I chatted yesterday with Stephen K. Bannon, the filmmaker behind the new documentary about Sarah Palin’s rise in politics – The Undefeated. This movie will premiere in Pella, IA on Tuesday with Governor Palin in attendance. The Des Moines Register reports that the tickets are already gone.
He was originally approached to do the movie by SarahPAC, to film some YouTube commercials. He said he “doesn’t work for PACs, and he doesn’t film political commercials.” He said he had an idea to do an independent documentary that would chronicle “her rise from obscurity to her position of leadership in the country.” He said that he and Victory Film Group kept control of the economics and the creative control of the documentary, the only thing he wanted from Palin’s people was access and introductions to civil servants in Alaska.
He said he never interviewed Governor Palin for the documentary, and said if it had been a condition he probably wouldn’t have done the film. He said he wanted viewers to get caught up in the whirlwind of the time not her retrospection on the events. One of the things that he said Governor Palin liked about the movie after screening it in Arizona a few weeks ago was that “it didn’t have any fluff or any happy clappy moments about the family, it was pretty hard core.”
He said this movie shocks people because many people, even her supporters, really don’t know her record and people have come away mad about buying into the mainstream media perception of her. He said her record as Governor he argues could be favorably compared to other former governors in the race and with the early records of recent past Presidents.
When you come away from this film you come away and say, you may not agree with her politics. You may not like her personally, but you can not I think come away from this film and not think that she is at the same, sitting at the same table talking about leadership as with gentlemen like Governor Pawlenty and Governor Romney. In fact, I think there is a very powerful case made that if you take the last three Presidents of the United States, President Clinton in Arkansas, Governor Bush in Texas, and President Obama when he was a state senator in Illinois, and a Senator in Washington, a U.S. Senator that her record of accomplishments and achievements as an executive certainly compares very favorably, I think, certainly even better than those three gentlemen at the time they ran for the presidency.
You can listen to the whole interview here or in the player above.