Cutler’s new documentary premiering Friday at the Sundance Film Festival.
For more than nine months, Cutler–whose credits include “The War Room,” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign staff–pursued an interview with Cheney, who has never tried to conceal his disdain for the media. But early last year, well after Cutler had begun work on a documentary about Cheney’s 40-year political career, the ex-VP finally agreed to meet with Cutler to hear the director’s pitch about why he should participate in the movie.
“It took a lot of patience and calming of nerves because up until that point, we didn’t really know if we were going to even have a chance to make the movie we really wanted to make,” Cutler said in a telephone interview with Yahoo News.
Over lunch, Cheney pressed Cutler on whether he would have a chance to tell his side of the story or if it the film was just going to be a hit job featuring Cheney’s many critics. Cutler told the former VP that he wasn’t entering the process with any “pre-conceived notion or agenda”—in spite of the fact that Cheney has been considered one of the most polarizing political figures in recent memory.
“I just told him that I wanted to tell his story and that included making his voice as central in the film as anybody else’s,” Cutler recalled.
Not long after their two-hour meeting, Cheney agreed to cooperate with the project and ultimately sat down for four days and nearly 20 hours of interviews. Those interviews form the foundation of “The World According to Dick Cheney,” which is scheduled to air on Showtime in March after its debut at Sundance.
The nearly 2-hour film explores Cheney’s full biography, from his troubled youth— he was kicked out of Yale twice and arrested for drunk driving in his home state of Wyoming—to his rise as one of the most influential and controversial Republicans in Washington. The film includes interviews with Cheney, his wife Lynne, and a cadre of both critics and longtime allies of Cheney, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who first hired Cheney during a stint in the Nixon White House and worked closely with him in the Ford and Bush administrations.
There really is a lot more to read at the link about this film if you are interested, so click the link above to check it out.