"The September Issue," a documentary on Anna Wintour and Vogue will premiere tomorrow night at the Sundance Festival. The film follows the Vogue editor and her team from January through August 2007 and focuses on the production of the September Vogue, which remains the largest magazine ever published. Director R.J. Cutler first approached Ms. Wintour at the end of 2005; yesterday, nearly three years after the first meeting, he was finishing the final sound mixing before the film's Friday premiere.
Mr. Cutler, who produced the 1993 Academy Award-nominated War Room, says that as in covering the world of political power brokers, he was interested in "one's relationship to one's work, the dynamic in the workplace and the connection to what you aspire to be when you were young and what you became."
The four-person crew shot over 300 hours of film in order to accurately capture contradictions innate to the fashion world. "It's a remarkable world, filled with great complexity," Mr. Cutler says. "It's glamorous and it's workaday. It's exhilarating and exhausting. You have to toil and work hard to accomplish what they accomplish but you're living on the top of the world."
The film features appearances from fashion's elite, including Andre Leon Talley, Grace Coddington, Thakoon Panichgul, Karl Lagerfeld, Vera Wang and Mario Testino. Mr. Cutler says he was not worried about authenticity, even though the fashion industry's job is the manipulation and control of image. "The pursuit that Anna and her team are involved in is far more important than the fact that we're making a movie," he says. "We're filming with them day in and day out for eight and a half months. The greatest actor in the world can't perform a character for eight and half months."
Ms. Wintour has been the subject of numerous rumors about her leaving her post, which Mr. Cutler says is addressed in the film: "There is a moment in the film where, what might lead to the end of her time at Vogue comes up and is addressed. I don't want to give away story points but it is something that she speaks to."
