A couple of years ago Oscar-winning documentarian Charles Ferguson (Inside Job) and CNN partnered to make a Hillary Clinton doc. The idea was to explore or explain how Hillary went from being “a very sincere, committed person,” in Ferguson’s words, to the guarded, secretive, heavily fortified figure she is today. Her changeover happened, says Ferguson, because of “what [she and Bill Clinton] went through in the White House…some of that is known, some of it is not…it changed her a lot.

But in a chat with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Ferguson explains that the project stalled because “no one [would] talk to me. Absolutely no one. I encountered a wall of silence the likes of which I have never encountered before.

“Nobody would talk to me. Nobody who knows the Clintons, nobody who likes the Clintons, nobody who hates the Clintons. At a certain point, the Clinton people got in touch with me directly and said, ‘We really don’t want you to make this movie. Go away.’ The day after [the CNN deal] was signed, we got a call from Hillary Clinton‘s press secretary, saying, ‘Let’s talk. We have a problem.’

“Both the Republicans and the Democrats thought I would be a problem for them from that point of view. The other thing is that many of those people want jobs in the Clinton Administration. If they disobey her by talking to me then they won’t get those jobs. But only about 10 percent of those people are actually going to get jobs. So after the election, if she wins, once she announces her cabinet, then it’s going to be much easier to make a film.”