25 October: Selena and Alek Keshishian talks about “My Mind and Me” with Vanity Fair

In the new interview with Vanity Fair, Selena and the director of her new documentary “My Mind And Me”, Alek Keshishian, talks about filming process, the meaning of documentary and gives some new sneak peeks from behind the scenes.

When Selena Gomez began filming her abruptly halted 2016 tour, she had no idea the resulting film would become her most confessional project to date: “The documentary took on a life of its own,” she tells Vanity Fair via email. Over the course of six years, what began as footage of her Revival tour morphed into Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, an unflinching look at the pop star’s mental health journey that debuts on Apple TV+ November 4. “It was never this thought-out plan thinking we were going to capture these very personal parts of my life,” Gomez says. “It just evolved from there.”

“I had seen Truth or Dare and thought it was one of the most brilliant music documentaries that’s ever been shot,” Gomez tells VF. “I watched it seven times. It’s an actual work of art. This isn’t just, ‘Here I am on tour and I’m going through things.’ It was a glimpse into someone’s life, and it had respect and love and empathy, and nothing was sugarcoated.” She continues, “I knew if I were ever to make a doc, I wanted Alek to direct it.”

Check out more stills with Selena from behind the scenes of My Mind And Me in our gallery at: gallery.armyofselenagomez.com

The only snag? Keshishian had long sworn off movies about musicians. “I’d said no to all music docs,” he tells me in his first interview about the project. “I was like, I don’t want to repeat myself.” Still, the filmmaker couldn’t help but be charmed by Gomez. “I kind of fell in love with how authentic and vulnerable and real she was. I was expecting a very manufactured person, and I didn’t get that,” Keshishian continues.

“[Madonna] was one of the top three most well-known people in the world because there wasn’t a constellation of stars. There was [Princess] Diana, Michael Jackson, Madonna,” he explains. “By the time Selena came to me, it was a very different universe. So what was revolutionary during Madonna’s time—ironically I think it’s stopped being revolutionary now. I didn’t need to see more stars trying to outrage the public. For me, I got that enough on social media.”

“But what was fascinating to me was, there was this girl who somehow hadn’t put on that armor of the public facade. This young woman has no guile. She is not someone who is savvy about how she should present herself. It doesn’t give her any pleasure and it’s not in her DNA. So in that respect, for the time we’re living in, I was like, This is a one-of-a-kind subject matter.”

Keshishian did have one condition: “You have to give me access to everything,” he told the then 24-year-old. “And she did.”

Two weeks into filming Gomez’s turbulent Revival tour, which would be scrapped after 55 performances amid her struggles with anxiety and depression, cameras went dark. “Things were starting to go off the rails a little bit with her personally. You see it in the movie,” he tells me. “And it didn’t feel like the timing was right. It felt intrusive and, I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right to me as a human being.”

The intimacy and trust Keshishian builds with Gomez—who shares her “darkest secrets” via journal entries and bedroom confessionals—was hard-earned. “See, with Madonna, in four days, we were like best friends,” he says. “Selena, we had a connection, but I was much older than she was, and she looked up to me as a filmmaker. I couldn’t have had the relationship I had with Selena in the beginning that I had with her when she had her lupus relapse [in 2020] and asked me to keep shooting. That was earned over time.”

And Gomez gave that trust in full. “She never wanted to come into the edit room,” Keshishian says. “She never micromanaged a single thing about this film.” When he showed her a two-and-a-half-hour original cut of the film, they both agreed it wouldn’t be the final version. “She said to the people financing the movie and Apple, ‘I want to give Alek more time,’ which was huge. So she supported me as an artist,” he adds. About nine months later, Gomez watched the near-final edit. Her reaction? “It’s what needs to be said.”

“I was very aware that what I didn’t want was to do a social media look at the behind-the-scenes of Selena’s life. It had to go deeper,” he says. “It had to be somehow more authentic and raw.” The filmmaker admits to shooting some of Gomez’s more buzzy events, but scrapping the footage in search of the unguarded moment.“There’s easily a 10-hour docuseries from this material we could have done,” he explains. “But I wasn’t making this just for her fans. I was trying to tell a story, hopefully, for people who don’t even know Selena or need to know her music.”

That meant exploring Gomez’s preoccupation with the past. “I think my past and my mistakes is what drives me into depression,” she says in the documentary. And yet much of the film delves into her childhood in Grand Prairie, Texas, a version of her life that she left behind for roles on Barney and Disney. “I thought it was important to show a more uncomplicated time in my life,” Gomez says of these scenes. “Before I started working at a young age, by all accounts I had a relatively ‘normal’ childhood. We didn’t have a lot, but I never felt that.”

The documentary’s focus on mental health crystallized when Keshishian filmed Gomez accepting the 2019 McLean Award for mental health advocacy. “I was like, Holy F, this girl is literally just beginning a recovery journey, but she’s desperate to help others,’” he recalls. “There’s this tension because to help others, she has to really reveal herself. She’s this little fragile being and she’s still struggling, but she desperately wants to use her experience to help others.”

Mental health is an endlessly messy and never fully reconciled journey. As such, the movie doesn’t wrap up Gomez’s story in a neatly tied bow. “I even said to Selena recently: ‘The real ending of my documentary isn’t in the film. The real ending of my documentary is each day that she’s alive and she’s doing something,’” Keshishian tells me. “All I care about is if it can help somebody watching it find a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of light to pick themselves up and to remember that you can change the world even if you’re broken,” he continues. “You don’t have to be a pop star.”

Says Gomez, “As nervous as I am to put out something this personal, in my heart I know now is the time. I hope that by sharing my experiences and difficulties, it will help people feel inspired to share their own stories. And to have hope that things can and will get better.”

Check out new sneak peaks and ADS with Selena from My Mind and Me.

Source: www.vanityfair.com