Paula Deen Filmmaker Says New Documentary Took ‘a Level of Self-Awareness’ for Disgraced Star (Exclusive)

More than a decade after the scandal that shattered Paula Deen’s multimillion-dollar empire, a documentary sheds new light on her story.

Canceled: The Paula Deen Story, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 6, chronicles the disgraced television personality’s journey from the catering business she started in her kitchen with $200 to her 11-year superstar run on the Food Network, which ended when she was fired in 2013 as a result of her admission to using a racial slur in a sworn deposition. 

The deposition was part of a lawsuit filed by Lisa Jackson, a former manager of one of Paula’s restaurants, Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House. A federal judge in Georgia dismissed the lawsuit after a settlement was reached, but the controversy cost her numerous business deals. 

 “When they lay me down, I do not want on my tombstone, ‘Here lies the body of a racist,’” Deen, 78, says toward the beginning of the film.

In an interview with PEOPLE, the documentary’s director, Billy Corben, weighed in on why Deen is coming forward with her side now.

“I think she still doesn’t understand what happened,” Corben says. “I think she’s looking for answers, too.”

In the film, Deen maintains that when she admitted to having used the racial slur, she was referring to a 1987 incident, when she was held at gunpoint while working at a bank. Although Deen mentioned that context in the deposition and in a 2013 Today show interview that the Washington Post subsequently called “garbled,” her claim that her use of the slur was decades prior wasn’t what stuck with the public.

“I think that she tried to tell her story,” Corben says. “I think she realized that she wasn’t very good at it. There’s a word she uses to describe herself a lot. It’s only in the doc once or twice, but if you go across her era of stardom, ‘naïve.’ She refers to herself as naïve. I think that’s a very fair and accurate and polite description.” 

“I think it was a level of self-awareness to say, ‘Maybe what I do need to do is turn this over to somebody else, but also participate in it to try to find, I guess, answers for myself,’ ” he adds. “Because she did interviews, they just weren’t very good. Also, time and perspective helps a bit, too. We spent a lot of time together talking on camera, so she had to get introspective and really start thinking about things in a new way, or a different way at least.” 

A montage of media coverage depicting Deen’s public downfall shows Larry King calling Deen’s comments “inexcusable” and Joy Behar saying “she needs to be gone, just based on her insensitivity.”

“It’s my belief that White people canceled Paula Deen. It wasn’t us,” Black culinary historian Michael Twitty says in interview footage interspersed with those clips. “It was White people doing that to assuage the guilt, especially in the ‘Oh, we don’t say that anymore’ Obama years.”

Corben says he was initially skeptical of signing on for the project, but was intrigued enough to visit Savannah, Ga., and meet Paula and her sons, Jamie, 58, and Bobby, 55.

“I realized very quickly that this wasn’t just this Paula Deen celebrity scandal story, but true to the name of their restaurant, this was The Lady and Sons,” he says, referring to the eatery that launched her to fame.

The filmmaker says he found their dynamic “so compelling” as they toured the city, visiting the two-bedroom home where Paula illegally operated her company in the late 1980s, the Best Western where the family had their first brick-and-mortar restaurant, and the shell of the building that was Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House.  

Corben noticed that Paula and Jamie were warm and talkative, while he’d watched Bobby “clenching his jaw in the rearview mirror.”

“I said, ‘Hey, Bobby, do you think y’all should be making this documentary?’ He was just like, ‘Oh, finally, somebody asks me. No, I don’t,’ ” Corben recalls. 

“For the next 20 minutes in that SUV, I watched what I called the best documentary I never made,” Corben says. “Paula Deen starts sobbing. Jamie is calm and soothing like, ‘Brother, I hear you.’ Bobby is just low-key apoplectic. I was convinced there that there was a documentary here.”

Corben was also captivated by “this Horatio Alger story” of the family’s rags-to-riches experience.

“In order for it to be a rise-and-fall story, you needed to understand that rise,” he says. ”If you’re going to destroy the woman, if you think the punishment fit the crime and she deserved it, so be it. At least know what you’re destroying and who you’re destroying and what she overcame to accomplish what she did.”

Corben says he has encountered a lot of people who thought “that [Paula] was this deranged racist running around her kitchens with a cleaver, dropping N-bombs at everybody all the time.”

“I think people really have that vision in their head when they think about her,” he says, noting that he’s fine with viewers walking away with their own opinions of the controversial culinary star. “But I would like them to have an informed opinion, which I don’t think a lot of people had in 2013.”