The untold story of Whitney Houston's childhood abuse

When filmmaker Kevin Macdonald agreed to make Whitney, the first authorized documentary about Whitney Houston, he had one major request for the late singer's family. "The issue for me was very simple: they had to be willing to give me final cut," the director tells Yahoo Entertainment. "Making these kinds of films—celebrity portraits—unless you as the filmmaker have control, it's a slippery slope to hell." Striking that deal with the Houston family meant that Macdonald had final say over what went in the film, even if the information he turned up didn't present them, or Houston herself, in the best light. Of course, that also meant that the surviving family members were on their guard when they first sat down to be interviewed. "All the family were pretty reluctant to talk," Macdonald remembers. "In principal, they had agreed to be part of this film, but it's a different matter when they turned up to be on camera."