CNN Film, Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid directed by Matt Tyrnauer is an intimate look behind one of the most brash and unapologetic voices of the Democratic Party, James Carville. From humble Louisiana beginnings to masterminding Clinton’s presidential upset in 1992, the CNN Film chronicles the rich life of the Rajin’ Cajun of American Politics and how he continues to impact the modern political landscape. Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid premieres Saturday, October 4 at 7P/ET on CNN.
We caught up with the film's director Matt Tyrnauer to discuss his take on filming with James Carville.
In the time of filming with James Carville he emerged as a lone voice warning that president Joe Biden was in grave danger of losing the election to Donald Trump. How did the film change as the election shifted?
In May of 2023, while I was filming James at his home in New Orleans, an ABC News / Washington Post poll came out, showing Donald Trump leading President Biden in the polls. That day I filmed James as he worked the phones and as we continued following him over the next few weeks, it became clear that he had determined that President Biden was very likely to lose the election and that the president's age had become an almost insurmountable campaign issue. From that point on, James embarked upon a very lonely campaign using all of his knowledge, wits and many platforms to encourage President Biden to step aside.
It was a very unpopular position within his party, and he became more and more outspoken, more and more criticized, and increasingly resolute and brave as he pursued, at times, a one-man campaign to do what he thought was the right thing to try to forestall an historic defeat that could, in his view, change the course of history very much for the worse, allowing Donald Trump to ascend to the presidency for a second time.
I knew that this would become a major arc for the film, and I focused on it intensely. For the remaining months that we filmed him and then in the edit room, it indeed did emerge as a dominant theme. It also gave the film a kind of lightning in a bottle intensity, as my main character, already one of the most important voices in American politics, became the bravest and most dominant voice as an insurgent in his party, changing the course of the election and history himself.
James is known for his blunt and often polarizing political commentary. Why do you think he's such an enduring voice of the Democratic Party after four decades of working in politics?
The word unique is overused, but I think it really does apply to James Carville. Not so long ago, there was a time when the elder statesman in a political party looked pretty much the same. There were elderly gentleman, generally lawyers, dressed in dark pinstripe suits, who would appear on the Sunday talk shows and be photographed counseling the president in the Oval Office. That species is extinct. The Democratic party, except for its former presidents, doesn't really have an elder statesman in the old tradition, but it does have James Carville. He performed the role of figures such as Bob Strauss or Vernon Jordan, who were in the classic mold.
Carville with his LSU sweatshirts, Marine Corps baseball caps and multiple media platforms is able to get potent political advice across to presidents and the media—and as we have seen in this current election cycle, he can move the needle in a way that few before him had ever been able to do. He’s a new model of elder statesman, with a style of his own, a brilliant intellect and unmatched knowledge of politics and the way it works. As someone in the film says, winning is James's religion. As James says, winning is everything. In this film you see how he practices what he preaches.
