|
Post by Admin on Jan 29, 2020 18:05:53 GMT
Alissa Wilkinson At the premiere, Taylor said that you two weren’t really sure what kind of movie you were going to be making when you first got started. So how did this project end up happening?
Lana Wilson I was introduced to Taylor by Morgan Neville, who’s a producer on the film. I went to meet her in person, and she had watched some of my work. We talked for an hour about documentaries and storytelling.
I knew and loved her albums. I would tell friends, “Oh, you should listen to her early country stuff, because it’s such great songwriting.” I don’t know much about country music, but I knew she was an extraordinary songwriter. So I admired her, and knew she’d been writing her own songs for 15 years, and all of that. But I didn’t know anything about her personal life, or what she was really like beyond her songs.
So, when first met, we had a mutual admiration for each other’s work. She appreciated that my documentaries give audiences space to come to their own conclusions. They’re about gray areas and complexity. She really responded to all of that.
We talked about doing a documentary that felt raw and intimate and complex and messy. She was coming out of an important time in her life. She’d been out of the public eye for a year, and she was coming back. She wanted to keep making work and going out into the world, but she wanted to do it in a way where she wasn’t caring as much about getting everyone’s approval and getting everyone to like her.
That was something I related to, as a creative person. It’s terrifying to put your art into the world. You always hope everyone likes it, even though you know not everyone will like it. We’re all on social media and more conscious than ever of how we measure up to other people, and if people like us or not.
And I related to her as a female artist in a male-dominated industry. There is something different about needing to be liked by the people in your industry, by the people that you work with. You’re judged based on whether you’re likable or not if you’re a woman, in a way that you’re not if you’re a man. I immediately thought this could be incredibly rich and deep, and started filming. The evolution of her political, feminist consciousness leading to this decision to speak out politically, for me, was extraordinarily powerful to witness.
Alissa Wilkinson A lot of the big public events in the movie are familiar to most people who pay any attention to pop culture, but this movie feels like we’re getting access to behind-the-scenes footage. A lot of people thought they knew what was going on with Swift behind the news headlines, but that’s not necessarily true.
Lana Wilson Right. It was a challenge and a joy in the edit room to figure out how to do this. The film primarily covers about two years. But then, you have to ask, what elements of her backstory and her past do you need to know in order to have the context for the emotional journey she’s on now?
She’s had this 15-year career already, so we had an overwhelming amount of material to choose from. We ended up, in the edit room, deciding to use the archival footage as sparingly as possible; we just used what you needed to know to understand where she was coming from, and why [the decision to speak out] was so profound for her.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 30, 2020 1:40:18 GMT
Alissa Wilkinson It seems like putting together this story would be especially hard with a subject about whom everyone has preconceptions. Everyone thinks they know who Taylor Swift is. Your other films are about people who aren’t celebrities (though they’re public figures in their own way). Did it feel like you had to do something different to find what the story would be for this one? Lana Wilson Well, yes and no. I do feel like my other films are about people living in extraordinary circumstances. And they’re about giving audiences the chance to intimately experience [the subjects’] lives, even though their lives could probably not be more different than the audience members. So my approach was certainly common here. I was surprised by moments [in Taylor’s life] that I thought people could relate to, especially women and girls. So those were really the focus. But of course, it was very different in some ways than my other films, in terms of the amount of information that was publicly available about this person. And you’re right that people have all kinds of preconceptions about Taylor Swift. Alissa Wilkinson I think my favorite thing about the movie is how much we get to watch Taylor just work! Documentaries about artists’ processes fascinate me, and that’s a huge part of this movie. We get to just watch her write songs. I think it may also help show some skeptics she’s the real deal as a songwriter, especially for people who assume she’s just a manufactured pop star because she’s young and pretty and successful. Lana Wilson No one had ever filmed with her in the studio before. Alissa Wilkinson Ever? Lana Wilson Ever. She had occasionally used her own cellphone to film, which you see a little bit of in the film. It was fun for me, as a creative person too, to see the process. She’s always recording voice memos, or writing notes of lyrics in her phone. You have to do this as a writer — you have to catch ideas as they come. She’s such a pro at that. It’s fun to watch someone who’s just been such an extraordinary songwriter for 15 years, who has the craft down. I loved watching that. But no one had ever filmed with her in the studio before, so it was a process. I went in alone with a camera and planted myself in the corner. On day two, I might move around a little more. On day three, I might bring in a sound recordist. I try to make as small of a footprint as possible — just me, or me and one other person, in the room. It was a challenge. But I think in the end, she came to enjoy having us there. It’s different, but in my past films, with sensitive filming situations, I’ve tried to just be still and radiate support. I know I’m not invisible, and I’m not going to disappear. But I can become part of the process in a silent way. Alissa Wilkinson That’s the funny thing about documentary — it’s kind of like a science experiment. Things change under observation. But I do wonder, since Taylor is so used to the spotlight, if it’s different in her case. Did you feel like she was more or less aware of the cameras, aware of managing her image for the cameras, than someone else might have been? Lana Wilson You’d have to ask her, honestly. I think my presence felt different than those of other people filming her have been in the past. I mean, this is someone who has paparazzi after her all the time. And just seeing a camera out of nowhere — it’s scary. A camera has the potential to be a destructive — and has been — a destructive force in her life. The microscope she’s been put under by the media and by the public, and it’s not just about her music. It’s about her as a person. She is without peers, in a lot of ways. She’s writing all her own songs. A totally self-created artist who’s been doing this for 15 years, at the top of her game. But to say she has no peers is both a compliment and a quandary, because there aren’t a lot of role models to look at. She’s doing this under intense layers of public scrutiny, both about her as an artist and a person. And she’s somehow managed to maintain her humanity and her sense of humor despite all of that. That was amazing for me to see. Alissa Wilkinson I think some people are going to assume she really managed this portrait of her, too. Which might be because you don’t really appear in the documentary. Lana Wilson Yes. I don’t put myself in my documentaries. I never have. There’s one point in the film where you hear my voice, and that was the idea of one of our editors, Lindsay Utz. I thought it was a great idea. Alissa Wilkinson It’s you asking Taylor a follow-up question, right? Lana Wilson Yeah. She says there’s no such thing as a bitch or a slut, and then apologizes, then asks herself why she’s apologizing. You can hear me saying, “Well, we’re trained to say sorry.” It was a great thing to have in there, because it relates to something a lot of women experience. If you speak out too much or go too far, or you’re too strong or assertive, you’re like, “Oh, God. I’m so sorry. Did I offend you? Is that okay?”
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Jan 30, 2020 18:54:25 GMT
Swift hasn’t been to a Grammys ceremony since 2016, when—at 26—she took home three trophies, including her second Album of the Year for the multi-platinum 1989. But the awards loom large in Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, the much-anticipated documentary (which premiered last week at Sundance and will hit Netflix on Friday, Jan. 31) that traces her life in the years that followed. One of the film’s most revealing vignettes takes place in late 2017, when Swift learns that 1989’s divisive follow-up, Reputation, has failed to earn a single nomination in any of the Grammys’ major categories. “This is fine,” she declares into her phone, studiously calm but also palpably hurt. “I need to make a better record.” There’s a lot going on in that reaction. Like most superstars, Swift doesn’t need the Grammys nearly as much as they need her. So she could have shrugged off her snub. After all, it’s not like the Recording Academy is known for its consistent good taste. (The same year Reputation was passed over for AOTY consideration, Bruno Mars’ bland 24K Magic beat out far superior albums by Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Jay-Z and Lorde.) Or she could’ve gone to the opposite extreme, raging against her exclusion from an honor to which she, as one of the most successful pop musicians in the world, felt entitled. Instead—ever beholden to the opinions of others—she accepts the outcome as a valid criticism of her latest album. At this point in her career, Swift is still striving for the approval she sought as a teenage country prodigy. “My entire moral code is a need to be thought of as good,” she admits early in the film. The cursory, unfocused, overly stage-managed but occasionally fascinating Miss Americana is, more than anything else, the story of how a pop star stopped worrying and learned to speak her mind. Directed by Lana Wilson, a filmmaker best known for such dead-serious fare as the acclaimed 2013 documentary After Tiller, about late-term abortion providers, the movie is a bit of a hodgepodge. Interviews that read as intimate but don’t always provide new insight into Swift’s experience sit alongside performance footage and frustratingly short clips of casual hangouts with friends and family. A scene in which she, her beloved mom Andrea and Andrea’s giant dog endure turbulence at mealtime on an airplane is pure physical comedy. (Pets, particularly Swift’s cats, get a lot of screen time in the doc.) In the studio, we watch her bang out hits from last year’s swooning comeback album Lover with a pro’s finesse and the infectious glee of a musician who savors the songwriting process. The result is less a cohesive story than a patchwork of mismatched topics and situations that Wilson attempts to sew together with threads of an extremely public, ever-intensifying Taylor Swift narrative. Those lucky few who don’t do social media or follow celebrity news might not realize that the singer had a rocky few years immediately after 1989’s triumph—by the standards of an industry juggernaut who never stopped selling out stadiums or releasing hit records, at least. April 2016 brought Kanye West’s “Famous,” on which the rapper muses, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous” (a reference to that time, seven years earlier, when he’d humiliated both Swift and himself by interrupting her MTV VMAs acceptance speech to protest that “Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time”). The conflict escalated on social media. Meanwhile, during the all-important 2016 presidential election, Swift declined to endorse either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, in a move that was widely perceived as self-serving.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Feb 4, 2020 1:05:30 GMT
Taylor Swift's documentary, Miss Americana, debuted on Netflix last week — and there's one particular moment that some eagle-eyed fans can't stop talking about. In the scene where Taylor is explaining why she wants to speak out about politics, she raises her left hand to reveal a large piece of bling on the ring finger. This is, of course, the very same finger that many people traditionally save for engagement rings 👀. There have long been rumors that Taylor and her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, are engaged — and considering how private they are about their relationship, it wouldn't be the MOST shocking thing if they were keeping the news under wraps.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Feb 5, 2020 21:25:25 GMT
It looked a bit comical from a distance when Kanye West bigfooted Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards with his “Imma let you finish” interposition. But Swift, then 19, was genuinely crushed: “I thought that they were booing me,” she explains now. Of course! A male artist would have allowed his aggression to surge, gotten angry, ordered Ye to step off, bro. Swift, though, is definitively feminine. She is eager, indeed anxious, about being pleasing. “For someone who has built their whole belief system on getting people to clap for you,” she says, “the whole crowd booing is a pretty formative experience.”
Swift doesn’t add this, indeed can’t add this because some things can’t be said, but the racial element must have been particularly unnerving. A black artist interrupted her to say that another black artist (Beyoncé) had been robbed of the trophy Swift was holding. She must have felt stamped a beneficiary of racism and that the crowd agreed with West. What could she do except disintegrate?
Swift walks us through all of this in Miss Americana, the new Netflix documentary that is partly (an extremely circumspect) biography, partly the story of the making of her latest pop masterpiece, and partly an apologia for her political awakening. The film is convincing evidence that you can bestride the planet like a sparkly cheeked, thigh-booted Colossus (Colossa?) and yet feel besieged, beleaguered, and frail. “There’s a part of me,” Swift says, “that feels like I’m 57 years old.”
Understandable. The pressures Swift faces are more asphyxiating than those that squeezed the life out of many male predecessors. John Lennon didn’t need to worry about whether people would say mean things about his tummy, and Kurt Cobain didn’t have to master dance moves or come up with a new look every 18 months. Swift is so talented that she could sell out Madison Square Garden if she looked like Dianne Feinstein, but her teen-girl fan base is so visually oriented that she faces another level of toil atop the necessity to keep coming up with great songs. Under the circumstances, Lover, an album alive with Tigger-ish jubilance in tracks such as the affirmational “ME!” and the adorable “Paper Rings,” feels like a spectacular comeback, especially after the doomy fug of her previous record, Reputation, in which resentment, frustration, and anger started to be a drag on her talent. “Maybe I got mine but you’ll all get yours,” she intoned, seethingly. Lover, though, is so world-crackingly brilliant it was even shut out at the Grammys, the idiot rodeo where Christopher Cross is adjudged better than London Calling and A Taste of Honey (that’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass) towers over the Beatles’ Revolver. Even a slightly preachy song on Lover, “You Need to Calm Down,” is a bubble show of fun, and in one especially delightful moment in the documentary, Swift explains the reasoning behind “ME!”: “I just want kids to be, like, ‘There’s no one like me!’” In the coming Billie Eilish documentary, I fully expect a scene in which she explains how her songs are, par contre, meant to inspire kids to cut themselves.
|
|