EXCLUSIVE: Director Matt Tyrnauer is doing a rapid update of his new documentary Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid to reflect Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election.
Deadline has learned the filmmaker quickly assembled a crew to shoot a new interview with the famed Democratic political consultant to include as a coda to the film. “The election wasn’t decided when we finished the film just a few weeks ago,” Tyrnauer explains. “We now know the outcome and I felt that I wanted to put a period at the end of the sentence.” The recut version is now streaming on Max. “There was a reshuffling of a few elements that are almost invisible,” Tyrnauer says. “Then we give the outcome the election, and then James gives what is almost like his homily — or, battle cry is maybe a better term — which is we’re an opposition party… And that brings the film up today.” The Democratic Party today is somewhere in the process of coming to terms with a decisive Electoral College loss that saw President-Elect Trump win all the battleground states, albeit by a relatively slim margin. “When you lose, everything is a mistake,” Carville says by way of an election postmortem.
In the film, he is seen sounding the alarm that Pres. Biden was heading for a resounding defeat to Trump. It was in large part because of his influence in the Party (as well as a shove from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the incumbent president got out of the race.
But crucially, Carville advocated for some form of mini-primary to determine who should be the Democratic Party nominee to replace Biden.
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