‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’ Filmmaker Lana Wilson On Making It About Mom – Crew Call Podcast

After shooting the Taylor Swift documentary Miss Americana, deconstructing another pop icon in Brooke Shields was an organic segue for filmmaker Lana Wilson. The director is up for a Primetime Emmy nomination in Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program for the Hulu/ABC News docuseries Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

Wilson’s agent first brought the opportunity of a Brooke Shields doc to her attention after the concept was in the works via Alexandra Wentworth and George Stephanopoulos, who have a production deal at ABC News. Wilson tells us why the time was finally prime for Shields to tell all.

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Shields proved a documentarian’s dream subject, not holding back from her roller-coaster ride high of being a 1980s starlet in such dicey movies such as Pretty Baby, The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love to tabloid headlines as Andre Agassi’s wife and Michael Jackson’s Grammys date. Wilson wanted to make sure Shields would be “really game for an outsider’s perspective on them….I could see she was game.”

Key for Wilson was showing Shields and what she represented at different points in time as a cultural icon.

“It was hard for her to grow up as a child with the symbol Brooke Shields already being identified in these incredibly loaded ways: sexualized, exploited child star; later virginity, purity symbol. She was a persona and a symbol before she was a human and I like the idea of incorporating that tension into the film,” Wilson said.

However, above all, it was important to zero in on Shields’ manager mom Teri Shields, who not only battled alcoholism but went toe-to-toe with filmmakers themselves.

Wilson told Shields, “‘I think your mom deserves a complex portrayal because there was a deep love there, but she also caused you a huge amount of pain. I felt like we had to talk about all of it.”

“Teri Shields was so vilified in the media,” Wilson tells Crew Call. “[Brooke’s] mom was held solely accountable for all the sexual content as if all the people who were making the films had nothing to do with it.”

Wilson shares with us how the docuseries captures Shields’ own evolution as mother. We also talk with Wilson about her booming career as a documentary filmmaker, going back to her roots with her first big hit at the Sundance Film Festival in the 2013 abortion documentary After Tiller.

Listen to our conversation below:

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