Filmmaker Alex Holder said he landed interviews with the Trumps with a 'ridiculous pitch'

Documentary maker Alex Holder speaks to BBC News. BBC News

• UK filmmaker Alex Holder said a "ridiculous pitch" led to him interviewing Trump and his children.
• Holder's documentary "Unprecedented" covers Trump's failed 2020 campaign and the aftermath.
• The Trumps were for the project because of "hubris," he said.

British filmmaker Alex Holder's earlier work includes a documentary on a rap trio and another on a neo-Nazi who discovers he is Jewish.

So how did he land interviews with Donald Trump at the end of his presidency? Tim Miller asked Holder on "The Bulwark Podcast."

Holder, whose series "Unprecedented" covers Trump's failed 2020 re-election campaign and the aftermath, said his original pitch to close Trump family associates was, "'It'd be really cool to make a documentary about President Trump and his eldest kids.'"

"It was a ridiculous pitch," he said. "I mean, everyone wants to make a film about the sitting president of the United States, especially Donald Trump, right, and his kids?"

Holder said he interviewed people who had connections to the Trump White House while working on an ongoing project about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and through them, he was introduced to the Trump family.

Getting the introduction to them was the difficult part, he said, and "they were all for it" when he described the project.

"And I think the reason they were for it was really down to this hubris," he said. The family thought 2020 would be a repeat of the 2016 election and the polls were all wrong, he said.

Another reason, he said, may have been that he isn't American and didn't have any "political skin in the game." 

Holder told them they'd been complaining about the way they've been covered in the media and that he wanted to hear from them and use the campaign as a backdrop for chronicling what happens next.

"Look, I mean, I certainly didn't think they were going to try and destroy democracy at that point," he said.