‘Brett Ratner Was the Worst Part’: ‘Melania’ Crew Members Dish About ‘Very Chaotic’ Set — Most Didn’t Want Their Names in Credits

Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File

The making of Melania, Amazon MGM Studios’ biopic about First Lady Melania Trump, was so “chaotic” and stressful that multiple crew members are dishing about the terrible experience they had on set — including pointed critiques of the director, Brett Ratner.

Melania is set to open in about 1,400 theaters on Jan. 30, with Amazon sinking a whopping $75 million into the project, consisting of an initial $40 million for the distribution rights and an additional $35 million into its promotional and advertising budget. It’s a stunning figure for any film, but especially a documentary. Outside of rare exceptions like Taylor Swift’s concert films, documentaries are not the box office draw to justify such a massive investment. Chatter about soft ticket sales with mere days to go before the premiere isn’t likely to help.

The film had a troubled and bumpy road to get to its premiere, according to a report by Rolling Stone’s Tessa Stuart, who wrote that crew members told her “the worst part of working on the film wasn’t promoting the Trump administration — it was having to work alongside accused sex pest Brett Ratner.”

Stuart’s article dives into the “frantic scramble” the crew had to undertake “to get as much footage as possible of the first lady in the weeks leading up to the inauguration” to put together the film, describing it as “a chaotic process that involved hiring and coordinating three separate production crews working in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York City.”

Crew members told Stuart that they “were worked really hard,” with “really long hours, highly disorganized, very chaotic.”

“It wasn’t easy money,” another crew member said, explaining that Melania Trump’s status as a Secret Service protectee made following her around to film “very difficult.”

Travel and other logistics issues were also more challenging than usual for documentaries. Stuart noted that crew members “would board the Trump Organization’s Boeing 757 to film the first lady on a flight en route to Mar-a-Lago and end up without a ride home.”

Hollywood is typically an industry that is hyperconscious of who gets top billing and the participants jostling to make sure they get proper credit, but that was flipped upside down with Melania, wrote Stuart, with many crew members wanting to keep their involvement secret:

One person familiar estimated that some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary. A separate person who will be credited on the film said that, after experiencing the first year of Trump’s presidency, they now wish they had not put their name on it. “I’m much more alarmed now than I was a year ago,” that person said.

Melania Trump herself was not the problem; Stuart wrote that she “was described as friendly and very engaged in the process” by the crew and “totally nice” — but also as “the opposite of Brett Ratner.”

Ratner had not made a film since 2017, when he faced a slew of public accusations about sexual harassment and assault by six women. (A shirtless photo of Ratner also posed up in some of the recently-disclosed Epstein files.)

A member of the production team told Rolling Stone that they did not know Ratner was going to be on the project until just days before filming started and would not have accepted the gig if they had been told, saying they felt “a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this…but Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.”

“There was more talk about Brett being slimy than there was about Melania,” another crew member added.

Besides uneasiness about the allegations against Ratner, crew members also shared several anecdotes about the director “being a dick” to the crew:

Ratner left a trail of detritus — discarded orange peels, gum wrappers — wherever he went on set. “He did actually chew a piece of gum and throw it in a coffee cup on my cart,” one said, [but] “didn’t acknowledge my existence for even one nanosecond.”

Another recalled a long day during which the crew wasn’t allowed to break for meals, and no outside food was allowed to be brought into the space where filming was taking place. Everyone was starving. “Brett, unknowingly or maliciously, got his own food, went up there, was just eating it and just licking his fingers in grubbiest way possible, either being a dick or [having] no awareness whatsoever to the fact that everybody else is working and no one’s eating,” one person recalled.

“Unfortunately, if it does flop,” one crew member said, “I would really feel great about it.”

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