Nanette Burstein is no stranger to the festival circuit and awards season. Burstein made her first major splash with On The Ropes, which she and Brett Morgen directed. The documentary won a Special Jury Prize at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, went on to receive a Best Documentary Oscar nomination, and garner a DGA Award.
As a solo director, Burstein has since built an accomplished body of work, including American Teen which won the Sundance award for documentary filmmaking in 2008. Also scoring much acclaim was Burstein’s four-part docuseries Hillary–a look at the life and work of Hillary Rodham Clinton, interweaving biographical chapters with never-before-seen footage from her 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Hillary debuted on Hulu and earned a primetime Emmy nomination in 2020 for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series.
Among Burstein’s other directing credits over the years are The Price of Gold, an ESPN 30 for 30 about infamous skater Tonya Harding, which won Best TV Documentary at the Cinema Eye Awards, and the Netflix documentary Killer Sally which tells the story of former U.S. Marine and bodybuilder Sally McNeil who was convicted of murdering her husband. Burstein has also directed primetime episodic TV work, including for such series as New Girl.
Now Burstein’s latest is generating buzz as the HBO Original documentary Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes made its world premiere at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, screened at the Tribeca Festival, and debuted last week on HBO. The documentary taps into candid, extensive interview sessions that Taylor had with journalist Richard Meryman in 1964. Drawing from 40 hours of the newly unearthed audio interviews and extraordinary access to personal photos, home movies, archival interviews, and news footage, illustrated with clips from the iconic roles that mirror her real-life challenges and triumphs, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes provides the most intimate portrait of the actress to date. The documentary deploys Taylor’s own voice to narrate her story, inviting viewers to rediscover a mega star from Hollywood’s Golden Age as well as gain insights into a complex woman–strong yet vulnerable–who dealt with fame, grappled with personal identity, and endured public scrutiny on a global stage since childhood.
Taylor discusses her film debut as a youngster in 1943’s Lassie Come Home, her struggle to free herself from the limitations of ingénue roles, her benchmark performances in A Place in the Sun, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8, for which she won her first Academy Award, and the excesses of shooting the troubled epic 1963 film Cleopatra. Taylor also speaks unguardedly about her marriages and children, her close friendships with Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, and Roddy McDowall, and her fifth marriage to Richard Burton, with whom she would star in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, winning her second Oscar. She also used her fame to cast light on the AIDS crisis, becoming a fierce activist and advocate for the LGBTQ community.
Burstein not only directed but served as an executive producer on Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, a Zipper Bros film, Gerber Pictures, Sutter Road Picture Company, and Bad Robot production in association with House of Taylor.
In addition to her work in film and TV, Burstein has made a major directorial mark in the world of commercialmaking where she is repped by production house Hungry Man and has turned out work for global brands including Verizon, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Facebook.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
SHOOT: What drew you to Elizabeth Taylor’s story?
Burstein: I’ve been a fan of Elizabeth Taylor dating back to going to arthouse cinema when I was growing up. I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was completely riveted by it. A dysfunctional adult relationship, the performances were astonishing. From that point on, I watched her movies–A Place in the Sun, Butterfield 8, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Four years ago, I was contacted by the producers [including J.J. Abrams, Glen Zipper, Sean Stuart, Bill Gerber] to make a film about her. They told me about a journalist named Richard Meryman who often wrote for Life Magazine. He had ghostwritten a celebrity book about Marilyn Monroe and he was going to ghostwrite a book about Elizabeth Taylor. His recordings with her were to be used as research. They were not meant to be shared with the public. Forty hours of these recordings were discovered years later by his wife after Richard had passed away. She had given them to the [Elizabeth Taylor] estate. To have access to these candid conversations was very exciting to me.
SHOOT: It seemed from the documentary that film was both cathartic for and exploitative of Taylor–the prime examples being Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8. Her husband, producer Mike Todd, died tragically in a plane crash when Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was being filmed. She wound up going back to the production and it sounded like the work on that film helped her to escape the brutal reality that the man she loved had died. Then when a close friend of Todd, Eddie Fisher, left his wife, Debbie Reynolds, to be with Taylor, it was a huge scandal. Taylor is then cast in Butterfield 8 as a prostitute, with Fisher in the cast as a friend who’s in love with her. The movie seemed to blatantly exploit the tabloid news.
Burstein: You’re right. When anyone dies whom you are close to, it’s horrible. In the case of Mike Todd he was perfectly healthy and suddenly he’s never coming home again. It was in the middle of making this film [Cat on a Hot Tin Roof]. Elizabeth took only a couple of weeks off. To escape the grief, she went back to work, still in shock and denial. To inhabit another character [Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof] allowed her to function.
Then came Butterfield 8, at the time of her public affair with Eddie Fisher. She never really loved him but married him. She liked talking to Eddie–particularly about Mike Todd. She could keep Mike “alive” by being with Eddie. She was shamed publicly. But she was still a contract player. Actors belonged to the studios like chattel. This was the last movie she had to make on her contract. She did the film, begrudgingly. Eddie Fisher plays her best friend who’s really in love with her. She may be in love with him. His girlfriend in the movie looks exactly like Debbie Reynolds. It’s a good movie. She [Taylor] is great in it…But she’s so humiliated and angered [by this art-imitating-life situation].
SHOOT: What’s your biggest takeaway or lessons learned from your experience on Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes. What are among the things you walk away with first and foremost from the experience? What has left a lasting impression on you?
Burstein: This is not the first film I’ve made about the plight of women in the 20th century. I did a series on Hillary Clinton, a film on Tonya Harding. It’s not the first time I’ve tackled the way that public scrutiny has skewed women through the lens of sexism in a way that no one questioned during that time period. You can look back and see that it was pretty fucked up. We cast a light on what Elizabeth Taylor was going through.
SHOOT: It’s said that one experience informs another. Did the docuseries on Hillary Clinton somehow inform you when the opportunity arose for you to tell Elizabeth Taylor’s story?
Burstein: I’m sure it did but it’s not something I’ve overtly thought about.
I think generally [we learn from one generation to the next]. Watching my mom growing up informed me. Her life was so different than mine, the choices she had versus those I had.
Then for me, it was much harder when I was growing up to be a female director. I think about the choices my daughter has now versus the choices I had.
These life experiences attract me to tell these stories [about Clinton, Taylor and others}.
