Courtesy NetflixThe documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two, now streaming on Netflix, is an intimate portrait of Lady Gaga as she records her album Joanne and prepares her Super Bowl halftime show. But director Chris Moukarbel [muh KAR bull] says you don’t need to be a Little Monster to enjoy the film.
“I don’t think you have to be a fan of hers to ‘get’ the movie,” Chris tells ABC Radio. “I think it’s a human story. It’s a portrait of a really fascinating person, a very unusual person who’s had an extraordinary experience.”
Chris, who spent months up close and personal with Gaga, says what surprised him the most is how unassuming she is. “She’s really modest, and sort of insecure about certain things,” he explains. “She’d get off stage and be, like, ‘Was that good? Did they like that? How did I sound?’ She sometimes doesn’t always know her power.”
One of the film’s most touching moments comes when we hear Gaga sobbing about how lonely she is. Chris says that private moment was accidentally recorded.
“Part of me was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m not supposed to be hearing this!’ but then I was like, ‘You know what? This is really at a core of so much of what I’m trying to do here,” he tells ABC Radio. Gaga later OK’d the audio.
Throughout the movie, we also see Gaga suffering from intense physical pain — the same pain which has caused her to postpone her European tour. Chris says that’s why he called the movie Five Foot Two, Gaga’s height.
“I wanted people to think about her stature and her frame,” he explains, “For me, so much of the movie does revolve around her body, about the limitations of her body.”
“There’s a lot [of the film that] probably isn’t very flattering,” he adds. “But that’s where the humanity is.”
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