Director: 'I love their faces . . . their spirit'

Before R.J. Cutler started on The September Issue - his brilliant behind-the-scenes look at Vogue and its mighty monarch of an editor, Anna Wintour - the documentary filmmaker would have been hard-pressed to tell you much of anything about the world of couture.

"I could not have named three of the world's most important designers," he says. "I certainly couldn't have told you that Karl Lagerfeld designed for Chanel. . ..

"I could list for hours the things I didn't know then that I do know now."

But one thing Cutler did know, of course, was who Wintour was.

"Who hasn't heard of her?" says the Emmy- and Peabody-winning producer of The War Room, A Perfect Candidate, and the doc series American High. "She's caricatured everywhere you look. There are two of her in Ugly Betty. There was the animated Anna Wintour in The Incredibles - I'm told that the costume designer character was based on her. And of course at that point you couldn't help but hear about the book The Devil Wears Prada - the movie was more than a year away. And I had even heard that Johnny Depp's character in [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory] was inspired by Anna. At least, his hairdo and his glasses."

In The September Issue, which chronicles the seven-month-long process of creating the phonebook-size fall 2007 issue of Vogue, Cutler and his crew track Wintour as she scans the runways of Paris and New York, attends meetings with designers and retailers, sips her Starbucks, and issues orders with a withering glare.

But what's fascinating about Cutler's film, opening today, is that for all of Wintour's chilly and imperious airs, she does not come off as a villain, a witch, and certainly not as a fool.

And there's another figure vital to the film - and to Vogue, the most important publication in all of the fashion biz. That would be Grace Coddington, the magazine's creative director. Like Wintour, Coddington is a Brit, but unlike her boss, this woman with the long, red hair and the lazy gait - a former model who orchestrates Vogue's elaborate photo shoots - appears quiet and modest, deliberately removed from the power circle that is Wintour's milieu. Wintour, close to 60, and Coddington, close to 70, have worked together for decades; it's a relationship of give and take, of demands met and demands ignored, and it's a relationship that is at the very core of the magazine's aesthetic.

"Grace was not eager to see me, ever," says Cutler, chuckling over lunch at a Center City sushi spot. "She would have closed her door on me even if my fingers had been in the way."

But finally, Coddington relented and granted Cutler an hour to talk - off camera. Wintour may have said something, too, because in the end Coddington let Cutler and crew follow her around, resulting in some of the movie's most prized, and surprising, moments.

"If I wanted to tell a story about who Anna Wintour was, what Vogue was, I needed to tell the story of who Grace Coddington was," the filmmaker says. "I believe it is the defining relationship. . . . And she is so wonderful to watch work."

And in a culture, and an industry, that is all about youth, The September Issue offers a portrait of two exceptional women who could easily be grandmothers to the twiggy models in Vogue's pages.

"I love that this is a movie about these two women of a certain age who are so mighty and powerful and going strong and ruling the world and brawling with each other and caring so much," Cutler says. "I love their faces. I love their spirit. They put us all to shame with what they do day in and day out, and they do it 12 times a year and they've been doing it for 20 years and they're going to do it for many more years to come. They're awesome."