Burstein and I spoke in January in Pasadena, California, shortly after she introduced the docuseries as part of Hulu’s presentation for the Television Critics Association press tour. She arrived onstage alongside Clinton herself, to the great interest of the journalists in the room. (A network’s slate preview doesn’t usually feature guests who come with a Secret Service presence.) To Burstein, that fascination—positive or negative—with Clinton made for the perfect gateway to explore her own interests in the docuseries. “As I got deeper into [studying Clinton], I really felt like, well, this is an opportunity to understand some of the things I most care about, which is the history of contemporary feminism in the United States, and the history of partisan politics and how that works,” she told me.

As a result, Hillary covers Clinton’s rise to celebrity and feminist-icon status as much as it interrogates the intensity with which people react to her actions, and it does so without cinematic flair. The most conspicuous creative choice Burstein makes is to use Clinton’s 2016 campaign as an anchor to tell the rest of her life story, illuminating the contradictory expectations that have persisted throughout Clinton’s career. She weaves together proof of hatred (a clip of her being burned in effigy for pushing health-care reform as first lady in 1994) and of ardent adoration (news footage of women walking 13 hours to see her in India when she visited in 1995)—sequences that paint a picture of Clinton as a public figure who inspires visceral reactions. In her previous films, Burstein added artistic touches; The Kid Stays in the Picture told the story of the film producer Robert Evans mostly through stylized photographs. Hillary presents the story without embellishment or narration.

It’s a call-and-response—here’s a scene from her 2016 run; now here’s what informed it—and it’s effective in its straightforward presentation. Burstein juxtaposes how, on the campaign trail, Clinton was criticized for coming off as too cold, yet years earlier, she’d been forced to learn how to be unemotional, to hold her ground as the rare female law student. Burstein shows how Clinton the candidate was accused of playing the “woman card,” but as first lady of Arkansas, she was once seen as not feminine enough. These contrasting snapshots accentuate Burstein’s point: that Clinton’s gender both helped and hindered her in unpredictable ways. She was scrutinized because of it, policed because of it, loved for it, hated for it. Any female politician who rises to national prominence, Hillary suggests, will be met with the same fierce admiration or harsh contempt. History tends to repeat itself, after all.

When Hulu released the trailer for Hillary, the YouTube comments ranged from lingering #ImWithHer supporters applauding Burstein to detractors calling the director a modern-day Leni Riefenstahl. “I knew from the very beginning, doing this, no matter what I do, it will be criticized,” Burstein conceded. “It will be, ‘Oh, this is too fluffy,’ or ‘This is too critical. Please go away. Why are you doing this?’ No matter what we did, no matter how hard I tried to get at what I thought was the most honest depiction of all these very complicated things that come up, it will never be okay, and so I have to be okay with that.”

Clinton’s polarizing reputation often worked against Burstein’s goal of making a balanced series. Her wish list of interviewees wasn’t limited to Clinton’s childhood friends; her husband, former President Bill Clinton; her daughter; and other political allies such as former President Barack Obama. She also spoke with journalists who covered Clinton closely and the Republican former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. But Burstein had hoped to have more conservatives go on the record. “I really wanted more Republicans in it, but it was hard to get them to do that,” she told me. In fact, she recalled, the former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich so hated the idea of participating that he responded to her request by saying, “I would rather stick a needle in my eye than talk to you about Hillary Clinton in a documentary.”