‘Framing Britney Spears’ Director Understands Why Singer Criticized the Doc

Framing Britney Spears director Samantha Stark and senior story editor Liz Day are featured in a new Hollywood Reporter interview about the documentary, produced by The New York Times for Hulu/FX, about the pop star’s ongoing battle to break free from her conservatorship.

Shortly after the documentary premiered on February 5th, Spears wrote on her Instagram account that she “didn’t like the way the documentaries bring up humiliating moments from the past.” She has also criticized the film as being “hypocritical” in its scrutiny of how the media treated Spears in the past while “[doing] the same thing…Why highlight the most negative and traumatising [sic] times in my life from forever ago?”

When asked about Spears’ criticism, Stark responded: “While we were making the film, we talked a lot about re-traumatizing Britney and her family by showing these moments. Part of the reason it’s called Framing Britney Spears is there are these still-photo frames that were humiliating to her. We thought it was really important to pull outside the frame because so many people had all these assumptions based on one frame, one still image that they saw. In the end, we felt like we had to put some of them in because we wanted people to have more context.”

She continued: “We always tried to have her talk back to [the paparazzi] if we could. She 100 percent deserves to be mad that we’re still looking at those photos, because it’s ridiculous that we’re still looking at them, and they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. As much as I want to explain myself to her, I totally understand where she’s coming from.”

The buzzed-about documentary has been nominated for two Emmy Awards in the categories of outstanding documentary or nonfiction special, and picture editing for a nonfiction program.