Netflix, these days, just about rules the world. It's at the forefront of popular culture, winning Oscars and re-writing the rules of what entertainment is. Netflix has movies, concerts, comedy, and all kinds of entertainment both highbrow and low.

This is especially the case during the coronavirus pandemic, with much of the world stuck at home and streaming more than ever. Netflix's stock is at an all-time high, with its market capitalization nearing $200 billion.

How did Netflix grow from an unheralded startup in 1997 that first drew attention for sending its subscribers DVDs, into an entertainment colossus that's worth more than Disney? That's the subject of "Netflix vs. The World," a new documentary that's now available for rental and purchase from… Amazon Prime.

The documentary is based on Gina Keating's 2012 book "Netflixed: The Epic Battle For America's Eyeballs," and Keating is credited as the documentary’s writer. Featuring interviews with several ex-employees of the company, as well as those of its onetime rival Blockbuster, "Netflix vs. The World" traces Netflix's history through its humble beginnings, the Red Envelope era and its battle with and triumph over Blockbuster. It then covers the company's pivot to streaming and high-profile original content, the Qwikster debacle, and eventually the company's growth into a Hollywood superpower.

There are also some funny stories, about how much the company struggled with how to make DVD packaging that wouldn't break, and about the time Netflix produced a DVD of President Bill Clinton's impeachment testimony which was shipped to customers who, due to a supplier mixup, mistakenly received Chinese pornography.

The National Interest spoke last week with Shawn Cauthen, the director of "Netflix vs. the World," about the film, what Netflix thinks about it, and how a movie about Netflix ended up on Amazon.

Q: How have you been doing in quarantine?

A: You know, good. Just trying to hold down the fort and get this project out. It's earlier than we thought we were going to release it, but when all the film festivals started shutting down, it just seemed like the time was now, because holding on to it did nothing. . I'm also working on another docuseries… it's called "Fan Level Midnight: Devoted to The Office." I went cross country with some people to discover the fandom of "The Office."  It was something that I discovered while I was doing "Netflix vs. the World.”  I saw that "Friends and "The Office" were, you know, their top shows at the time which I found interesting, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

Q:  My first question for you about the movie is, how exactly did you come to direct this particular movie?

A: I was working on another doc called "The Orange Years The Nickelodeon Stories," about the origin of Nickelodeon And so I was in post on that I'm not the director of that one I was just a DP and co-editor. But I was looking for my next project, and there's two projects I was looking at doing.  One was on Fred Rogers which I'm glad I didn't go down that route because they were already in the process of making  "Won't You Be My Neighbor. And the other one was Netflix.

Because I'd read a book called "Netflix'd: The Epic Battle For America's Eyeballs." And I always loved that book, I always love the entrepreneurship and the whole Silicon Valley race to it. So I reached out to the writer to see if she would let me interview or for a documentary that I wanted to make, and she was like 'I've actually shot a few interviews, maybe we could team up.' So that's kind of where it came about.  So we teamed up and I kind of took over the directing role.  We reshot some of the interviews she did it because did them in  HD but I wanted him to be more future-proof. So we went back and shot them in 4K , with a Blackmagic URSA, which is one of the cameras that Netflix asks that you should use if you're going to shoot for them. So of course you've noticed this isn't on Netflix so that's a whole different story.

Q:  How much cooperation did you have from Netflix itself?  I know there's some interviews with  a lot of ex-employees and also a couple of current employees.  Did they know you were working on this, and did you have any buy-in from them? What exactly was their role in this?

A: So, they helped out not at all. The writer Gina that I did this with when she wrote "Netflix'd" they actually didn't help out until the end on her book, they came in and they helped her in fact checking and all that.  But for this one we reached out to [CEO Reed Hastings] and Reed said that he didn't have any interest in doing it because he was working on his own book at the time, so we just kind of had to go on it by ourselves. So, we have a lot of the founding team except for Reed.

Q: Are there ways in which you tell the story of how Netflix came to be, that are different from how they tell it themselves?

A: Well it's just mainly taking the different stories and finding what we found to be the truth Because you know everyone has their own recollection or memory of how events went.

Because you know I I even kind of teased it in there on Blockbuster meeting because [then-Blockbuster CEO] John Antioco remembered not even being in the meeting but [Netflix cofounder] Mark Randolph remembers him being in there. So I kind of let the audience know these are the two different sides and you can come to what you think actually happened in that meeting or who was there.  But the essence of the story is there. So I let the audience kind of understand that you know these are coming from two different points of view so you just kind of have to take it and figure out what you think the story is.

Q: So I see you interviewed [early Netflix executive] Mitch Lowe. I know he went on to become the CEO of MoviePass, which could have been an entire documentary itself. Did he talk about that at all with him?

A: MoviePass is a whole different beast…. the interview was done when MoviePass started hitting their troubles, so it was mainly just concentrating on Netflix and all that.

Q: The interview with [current Netflix content chief] Ted Sarandos-was that originally by you, or was that from the older footage?

A:  That's from a journalist friend of mine had interviewed him. Netflix used to do press all the time because you know it's all about giving that earned media. So yeah that was from a friend of mine that gave me permission to use his footage.

Q: In the part of the movie where you're talking about "House of Cards," you see a lot of footage of Kevin Spacey and knowing what's happened with him since,  did you have any apprehension about including that?

A:  No, I've had people ask me about that. But from my point of view this is an historical documentary, so I mean if you're gonna talk about "House of Cards" and you're not mentioning Kevin Spacey, you're not really being historical. Just because someone's done horrible things doesn't mean they just get written out of history.  It's not like I talk about how great a person he is and everything. But you can't talk about how successful "House of Cards" was without mentioning that Kevin Spacey was in it. Because you put a different factor in that role, maybe it's not as popular or eye-catching when it was released.

Q: You seem to focus probably in the two-thirds of the movie or maybe even more than that on the early years of the company, especially the feud with Blockbuster. I know you talk at the end about things that have happened more recently, with the streaming explosion, and how they became so dominant the way they are now. Did you consider the earlier stuff more interesting, or was that just having the book [that the documentary was based on] concentrate on that period?

A: I found a lot of it's interesting, I mean in the the sheer fact that when I started this project I had the same understanding that everyone has you know, "Oh,  stupid Blockbuster, they missed their opportunity to buy Netflix." And then I was making it, I [realized] "all right, well if I put myself  in that same situation, I'm not buying Netflix." Like, when the dot com [bubble] burst, and  something that I think I could probably make you know $5 million myself, would I would [have to pay] $50 million. So I understood why they passed on the opportunity.

And some of the behind the scenes stuff with Total Access versus Netflix I found interesting because I had the misconception that I was an early adopter of Netflix because…  I got Netflix back in like 2001 when I started college at the University of Texas, but I was off by like three years. So there's just a lot of interesting stuff. And as we see now the story of Netflix continues to change and everything, so there was a certain point that we had to have a cut off because everything changes so rapidly. I mean we were making a movie we put in about Netflix passing Disney for valuation and then five months later Disney passed Netflix again. So I was going to take it back out. But then we look at it now because of COVID Netflix's now worth more than Disney. So it's just something that if you try to make a documentary about it you just pull your hair out because every weeks it would change."

Q: I guess Netflix is lucky they don't own theme parks, or else they'd probably fall behind again.

A: Right, and that was one of the things that people always talked about why Disney was so better positioned than Netflix because Netflix had their streaming, but they didn't really have merchandising. You can get a "Stranger Things" T shirt. But Disney owns merchandising and theme parks and stuff like that. But now that's become their weakness because the theme parks I think lost a billion dollars in the first quarter of being shut down, so Netflix doesn't worry about anything. 

People are actually watching Netflix more now because of the lockdown. And you know the same thing happened in 2008, Netflix shot up because the Great Recession happened and people have less money to spend on entertainment. So spending, you know, 12 bucks on Netflix seems like a better value than going out to a theme park or going to a movie and spending like 60 bucks, So Netflix kind of thrived in situations like this.

Q: So was there ever any chance that Netflix would stream the documentary themselves? Were there ever any discussions, or was that just a nonstarter ?

A:  I mean we've reached out and I know multiple people that know Reed and things like that and know he's aware of the documentary. It's just one of the things-I mean I would love it to be there but you know it's something that happened when we were doing the film festival circuit.  I won't say what film festival but it was a good sized festival but one of the people inside said “hey, Netflix is a platinum sponsor, we can't touch this and it's one of those things.”

It was a Catch 22. It's like either If Netflix was a sponsor of a festival, the festival would have two reactions to it. One,  they didn't want to play anything that would piss off a big sponsor because you know festivals,  it's good to have sponsors give money towards your festival and the second is,  if they're not afraid of Netflix getting pissed off, but if they let in a documentary about a sponsor, then it looks like they're playing favoritism.

So it was definitely a challenge that we knew what was coming but I just think I think of Netflix as, which is weird to say,  our modern day Apple -  a company that shouldn't have succeeded but has on so many fronts,  and there's so many perfect moves that they made that sometimes it wasn't even their own intention. I mean Netflix never intended stream content. Netflix was always the understanding that you would download the movie from their service.  But the studios said "piracy, hell no," and that's why they shifted to streaming. And look at where they're at now, I mean they've changed the whole way people consume entertainment.

I was shocked I remember going back just like you,  back in the day when I used to work in entertainment press, I used to work in a show that aired in Spain. And I didn't think Netflix was going to make it because I was like all it's going to take is people are going to have to take their content back and Netflix is not going to have any content. I never foresaw Netflix just producing more amounts of content than even the studios could.

Q: So you mentioned that you put the movie out sooner than planned. Was it that you just knew festivals weren't happening and people were streaming. Is it Amazon who has it exclusively, or is it available other places?

A: it's right now just on Amazon. We might play it other places eventually, but currently, it's doing well on Amazon, which is promising because we have like no marketing budget So it's all writing personal emails to people to see if they would cover the film because this is an independent film. 

A funny thing is that when we first released a trailer,  in the trailer you would see people saying like "why am I gonna watch this, it's Netflix making a movie about themselves" or people would rate the trailer poorly because Netflix cancelled their favorite show. People would say "I'm never going to watch this because they canceled "Sense 8." And I'm thinking this has nothing to do about this. This is a dad of four in Texas with a former Reuters journalist, a female writer, this is as independent as you can get, like raising money from people that we know. But people just see the name and they just assume that you know it's got like half a million dollar budget behind it.

Q: Well that would be more a Disney thing. I mean, there are a lot of documentaries on Disney+ that are about Disney, most of which are made by Disney and sponsored by Disney, about extolling Disney, which is a very Disney thing to do. 

Is it on Amazon Prime for streaming, or is it on rental?

A: It's on Amazon for rental and purchase.

Q: And I guess it's been helpful to your film to have so many at home and streaming?

A:  Yeah, I mean there's people are just looking for content and the documentary space It's just exploded,  back in the day no one cared about documentaries. But now  you see a documentary like "Tiger King," which  sucks out all the energy in the world compared to "Extraction,"  I mean you put "Tiger King" next to  “Extraction" —  one's a big blockbuster type movie with Chris Hemsworth and one's about a redneck that owns tigers and "Tiger King" killed it.

Q: Another thing that Netflix is often in the news about these days is them fighting with movie theaters. They want to have the window be a certain thing, and the major theater chains are boycotting them. What do you think about that whole thing?

A: We touched on that slightly at the end. From my point of view like I understand where the theaters are coming from. I mean, this is their business model. I love going in movie theaters. It's tough because you go to a  theater This is one of the differences between Netflix and  the movie theater is that to go to the theater I have to put my kids in day care, so you're talking about day care costs, and then going to the theater, and then sitting down, you order the food and such, which is higher-priced. So it's just an experience that's different from watching at home.

But also, it's limited on what I'll see in the theater. I don't know if I'll go out and see a comedy, or if my wife wants to see a rom-com. I'll go out to watch a "Batman" movie or Marvel flick. It's gotta be a big experience, because you know, smaller-type movies I'll just watch it at home because I can't justify spending a hundred bucks. So I understand where the theaters are coming from, but it's just the battle of distribution, which has been going on from back in the day when the studios legally could own theaters. I forgot what the thing that Congress passed was called.

Q: The Paramount Decrees

A: Yes.

Q: Which I think they're taking steps to repeal.

A: Yes, I saw that, because Amazon's taking steps to buy AMC, I heard.

Q: Yeah that was a crazy report like a week ago but no one denied it. That's the kind of thing where it's a crazy thing that gets reported and it's not true It's usually the kind of thing that you know someone would deny it, if not just as an anonymous source, but no one did, so I'm thinking it's possible that it could happen.

A: I mean the stock price shot back up on AMC So yeah I know Wall Street seems to like it.

Q: I just remember last year  when “The Irishman” came out last year, and then “The Two Popes” and all the other Netflix Oscar contending movies,  I'm in Philadelphia which is a pretty major market. But there's one theater in the city that Netflix movies and it's on a tiny screen,  and that theater has since gone out of business.  So it's not like you can just go to a major theater and see “The Irishman” on a major screen, you'd be seeing on a tiny screen, when you can just watch it at home three weeks later. I'm interested to see how all that plays out the next couple of years.

A: I can't even imagine “The Irishman” existing outside of Netflix. I mean I watched it and made it through the first two hours,  and it took me another month to finish the movie just because it's so long, and it was such a commitment. I mean just imagine if Paramount would have ponying up that $200 million plus whatever the marketing costs, and then God knows how much Netflix threw at it for its Oscar campaign, so you're talking about it could have been like $500 million. There's no way if something like that ever making its money back.

But with you know with Netflix it's not about making the money back. Even if people check out a little bit of it-you know whatever it breaks down to the 160 million people that have Netflix to a $200 million Scorsese film,  I think they made up the budget in like a week or something like that It's crazy.  It's the Amazon model  where Amazon Prime never had to make money because they're making money from selling dog food and other products. Which if you're Paramount or Sony you can't really do that. If you release Bond, Bond's gotta hit for Sony, or else they're gonna be  in economic trouble.

Q: Anything else you'd like to add about the movie?

A: Like I said, I see [Netflix] as a modern-day Apple. The movie's good if you like documentaries but it's also good for people that aren't necessarily into the movie scene as in like "oh I I don't see indie films,"  well if you're an entrepreneur or you're into the business side I think it has a lot of business  knowledge in there that you can gain from it.  It's one of those things that it's it shows I mean everyone like we say like everyone thinks that Netflix is this big giant-but this was a small startup and not even Silicon Valley I mean in Scott Valley,  in the Best Western convention center.

It’s one of those things that if you just go back and you look at where this ginormous company came from I think people just kind of skip over it because it's part of saying you know people always talk about Amazon and Google and things like that,  but people just tend to forget about Netflix, and Netflix has his own sort of  Facebook type story.

Which it's interesting that if you think about  Netflix's the competition is Disney which they won't say it is but their competition is Disney and Hulu and those sort of streamers. But it's really the Apples and the Facebooks and those of the world's because Apple cake you come in and buy Netflix If they wanted to they've certainly put their toes in the water so this story could change dramatically again.  But who knows.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.