‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’ Director Explains How She Navigated the Sexual Assault Conversation

If you want a documentarian who can peel back the layers of a larger-than-life celebrity to reveal a vulnerable woman, then Lana Wilson is your gal. Three years after her critically acclaimed Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana—which arguably turned the ever-changing tide of public opinion towards the pop star back to adoring—Wilson has broken down the walls of a new famous subject: Brooke Shields.

Viewers of Wilson’s new two-part documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields—which began streaming on Hulu today—may be surprised how much they find themselves relating to the life story of the actress and model, who first found herself in the limelight at the age of 12 when she played a child sex worker in Louis Malle’s controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby. Shields became a sex symbol before even understanding the concept. “She was a symbol before she was a person,” Wilson told Decider in an interview over Zoom. “She was a child when she became a symbol before she even had consciousness of her own identity.”

Wilson stressed that Swift and Shields are “such different people with different journeys,” but, nevertheless, Wilson found a way to showcase both women’s humanity for the public eye like it’s never been done before. In the case of Shields, that included opening up for the first time publicly about an unnamed Hollywood producer raping her, early in her career. “She was simply ready to talk about it,” Wilson said. The filmmaker spoke to Decider about navigating that difficult conversation, pouring over the archived clips of Shields’ life, and cracking the outer shell of two very different, but very famous women.

Decider: How did Brooke first approach you about directing a documentary about her? What were those early conversations?

Lana Wilson: It was really just one early conversation. It was a project that the idea was from Ali Wentworth and George Stephanopoulos, who were starting a production company through ABC. I believe they reached out to my agent about it. I remember thinking, “Brooke Shields? Huh.” I knew who she was, but I didn’t know why, in a way. I knew she was very famous and very beautiful and a household name. But I grew up in the ’90s, so I knew her from sitcom stuff. I didn’t know what, and I was curious, so I went to meet her in person. I’d read her books, so I knew she was smart and deep and funny, and in person, even more so. I was struck by the fact, first of all, that she watched every film I had ever made, including my second film, which is in Japanese and about death. She watched that twice! [Laughs.]

She was so thoughtful, fearless, candid, and game for anything. She wanted someone to come in with a perspective and take a deep look at her life. My idea from the beginning was to interweave her personal story with a bigger cultural story about what she symbolized, because I noticed in that first meeting that something Brooke has struggled with is finding her identity. in relationship to what she symbolized. As you saw from the film, she was a symbol before she was a person. She was a child when she became a symbol, before she even had consciousness of her own identity. That’s what’s so unique about her.

Why did you decide to make this your next project, after the success of Miss Americana?

The thing that really made me convinced I had to do this was that at that first meeting, Brooke handed me a hard drive of stuff that her mom had collected from over 50 years, including hundreds of video clips and thousands of photos—and also hours and hours of footage from this never-finished documentary that Teri [Shields] had commissioned called Look at Brooke. I took the hard drive home and started randomly opening clips. The big thing that really got me excited was looking at the press tour for Pretty Baby, the Louis Malle film that Brooke did when she was 12. I saw her sitting on talk shows, often with her mom next to her, being praised for her beauty and her sensuality—being complimented on her body and her face—but then also being criticized for being too sexual, going too far, and participating [in] exploitation that some might consider child pornography.

I remember watching that and thinking, “This feels very contemporary.” I didn’t watch that thinking, “How horrible that people could get away with that stuff then!” I thought, “Wow, nothing has changed at all.” Girls are still in this situation where you’re told that the way you look is very important—your desirability and hotness as you get older, that’s the most important thing. We have powerful messages everywhere telling us that. But if you go too far, if you’re too sexual, if you cross some invisible line that no one knows where it is—it’s always moving—if you cross it, then you’re criticized, judged and punished. I thought it would be really interesting to look at Brooke’s experience from the perspective of 2023.

What did the process of going through all of that archival footage look like?

There were thousands of clips and photos. I think it was a little under a thousand clips, maybe like 800, 900. And some of these clips are like, 45-minute interviews. We were also getting stuff that was not on the hard drive, things that weren’t collected by Teri—but a lot of it was the Teri archive.  I had a team of researchers who were different ages, races, backgrounds, because I wanted lots of different perspectives on the material. Basically, we divided it up between the researchers, they watched absolutely every frame of everything, wrote up notes on it, and then we’d get together once a week. Everyone would talk about what resonated the most with them. If one person was in like, 1978 to 82, they could compare something they had seen to something from 1990 and 1995. Then I would watch all the highlights myself.

Ultimately, once the research team and I had gone through all the footage, and once we started doing all the sit-down interviews, I then wrote a short-story-like treatment, on how I thought the film would be, and how would it unfold. That was a guide. It helped me figure out the central theme of the documentary, which was Brooke finding her own agency. Brooke going from being an object to being a human being. [Brooke] fighting the expectations of objectification and saying, “I have ideas and a mind of my own and I’m going to speak it out and be heard.”

One of the most harrowing moments is when Brooke speaks about her experience with sexual assault—describing an unnamed film producer raping her— for the first time. Did you guys sort of know from the beginning that was going to be part of the documentary?

It was something she mentioned to me at our first meeting. I think it had been on her mind, and she was simply ready to talk about it. We had a really great conversation about it and she was like, “Do you think that’s something we should have in the documentary?” I said, “I think it depends on what the documentary is. I don’t think we should put it in just for the sake of sharing, if it doesn’t fit into the whole.” A documentary about Brooke Shields could be 100 different things, 100 different approaches and stories. I told her I think it’s about figuring out what is the perspective of this film. I think we should talk about it in the interview, but then I want to edit this, and see if it fits or not. Brooke was like, “That sounds good.” If we did include it, I would want to make sure—I had final cut, I had creative control—but with Brooke talking about the sexual assault, I told her I would want to make sure you feel completely comfortable with that section before we put it out into the world.

We talked about it in the interview, we worked it in the edit, and I did feel like it was a huge part of her story. It’s about Brooke gaining agency over her own life. The sexual assault she experienced was the ultimate violation of her autonomy, physically, emotionally, and mentally. And it was connected to experiences of compartmentalization and dissociation that she had earlier in her life. I absolutely saw it as an important part of her story—though not, by any means, the biggest part of the movie. When the film was completely finished, I showed it to her and I double-checked: “Sexual assault section, how do you feel about that?” She felt ready for this to be out here, and she felt it was sensitively handled. She had only one thought, on something she said in the interview but I hadn’t [initially] included it in that section. It’s very small, when she says “I was just so trusting.” She brought that up—she said, “The only thing I think that’s missing is the idea that I trusted. I didn’t think twice about it. This was someone I knew and trusted.” I was like yeah, let’s add that. It, even more, reflected Brooke’s experience. And I think something that is really relatable, which was part of what was so shocking to Brooke about this, and I think for a lot of survivors of sexual assault, is when it’s someone you know and trust. There are these ideas that rape is a stranger, someone coming out of the bushes, out of nowhere attacking you, when the reality is it’s very often someone who you know and trust.

You conclude the documentary with this striking scene of Brooke eating dinner with her husband and two daughters. Her daughters start talking about her movies, and it’s not quite heated, but everyone is being very honest and real. Tell me about filming that.

I always knew from the beginning too that I didn’t want to see Brooke’s daughters until the end of the film. You go on this journey with Brooke and her own relationship with her mother—which is the most important relationship of her life— go through postpartum depression, and then at the end, you see her daughters. It’s really powerful just to see them. I said to Brooke, “Let’s film you having dinner with your family,” thinking it might be only a visual moment. That could have been enough. But I was thrilled that it turned out to be so much more than that. When I was filming dinner, it was just me, the DP, and a sound person, so only the three of us. As they were starting to sit down at the table I said to her daughters, “Have you guys seen any of your mom’s early movies?” And then the family just started to talk. I just stepped back.

When you film in an observational style, sometimes you can feel like you’re intrusive. This is one of those rare, precious moments in observational filming where I truly felt like we melted into the wall. I threw out that question, and they talked for 90 minutes. Sometimes, the fact that you’re filming gives people the opportunity to talk about stuff they might never have talked about otherwise. Brooke told me afterwards—I mean you can see in this scene, she didn’t know they had seen clips of Pretty Baby on TikTok. It was almost like me saying, “Have you seen any of your mom’s early films?” lit a spark of a conversation everyone had been wanting to have. I was struck by how smart the daughters are, and how they do represent their generation in a lot of ways. It’s a family dynamic where people are speaking very freely, and I was just thinking, “This is not at all Brooke’s dynamic with her mom. How different it is.” I loved that they had this conversation where everyone’s sharing freely, and it does get tense sometimes, but they’re also supportive and respectful of each other. I thought it showed something that is so quintessentially Brooke, which is that she’s truly so devoted to learning and challenging herself. You see that happening in the conversation, where she’s hearing her daughters challenge her and saying “OK, you have a point there,” but on the other hand she’s also holding on to her truth at the same time, and saying, “This was my experience, on the other hand.”

You’ve now directed two documentaries about larger-than-life celebrities, and you’ve cracked their shell to reveal vulnerable, human women. What’s your secret? And how was your approach similar to, and different from, Taylor Swift and Brooke Shields?

My secret? I don’t know, people meet me and they trust me, kind of immediately. I don’t know what it is! A lot of the time, not with Taylor or Brooke, but with my previous documentaries, often time people are very skeptical, dubious this is ever gonna happen, you shouldn’t even waste your time coming to meet me. But then I meet them, and they’re almost immediately put at ease, and I’m in. I don’t know what it is, but it really is like that! It was like that when I met Taylor in person, and when I met Brooke in person. It’s a chemistry thing and a trust thing. But Miss Americana and Pretty Baby were completely different processes. They’re such different, such different people with different journeys, and such different films. Miss Americana was really a present-tense film, mostly a vérité of a pivot point in Taylor’s life. I spent a ton of time with her in person filming. With Pretty Baby, I didn’t spend a lot of time in person with Brooke. I mean we did talk at the beginning a bunch, and I did the interviews, and a little bit of contemporary filming. But this was almost entirely me in the archive of the decades of Brooke’s life, and me working with the editors. It was a lot less time together in person.

Do you notice a difference in how people treat a Taylor Swift documentary versus a Brooke Shields documentary, from audiences or critics?

I’ll be honest, I don’t read a lot of reviews at least not immediately because I’m too sensitive and fragile of a person. Maybe I’ll read stuff a year from now, but I’m not really on social media. I try not to follow it super closely. But audience reactions were really interesting to experience at Sundance. Brooke goes through so many things that a lot of people, especially a lot of girls and women, go through. But it’s all so amplified, it’s all on steroids because it’s public, and because she is simultaneously navigating being a symbol. What was interesting to me at Sundance is how many different ways in there are for people connect to such different things, depending on their own personal life experience. Some people’s own parent struggles with addiction, they would really connect to that. Someone else who’s gone through postpartum depression, they really connected to that section. For someone else who constantly felt sexualized or uncertain on how to express their own sexuality in a way that was socially accepted, they may connect to that section. It really is one of those films that is holding a mirror up to the person watching it.

You’re gaining a reputation as a documentarian of famous women, and I’m sure you’re fielding more requests. Are you interested in doing more documentaries like this? Or do you have other ideas for projects to go in a different direction?

I’ve already started my next project, actually, and it’s about psychics. I would say it’s quite different! But I’m game for anything. For me. it’s really about the person or people; the depth, the richness, what’s there. Is this something that is so rich and fascinating to me that I can live in it for two years, keep learning and revealing more things? I’m always looking for projects where you have this sense of peeling back the layers of an onion, and how it can create a really deep, emotional, powerful experience for the audience. Those are the kinds of things I’m looking for.