Venus and Serena Williams are still not happy about the film “Venus and Serena” which is a documentary that aims to tell the story of their spectacular tennis careers and their journey through hardships.
The sisters were all on board when the idea of the documentary was first pitched, but it seemed like with every passing day the girls found yet another major flaw in the movie that had them pulling back on their support.
The main problem Venus and Serena saw with the film was the way their father , Richard Williams, was being portrayed as a womanizer.
But the film reportedly lost the support of Venus in its depiction of the womanizing ways of their father, Richard Williams. Serena is shown struggling to name all of Richard’s children, and unaware that a man who was watching one of her practices with her father may have been one of his sons.
Venus, who practiced more with Richard when the two were growing up, reportedly objected to that segment of the film, and as a result the sisters skipped an originally planned appearance at the film’s premiere at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival. Venus’ protectiveness of Richard in the wake of the film’s portrayal of him echoes his own watchfulness over his daughter in the film, including his interruption of an interview when he took umbrage at a reporter’s follow-up question.
Venus has come across as being very unenthusiastic about the film while Serena seems a little more content with the movie; however, neither of the tennis stars have public condemned the movie.
This is probably because there are many parts of the documentary that the sisters actually do like even when the scene may not be exactly one of their proudest moments in their careers.
The NY Times writes:
The footage from 2011 is interlaced with archive footage of the sisters’ early days training with their parents and with the coach Rick Macci, Venus’s first professional match, their domination of the women’s game and their eight Grand Slam finals against one another. The movie also deals with the hostile reception Serena received at Indian Wells, Calif., in 2001 — the sisters no longer play the tournament — and her argument with a line judge at the 2009 United States Open, an incident that she and her mother, Oracene Price, blame on her “Taquanda” personality getting loose. That incident led to her opponent, Kim Clijsters, being awarded match point.
The documentary reveals many of the troubling circumstances the sisters went through as well, especially the many health problems that the sisters battled in 2011.
Serena may not be completely happy with the way her father is being portrayed, but she does admit that she was happy the camera were there to capture an amazing part of her life.
“I think it was just a great time to capture in my life,” she said in an interview Monday. “I believe I wasn’t doing that great — I’d just fallen from grace, so to say. And you really see all the hard work that I was able to do and that I tried to do. Just from the beginning I won Stanford, and then I won Toronto, and then I get to the finals of the Open, and then you can kind of see a little bit of the history of me getting back to where I am now, and I think that was kind of cool.”
The documentary is available on iTunes now and will be released to theaters on May 10.
