Gaga Media
In an interview at a Toronto Studio with Deadline, director of Gaga: Five Foot Two, Chris Moukarbel talks about Lady Gaga and how the process of filming the doc took place.
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When Moukarbel appeared, Gaga was initially reluctant. “She wasn’t trying to have a documentary made, and she allowed me in,” the director told me at Deadline’s Toronto Studio. “She said that she was just going to be doing her thing—cooking and going to the studio, and basically not having expectations, because she wasn’t doing anything interesting. But it’s all interesting, right?”
For Moukarbel, though, trust between himself and Gaga came fairly easy.”For me, it was about establishing in the beginning that she had agency, obviously, for me to turn the camera off if she needed me to. I told her right away, ‘I’m just going to shoot everything that I see, and if you ask me not to shoot something, I’ll shut it off,’” he explains. “We kind of established that trust right away, but she’s also very intuitive. I feel like we just kind of got each other and she felt comfortable with me, and she realized if she didn’t trust me, if she didn’t feel safe, she wouldn’t have done it at all.”
“She really didn’t even watch the movie until the premiere. I think she understood that for this to be good, for it to work, she had to let the process have its space,” Moukarbel reflects. “So she gave a lot.”
“It’s funny, I think my expectations were similar to a lot of people’s, where you think she’s going to be this off-the-wall character,” he says.
