Filmmaker with Trump around January 6 says he can't understand why Trump's aides didn't know about his project

• A documentary about the Trump family reportedly blindsided his aides.
• Filmmaker Alex Holder told Insider he doesn't know why the aides were surprised about the project.

The filmmaker who got special access to Trump around the January 6 insurrection told Insider that he did not understand why aides of former President Donald Trump said they didn't know about his film.

Alex Holder spent months interviewing the former president and his three eldest children — Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr. — as part of a special project documenting the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath.

Last month, most of the film's footage was subpoenaed by the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

The news — first announced by Politico — reportedly blindsided the Trump camp. Holder said that was odd since his work involved several people, large cameras, took up a fair amount of the Trump family's time and involved going into controlled settings like Air Force One and the White House.

"I still don't really understand how anyone could have not known about this," Holder told Insider in response.

Holder said that he didn't go out of his way to tell people about the project, but that he and his team were also not trying to hide anything.

"You can't exactly get onto Air Force One invisibly and you can't get into the most secure building in the world, the White House, invisibly," Holder told Insider.

"We were there multiple times, we interviewed the three eldest children multiple times, and obviously the president himself three times, and so it's a bit strange that there are people from the Trump camp who are saying they didn't know about it," he added.

A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Shortly after Holder's footage was subpoenaed, The New York Times's Maggie Haberman tweeted that senior campaign officials had been unaware of the project.

"A very small group of people had knowledge of this documentary project, and a lot of Trump advisors were surprised to see it existed," said Haberman, one of the most respected authorities on Trump and his circle.

Rolling Stone also reported that senior officials had only learned of the subpoena from the Politico article, with one former top official telling the outlet: "What the fuck is this?"

Holder told The Hollywood Reporter last month that after pitching his idea for the documentary to the Trump family, they were "game to participate" because they were "very confident in terms of winning the election."

Last month, Holder said the family was not promised any "editorial control" over the final production, pushing back after Trump allies told CNN they were.

Holder's documentary is due to be broadcast in full on the Discovery+ streaming service early on July 10.