Oscar-winning filmmaker Ezra Edelman called the situation surrounding his shelved Prince documentary a “joke” in his first major interview since Netflix effectively buried the project last month. 

Edelman held little back on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, dismissing the claims from Prince’s estate that his film was filled with “dramatic” factual inaccuracies and “sensationalized” renderings of certain events. The director noted that the “one thing” the estate was allowed to do was flag his film for factual errors; instead, he said, they came back with “a 17-page document full of editorial issues, not factual issues.” 

Edelman — who spent five years making his film on Prince after winning an Academy Award for his 2016 doc O.J. Made in America — bluntly added, “You think I have any interest in putting out a film that’s factually inaccurate?” 

The Prince estate’s frustration with Edelman’s film was first reported last summer. A few months later, a New York Times story revealed that the film contained interviews with ex-girlfriends, who said Prince could be physically and emotionally abusive. Other interview subjects said Prince was abused himself as a child and could be controlling or emotionally manipulative. 

Last month, Netflix announced that it had come to a “mutual agreement” with the Prince estate to not release Edelman’s project, and instead produce a new documentary featuring “exclusive content from Prince’s archive.” 

Speaking with Torre, Edelman said that what he found most “galling” was the “short-sightedness of a group of people whose interest is their own bottom line.” He claimed that the “lawyer who runs the estate” believed the film “would do generational harm to Prince” and “deter younger viewers and fans, potentially, from loving Prince.”

Edelman seemed to find this both dispiriting and frustrating: “I’m like, ‘This is a gift — a nine-hour treatment about an artist that was, by the way, fucking brilliant.’ Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. And yet you also have to confront his humanity, which he, by the way, in some ways, was trapped in not being able to expose, because he got trapped in his own myth about who he was to the world, and he had to maintain it.”

A rep for the Prince estate did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.

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