Kobe Bryant scrapped his original documentary and started from scratch because he's a control freak
However, it wasn't originally that way. In fact, "Muse" was filmed with many interviews of other people talking about Bryant. However, after it was finished, Kobe completely scrapped it and started over.
On "The Grantland Basketball House," Bryant told Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose that Phil Jackson was not in the documentary because he ditched all the interviews and started from scratch.
"One thing I noticed about the [documentary] and I gotta bring it up," said Simmons. "Because it is told from your point of view, and you had actually said that you had done it the traditional way with a bunch of different interviews and you decided 'you know what, I'm doing it my way,' which is actually kinda funny because it is a little like the way you played, 'I'm taking over.'"
Kobe simply laughed in agreement and responded "control what you can control" before moving on to explain that Jackson does have a big presence in the documentary since many of Kobe's philosophies come from Jackson.
Later, during his podcast, "The B.S. Report," Simmons went into more detail about the original "Muse" which never saw the light of day.
"The director, Gotham [Chopra], had been working on a pretty traditional documentary about Kobe for 7, 8, 9 months," Simmons said. "They interviewed like 40 different people. They had like a 3-hour Phil Jackson interview, etc., etc., etc.. Kobe sees the documentary is like, 'nah, I'm not feeling it.' Ends up, they go back in, film a whole bunch of new interviews with Kobe, because the director is like, 'well, if you are not feeling it, you gotta give me more in your interviews ... so they have these 40 interviews that nobody is ever going to see."
Kobe did hint during the appearance on "The Grantland Basketball Hour" that he may address his relationships with people in his life, like Jackson, at a time in the future and maybe these interviews will be included then.
But like anything in Kobe's world, that will only happen if he wants it to happen and you can be sure that he will be in control.