Lady Gaga on Her MTV Documentary Win and Reinventing Herself Through the Pain – Exclusive Interview
By Stuart Oldham
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Lady Gaga is five-foot two inches tall and still growing.
“I’m actually five-foot three and three quarters,” she clarified at Saturday’s MTV Movie and TV Awards.
The New York-born pop magnet, whose “Gaga: Five Foot Two” won best music documentary at the MTV event, has been largely out of the public eye since ending her Joanne World Tour in January, which grossed over $95 million in ticket sales.
Sitting backstage after the MTV taping, draped in black, she tells Variety she’s been holed up in the studio, readying for what could be the most pivotal year of her career, which will see her first major movie role in “A Star Is Born” opposite Bradley Cooper, a two-year Las Vegas residency that kicks off in December, and oh yeah, she’s working on a new album.
“I’m just always making music, I’ve always been that way and I think you see in ‘Five Foot Two’ that I’m a studio rat,” the 32 year-old says.
Netflix and Live Nation Prods.’ vérité-style doc, released in September, featured Gaga in her most vulnerable state yet, from rehearsing a high-wire performance at the Super Bowl to more down to earth moments like cooking at home, sitting poolside, topless, skewering “bulls-t” men and having a meltdown on the set of “American Horror Story.”
“All my insecurities are gone, I don’t feel insecure about who am I as a woman,” she says in the doc.
She tells Variety, “I made a decision really early on that I wanted Chris (Moukarbel, the film’s director) to have full access to me and my life. I just blocked the cameras out so they could capture the realities of my life.”
Moukarbel’s raw look at the global superstar also chronicled her battle with fibromyalgia and chronic pain, stemming from a hip injury she suffered three years ago that eventually cut her European tour short. She hopes by revealing the invisible illness it helps raise awareness and tackle ignorance about the disease.
“To anyone that doesn’t believe in fibromyalgia: I dare you to spend five minutes in my body on a day when I’m in pain, and then try and say it again,” she said of her condition.
Moukarbel, who has directed a handful of docs, including HBO’s “Banksy Does New York,” said his intention was never to make a movie about fame. “I think it happens to be a documentary about an artist who is famous. She has an opportunity to do a lot of things that other people haven’t. At the same time it also comes with all of these other conditions that she has to work against to make her art.”
“I wouldn’t call it a compromise,” Gaga says of her immersive lifestyle, “It’s more of a special gift called passion. And I’m just so passionate and what keeps me going is being inside the vortex of my art and creating and making things that are not only meaningful to me but hopefully to other people.
“When I’m with Tony Bennett, and we hang out, we always joke that we never work a day. Because we love what we do.”
