Lana Wilson admits that coming off Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana in 2020, she “wasn’t sure, to be honest” about making one other documentary a few movie star. A day in dialog with Brooke Shields — and the handoff of a loaded arduous drive — modified her thoughts.
The director of Pretty Baby — the brand new Hulu doc about Brooke’s life in the highlight, beginning as a child mannequin and going on to be essentially the most photographed girl in the world as folks obsessed over her look — remembers to Yahoo Entertainment that first assembly, on the dwelling of George Stephanopoulos and Ali Wentworth, who’re producers of the movie.
“I’d read both of Brooke’s books before, so I knew she was really smart and funny and deep,” Wilson says. “When I met her in person, she was kind of what I expected even more so — even more smart and funny and deep than I had anticipated. And I was really struck by her thoughtfulness, her level of introspection, of self-awareness. She had watched all of my movies, including my second film [1997’s The Departure], which is about death and is entirely in Japanese, and she had watched that one twice. So I thought: She’s not joking around here.”
What “really clinched it,” nonetheless, was the Suddenly Susan star, 57, giving her a tough drive of in depth archival materials, collected by Shields’s late mother and one-time supervisor Teri Shields, for Wilson to take a look at and contemplate.
“She handed me a hard drive — that I later learned was the only copy of this material, which is a bit frightening to think of in retrospect. I rode the subway home. It was jostling everywhere,” she says, noting she solely realized it was the solo copy after the finished movie screened at Sundance. “It was material her mom had collected for almost 50 years. Hundreds and hundreds of pieces of video, photographs of Brooke— over 1,000 items in total, including outtakes from a never completed documentary Teri commissioned called Look at Brooke. I got home and I started opening random files and was just astonished by what I saw. So that made me think: I’ve got to make this.”
Wilson pored over the outdated interviews with little one star Brooke, including round her controversial function in 1978’s Pretty Baby, in which the then-11-year-old portrayed a toddler prostitute, including nude scenes. Some of these interviews are included in the doc, displaying Brooke, and her controversial momager, being criticized for the exploitative function, with comparisons made to little one pornography — and in the following breath, praised for her magnificence and poise.
“I remember watching that thinking: This is a dynamic that hasn’t gone away at all,” Wilson says concerning the calls for on women and girls, which persists right now. “Nothing has really changed since then. I think girls are still in this situation, where they’re taught growing up that the way you look is the most important thing and your power comes from how you look — and from specifically being desirable to straight men. On the other hand, if you’re too sexual, if you cross some kind of invisible line — and the line is always moving, you don’t know where it is — you’ll be punished and blamed for whatever happens to you.”
So her imaginative and prescient grew to become to “look at this through the lens of 2023.” And whereas the larger story is “Brooke’s personal story” — the criticism, the exploitation, her sophisticated relationship with Teri, the general public dialogue about her virginity, her romantic relationships and battle with postpartum melancholy — “but it’s also the story of Brooke Shields the symbol and how that was like holding a mirror up to American society in terms of what we thought about women and girls at different points in time.”
The archival footage is the important thing a part of the movie since you observe Brooke from child to right now — and watch her change alongside the best way as she finds her voice. Wilson says it is “a little like that Richard Linklater movie Boyhood,” from 2014, “where part of what’s so powerful is seeing this person grow up truly in front of your eyes.” There have been additionally 4 days of latest interviews with Brooke, Brooke in dialog with her long-time pal Wentworth in addition to a day observing Shields with her husband, Chris Henchy, and daughters at dwelling.
In one of many new interviews, Brooke revealed for the primary time that she had been sexually assaulted in her 20s when attempting to revive her profession after graduating from Princeton. She spoke concerning the horrific expertise, involving an unidentified movie producer she met to debate a job alternative, and the way it took her a very long time to course of what occurred.
Wilson tells us she wasn’t certain she’d even embrace the traumatic expertise — throughout which Brooke, in worry for her life, froze and disassociated — in the movie and explains her reasoning.
“It’s something she brought up at our very first meeting … ‘There’s one thing I’ve never talked about publicly before, but I think I’m ready…'” she remembers. “I did think it was a really powerful story right away because Brooke speaks about her experience in a way that’s looking very much inside the experience of what it felt like then, how she’s processed it since and inside this space of not knowing what to call it at the time, blaming herself, feeling culpable, not just when it was happening, but for many, many decades afterward, beating herself up for not fighting back more. And I think that a lot of her experiences are really common ones to have and that a lot of what happens when you experience a sexual assault is you think: I’m to blame for that. I should have handled that differently…”
But whereas Wilson knew Brooke’s story would resonate, “I also told her, I don’t think we should make any decision now on whether it’s in the film or not, because it depends on what the movie is. I don’t think we should include this just because it’s new. I don’t want to include your experience of sexual assault as like a news item. I only think it should be in there if it’s an integral part of the focus and the story of this film. So let’s talk about it in an interview and and let me bring it into the edit and see.”
She says Brooke was high quality with that and because the movie began taking form, with Brooke’s evolution “in gaining agency over her own life,” she thought it was “an important part of that story because I saw it as the ultimate violation of Brooke’s autonomy — physically, mentally, emotionally.”
Now she says, “It’s hard for me to imagine the film without it. Although, just so you know, I also don’t see it as the most important sequence or moment.”
Wilson additionally says that whereas she had artistic management over the undertaking, she informed Brooke, “‘The exception to that is the sequence, if we use it, about your sexual assault. I want you to feel completely comfortable with it if it goes out into the world.'” When she confirmed her the completed movie, she checked in on whether or not Brooke was OK with it and she was, feeling it was “sensitively handled.”
Another impactful a part of the movie was Brooke talking right now in element about postpartum melancholy, which she had after the delivery of her elder daughter, Rowan Henchy, in 2003. While she’s spoken of it earlier than, including in her 2005 ebook Down Came the Rain and on Capitol Hill, in the movie, she provides a uncooked, unfiltered recollection of her mindset on the time and the unsettling ideas she was experiencing towards herself and her little one.
“Interestingly, I was actually pregnant when she was retelling the experience,” says Wilson, who lately grew to become a first-time mum or dad. “She was like: ‘Are you sure you want to hear this in your present condition?’ I was like: ‘Yes, [I’m] actually desperate to hear this.’ I read her book, which I thought was great, but in the interview she went even further in some ways and I just thought it was a gift. This is stuff that very often people don’t even discuss within their own friends and peer groups with this level of candor. I desperately wanted to hear this because there’s so much cultural pressure on people who are pregnant becoming mothers and so many romanticized ideas about what that is like and what it means and what it’s like to go through. So I felt personally grateful to her to have heard all of this.”
Wilson thought it was “extra brave” of Brooke to share particularly as a result of the connection she had with her mom “had been so deeply scrutinized. This idea that Teri was a bad mom. Now Brooke Shields is coming forward saying that she is not the ideal mom that she had always wanted to be made it extra courageous to me.”
Brooke’s two daughters seem on the finish of the movie, bringing the story full circle because the lady firstly, virtually a marionette managed by her mother, is now the mom who discovered her voice and her approach and is having a sensible and import dialog with her youngsters. They have been filmed at dwelling over dinner, for observational movie footage, after Wilson began the dialog by asking Rowan, now 19, and Grier, 16, if that they had seen their mom’s early movies. In the movie, Rowan referred to as Pretty Baby “child pornography, technically” whereas Grier mentioned, “The movie itself is about something that’s not OK now.”
“I always knew I only wanted to see her daughters at the very end,” Wilson says of the highly effective scene. “I thought when you go through this challenging, deep, loving but painful relationship Brooke has with her mom and then [her] postpartum depression, how rewarding will it be to see her daughters in front of your eyes at the end of the film?”
She wasn’t anticipating it to be greater than a picture of the ladies with their mom, however the scene performed out naturally and she knew she needed to embrace it.
“They just started talking and I stepped back,” Wilson says. “I think that one question kind of lit a spark … and gave everyone the freedom to talk about some stuff they might not have talked about otherwise.”
She continues, “I remember thinking at the end of that night: That was something really special. Not just because of the content of what they talked about, and how incredibly resonant it was with the rest of the film, which I had mostly edited already, but because of the dynamic between Brooke and her kids … and [how] it was so different than her dynamic with her mom, where she wasn’t going to challenge her… I think we even see Brooke having a revelation in that moment, reconsidering her own point of view, but they do it in a loving and supportive way… I was really moved by it.”
Pretty Baby is out now, airing in two components on Hulu.
If you or somebody you understand has been sexually assaulted, assist is obtainable. RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline is right here for survivors 24/7 with free, nameless assist. 800.656.HOPE (4673) and on-line.rainn.org.
If you or somebody you understand is experiencing suicidal ideas, name 911, or name the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-8255 or textual content HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
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