Martha Stewart has issued a damning review of her new documentary by filmmaker RJ Cutler, saying that it’s “shocking” how little of her archive he used despite having “total access.”
Out now on Netflix, Martha charts the 83-year-old lifestyle mogul’s “unstoppable rise, sudden fall and hard-won comeback” to become the original influencer.
Speaking to The New York Times in an interview published on Wednesday (October 30), the same day as the documentary’s release, Stewart shared her candid opinion of the film.
Taking aim at the film’s second half, she said: “Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden? Boy, I told him to get rid of those. And he refused. I hate those last scenes. Hate them.
“I had ruptured my Achilles’ tendon,” she explained. “I had to have this hideous operation. And so I was limping a little. But again, he doesn’t even mention why – that I can live through that and still work seven days a week.”
She also slammed the film’s “lousy” soundtrack. She claimed that she had originally told Cutler that “an essential part of the film is that you play rap music.”
Instead, she said, he got “some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”
While she spent much of the interview bashing the documentary, she clarified she doesn’t disapprove of it entirely.
“I love the first half of the documentary. It gets into things that many people don’t know anything about, which is what I like about it,” Stewart said.
“That’s what I wanted the documentary to be. It shouldn’t be me boasting about inner strength and any of that crap. It should be about showing that you can get through life and still be yourself.”
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Responding to Stewart’s critiques, Cutler told The New York Times: “It’s a movie, not a Wikipedia page. It’s the story of an incredibly interesting human being who is complicated and visionary and brilliant.
“I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it,” he added. “I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”
In a trailer for Martha released earlier this week, the cooking connoisseur revealed she “kissed a stranger at a cathedral” during her honeymoon in Florence, Italy with her ex-husband, Andrew.
“I met this very handsome guy,” Stewart recalled in the teaser. “He didn’t know I was married. I was this waif of a girl hanging out in the cathedral on Easter Eve. He was emotional. I was emotional. It’s just because it was an emotional place. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. An expansive dome. So beautiful and paintings all around you.”
Martha is available to stream on Netflix.