Director Lana Wilson had more access to pop sensation Taylor Swift than anyone has ever had, and Swifties can get a closer look at the star’s private life in the documentary “Miss Americana,” now streaming on Netflix.
“It felt like we had a lot of access — more than anyone’s ever had with her,” Wilson told TheWrap’s Beatrice Verhoeven at the Sundance Film Festival. “No one has ever filmed her in the studio before, and the interview I did with her at the beginning was the first interview she’d done in three years, so it felt very raw and fresh.”
In fact, Wilson explained, there wasn’t really anything that Swift considered off-limits. All Swift really wanted was to make an organic, genuine documentary, unlike the “conventional pop star documentary” we usually see.
“She was really very open — anything that compromised her security was off limits and that was understandably very important,” Wilson explained. “Her relationship [with actor Joe Alwyn] is private but we found a way to indicate the significance and the importance of her relationship in her life while respecting the privacy that she wanted to maintain with it.”
Indeed, “Miss Americana” shows the two embrace backstage after one of Swift’s concerts, and it’s one of the more closer looks fans have gotten at the pair who’ve been in a relationship since 2016.
“Miss Americana” also delves into Swift’s cancer battle, her relationship with dieting while in the public eye, and her evolving political stance. While always staying out of politics for the majority of her career, in 2018, Swift couldn’t take the “wait and see” approach any longer. For the first time ever, she used her fame to advocate for people needing to vote, causing a spike in voter registration. But that was never the intended focus of “Miss Americana,” although it surely is a driving factor.
“We started filming before that,” Wilson said. “I met her and started filming partly through her Reputation tour, so early 2018 and at that point, she had gone out of the public eye for about a year,” Wilson explained. “She was coming back into the public eye so she knew things were changing. She was trying to redefine the way she lived, she was redefining her relationship to public approval and public opinion. It was definitely a transitional period. The political stuff happened after we started filming.”
“Miss Americana” is now available on Netflix.
Watch the video above.