Netflix announced in February it had canceled the planned docuseries on Prince, and now the director of the series is speaking out about the decision.
Ezra Edelman, who also directed O.J. Made in America, told the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast that Netflix’s decision to axe the series is “a joke.”
The cancellation followed a dispute with Prince’s estate over what they claimed were factual inaccuracies in the film, something Edelman disputes. In fact, he says while Netflix allowed the estate to check the facts of the film, “They came back with a 17-page document full of editorial issues — not factual issues. You think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate?”
As for the estate’s fight against the doc, Edelman said, “It’s a joke. I can’t get past this — the short-sightedness of a group of people whose interest is their own bottom line.”
“This is a gift — a nine-hour treatment about an artist that was, by the way, f***** brilliant,” he said. “Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. But you also have to confront his humanity.”
Edelman adds that the battle over the film was not about the truth, but about “who has control.”
“This [is] reflective of Prince himself, who was notoriously one of the most famous control freaks in the history of artists,” he said. “The irony being that Prince was somebody who fought for artistic freedom, who didn’t want to be held down by Warner Bros., who he believed was stifling sort of his output.”
“And now, in this case — by the way, I’m not Prince, but I worked really hard making something, and now my art’s being stifled and thrown away,” he added.
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