Exclusive: ‘Melania’ Director Brett Ratner Gives First Lady ‘All the Credit’ for Documentary’s Opening Weekend Success

Melania documentary director Brett Ratner told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview – hours after the film hit theaters worldwide – that First Lady Melania Trump deserves “all the credit” for the picture’s historic opening weekend success.

Melania is set to haul in more than $8 million in its opening weekend, which would be the best at the box office for a documentary in the last decade. A humble Ratner told Breitbart News via a phone interview Saturday that he gives “all the credit” to the first lady, the film’s subject, for its extremely successful box office performance.

“I have to give all the credit to Melania because this was something that she came up with, even, obviously, before she met me. The fact that she had hired a feature director like myself to do a documentary was very surprising, and for me as well. But she said to me from day one, I want this to be very cinematic. I want it to have a theatrical release. I want it to live and play in theaters,” Ratner told Breitbart News. “It’s very rare that documentaries get released in theaters. It’s usually straight to streaming, and even before they were streaming, documentaries were not in movie theaters – very, very rarely. So it was really her vision to have that and to see it through.”

“And I think one of the strategies was to hire me, who does big feature films, for the movie theaters,” he continued. “I think, as planned, we designed this movie to really live and breathe inside a movie theater. You could watch it on streaming down the road, but I think the audience felt that too, and that’s why they showed up. They showed up for the theaters, but from the material, from the campaign, the trailers, you realize, ‘Wow, this is a big screen production. This isn’t just a kind of episodic documentary.'”

The film chronicles the first lady in the 20 days leading up to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025, which the first lady told Breitbart News on the red carpet at the documentary’s world premiere Thursday night was a “very intense” time.

Ratner has directed major feature-length films such as the Rush Hour trilogy (Rush Hour 4 is in the works), Red Dragon for the Hannibal series, Tower Heist, The Family Man, and more, and Melania marks his first-ever full-length documentary. He has joked to others that Melania is “the most expensive student film ever made,” and detailed for Breitbart News the nuances of not only filming a documentary, but one on such a unique subject as the first lady, compared to the feature-length films he has traditionally made.

“I was learning as I was doing it. Honestly, it was a huge challenge. I always try to challenge myself. When I did Rush Hour, I was being offered a lot of movies like Rush Hour. I had felt that I had done it already. So I went and did the Family Man, which is a romantic fantasy,” he said. “After the Family Man, I went and did a psychological thriller, which was part of the Hannibal series: Red Dragon. Then I went ahead and did X-Men. So I worked in multiple genres, and documentary is one of the two genres that I’ve not tackled yet.”

“I was always in the back of my mind, thinking, ‘God, if I was going to do a documentary, who would it be on, and what it would be about?’ I love biopics, and the truth is, this wasn’t a biopic. This was even more interesting, where it’s more wide-stream, mainstream, commercial, because it’s not just for a particular audience, anybody who’s interested in the role of the first lady, and that’s what we set out to do, to make a film that is specifically about that process. Nobody really knows or understands what the first lady does, so that for me was an interesting challenge and a great idea. I thought, ‘Wow, this is it. This is it. I should do it.’ For me, it was a huge challenge.”

Ratner told Breitbart News that Melania is likely the most difficult film he has ever undertaken, noting that in past movies, he had a script to follow, but in Melania, he was following the first lady’s real-life movements as they unfolded.

[It’s] “probably the hardest film, because I’m used to going into a film with a specific script, with planning, pre-production, storyboards. Now I will say we got farther than we could because we’re with the first lady and the president, and the access that Melania gave me was completely unprecedented,” Ratner said. “I was given the information about their movements. It’s usually on a film I’m telling actors where to go, but in a documentary, I can’t do that. But because everything’s so organized and structured when they move around, I was given the diagram, say, or the plans, so I could get a little bit ahead of it, where, on a documentary, you’re just following them. You’re just kind of going along with them, and you’re grabbing what you can.”

“I had a little bit more structure, and that’s why I was able to make it feel like a movie, you see, because I was able to kind of pre-plan it, knowing that when she left for the airport, and then went to the plane, and then from the plane to Trump Tower, I knew the path that she was going to take,” the Melania director continued. “I knew where the plane was going to be, or where the car was going to be, so I could send extra crews ahead of me to be waiting, so I could capture and focus on what I needed to focus on. So in that way, it was very much like a movie. I feel like, from at least the feedback I’m getting, it’s what I set out to do, but I didn’t really know if it was going to work, but I feel like it worked, and I kind of created a kind of almost a new genre of documentary film, not within itself, but within documentary.”

When asked to compare working with the first lady to working with Hollywood actors, Ratner had extremely high praise for the documentary’s star, likening her awareness and on-camera presence to that of legendary actresses such as Grace Kelly and Bette Davis.

“I’ve worked with some big stars, as you know, in a lot of my moveis and when people ask, I say, ‘Melania is actually what I think about what it would be like working with kind of a legendary actor,'” he told Breitbart News. “The young actors, when we’re filming a movie–say a beginning actor, an actor that I found or something that I put in a film when I was in theater, or we did commercials, you got to sort of walk them through the process where if I wanted to get to a mark, I put a mark on the ground. I put a piece of tape there. You’ve heard that saying ‘hitting your mark,’ so you kind of create a road map on the floor, but in a doc, I can’t do that. In a documentary, Melania as herself is going to walk where she wants to walk, and I can’t talk over her while she’s talking. It’s a different process.”

“I was surprised of her awareness and sensitivity to the filmmaking process,” he added. “It’s like working with, I would say, a very experienced movie star like Bette Davis or Grace Kelly. They know where their light is. She knows how to turn towards the better light. She understands the camera, possibly because of her experience as a model. She has a relationship with the camera, and, without being self-conscious because she was always being herself, she was always conscientious, I would say, of the camera, of the lighting, of where she needed to stand when she was talking in a conversation, to clear the eye line for the camera to see her, to see her face, to see her eyes. If it was raining, for instance, in the scene at the cemetery, she would raise the umbrella two inches higher so that a light would hit her face underneath the umbrella. It felt like I was working with a real movie star.”

The first lady’s enigmatic nature was a key draw for Ratner’s decision to sign on to the project.

“Melania has always been an enigma,” he said. “I met her once in the past, when she and her husband came to my premiere of my movie Tower Heist, which I filmed in one of Trump’s properties in Manhattan. So I just met her briefly, and I just knew what I read, like nobody really knew her and got to know her.”

When asked about what he wants the film’s legacy to be, Ratner said he and the crew accomplished what they set out to do: to demonstrate not only the role of the first lady but also her passion for it, which they witnessed firsthand during the filming.

“I’m very proud of the film, even if the box office didn’t hit it the way it did. I felt like I really succeeded because we premiered the movie at the Trump-Kennedy Center, and the audience, and the way they reacted to the film and spontaneously clapped or laughed–I’ve had some big premieres at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, at the Ziegfeld in New York that I think doesn’t exist anymore–there was nothing like this premiere,” Ratner told Breitbart News. “The reaction was so big and so huge that I felt like, okay, even if I get bad reviews, even if it doesn’t do well at the box office, I feel like I’ve succeeded, because Melania and the president are very happy and proud of the film. But what I think it does more so is it does what we set out to do, which is show the role and the passion.”

“What I learned about Melania from the process, from making the film, is that as passionate as I am about filmmaking, she is about her role as the first lady in her service,” he added. “I was there the moment she would wake up to the moment she would go to sleep every day for a month, say. In between, I would have to take a break, my crew would go to lunch, we would have different things that we needed to do, change a piece of equipment out; there were breaks. On those breaks, she wasn’t taking a nap. She wasn’t just sitting there waiting for us to keep shooting, which a lot of actors on set are kind of waiting to act. That’s their main job. She took her role as the first lady; she takes it so seriously. I wanted to have a second crew filming when I couldn’t film, when I was down for the in-between, because the in-between is as active as the on-camera stuff. Her meetings that she was having in between being in the film were as intense, and as busy, and as important. People talk about the president not sleeping; her days are long and her sleep time is short, but she’s working at every waking moment, and that I really was happy, not only to show in the film, but to learn that about how serious she is about the role of the first lady.”

President Trump’s respect for his wife was also apparent to Ratner throughout the process.

“The second thing I learned really was the amount of respect that the president has for her,” he told Breitbart News. “He has the utmost respect for her and really listens. She has a real opinion, and he really respects it, as you see in the trailer and in the film, when he’s doing his speech, and she weighs in on it. Not that it wasn’t expected, but you don’t know people, you don’t know the dynamics. I was very, very moved by the amount of respect that he has for his wife, and it’s mutual, by the way.”

While discussing an upcoming three-part series to follow up on the documentary, Ratner underscored that he had a firsthand perspective throughout the project of the first lady and the president’s humanity and compassion.

“The president was always a fantastic subject to film and very real,” he explained. “What I learned is their humanity and their compassion for people. I don’t want to give away what’s in the series, but I saw them interacting with some victims of disasters. You know when people are there sometimes, like when Kamala Harris, in the film, was at the inauguration, and she didn’t want to be there because she was looking at her watch? The president, when he’s speaking with somebody, he is present, he is looking you in the eye, and the same with Melania.”

Ratner assembled an all-star crew for the film, including, as producer Marc Beckman emphasized to Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily, several Oscar-winning cinematographers: Jeff Cronenweth, Barry Peterson, and Dante Spinotti. Ratner lauded the crew during his interview with Breitbart News on Saturday and singled out Assistant Director Michael Kahn, who has run the sets of some of Hollywood’s biggest films, including the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises, as well as David Fincher’s Seven. Ratner noted the president loved seeing Kahn during the documentary’s production.

“What was so great about Michael Kahn is he eats, breathes, and walks Donald Trump,” Ratner said. “He’s the most loyal Donald Trump fan on planet Earth, and the minute that the president met him, it was like a love – it was like birds were flying. The president would always acknowledge him. And so we got a lot of stuff done because I picked the best AD Assistant Director, because Michael was a force. I mean, he walks in with his MAGA hat, he comes in there, and when the president’s in the room and sees him, it brightens his day. It really does.”

He added that “it was great to see the appreciation the president had for my crew, and Michael was one of those guys.”

Ratner is embarking on Rush Hour 4 for his next project. When asked whether it would be more difficult to make a traditional film given Hollywood’s left-leaning politics, Ratner said he believes Hollywood is growing and he is happy where it is currently.

“Hollywood is growing in a way, and I’m happy where it’s at right now, and it gives me an opportunity to come back, and all I am is about the work. I don’t really get into the politics of things,” he said. “My dream from when I was eight years old was to make movies, and that’s really all I care about, and that’s what I was always focused on. So when everything started becoming political, or all this stuff came into play, it was frustrating on many levels for me. So I’m very happy with where Hollywood is, and a lot of great people. You see changes with the new owners at Paramount and a lot of these big studios, and it’s a different world than it was 10 years ago.”