Sony Music Vision Producing Documentary On Lisa, Blackpink Singer, Solo Artist & ‘White Lotus' Star
From Blackpink to White Lotus, the career of Thai singer, rapper, dancer, and actress Lisa is exploding. Now a documentary is in the works about Lisa's past year when she took a break from the K-Pop group to go solo for the first time, while dazzling with her acting debut in the hit HBO drama (she also found time to perform at the Oscars and appear solo at Coachella).
Award-winning filmmaker Sue Kim (The Speed Cubers, The Last of the Sea Women) is directing the film titled simply LISA. She tells Deadline she just completed the documentary's final shoot with Lisa in South Korea, where the singer was reunited with Blackpink. Fresh from Seoul, Kim took part in Sony Music Vision's first ever content showcase in Hollywood Thursday night, explaining her vision for the project.
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'We've all seen Blackpink, we've all seen Lisa on stage. But I really wanted to get to know Lisa in her resting state and who Lisa is with her family and with her parents who she's super close to,' Kim said in conversation with moderator Taylor Rooks. She added that Lisa proved open to allowing access to her inner circle.
'She was actually texting her friend group from Bangkok, her childhood friends, and immediately just told them, 'Hey, we're coming to Bangkok. We're making a film about my life. I want you to be part of it, and we just have to be how we are with each other,'' Kim recalled. 'As soon as I found out that that's the message she was sending them, I had a great feeling. I knew immediately that Lisa was a very willing participant in this story, which isn't always the case with celebrity docs. And I knew that she would give us the access and the intimacy that not just I was hoping to get, but that I know that the world wants to see.'
Lisa, 28, was born Lalisa Manobal in Buriram, Thailand. She made her first appearance with Blackpink in August 2016; in the years since, BP has become the most successful female K-Pop group of all time.
'When Sony Music Vision first approached me about telling this story, I was immediately interested, not just because I have such an admiration for her, but I also knew the very specific place she was in life which was she was taking a hiatus from Blackpink for a year,' the filmmaker commented. 'So many people in her position I think could have just taken a break, caught up on sleep, caught up with friends, or simply just stayed in their swim lane… I knew she was going to be premiering in her acting debut in The White Lotus, which she'd never acted before, and that's an insanely visible, beloved TV series, and that takes a lot of guts, a lot of courage to make that your acting debut. I also knew she was going to be recording a solo album, and I knew that musically she was going to be stepping away from K-Pop and exploring her musical identity.'
Sony Music Vision is producing LISA in partnership with LLOUD CO./RCA Records and Tremolo Productions (the latter Oscar winner Morgan Neville's company). At the showcase at Neue House, SMV also unveiled footage from Frank Marshall's upcoming Barbra Streisand documentary, Baz Luhrmann's film EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, as well as details on a documentary in production that's following Oasis musicians Liam and Noel Gallagher as they embark on a world tour.
The Marshall Plan
Marshall, a five-time Oscar nominee and Irving G. Thalberg Award winner known for Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Sixth Sense, Jurassic World, The Color Purple and much more, first encountered Streisand on a film set more than 50 years ago.
'I was Peter Bogdanovich's assistant and location manager on What's Up, Doc? in 1972, and that's where I first met Barbara,' he said at the content showcase. 'It was sort of a film school for me.'
Alex Gibney is producing the Streisand project, with Marshall directing. The two previously collaborated on Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, with Gibney directing that and Marshall producing.
'Barbra had watched a documentary about Frank Sinatra that Alex and I did, and she was considering directors and producers for a documentary that she was doing. She was in the middle of writing her book [My Name Is Barbra],' Marshall recounted. '[Streisand's manager] said, 'Would you be interested, Alex?' And Alex called me and said, 'Hey, let's go out and meet.' And we did and we went out to Malibu, and we met Barbra and it went great. And so we decided to jump on the project and it's been fabulous ever since.'
They've been immersed in Streisandiana maintained in a climate-controlled facility in Hollywood. 'We've got to dive into this incredible archive that's over here in Iron Mountain,' Marshall said. 'Unbelievable. So, we're very excited about putting this all together.'
Breaking Baz News
Baz Luhrmann could barely contain his excitement as he talked about EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert. The project continues his exploration of the King, which began with his 2022 narrative Elvis featuring starring Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker and Austin Butler as Presley.
'I would've thought that Elvis had left my building by now,' he cracked. The Australian filmmaker said EPiC defies easy categorization. It's 'not specifically a documentary, nor a concert film: Elvis takes the audience through the journey of his life, weaving never-before-seen footage with iconic performances that have never been presented in this way, from the 1970 Vegas show, on tour in 1972 and even precious moments of the 1957 'gold jacket' performance in Hawaii,' he said. 'Most importantly, Elvis will sing and tell you about his life in first person, through both classic and contemporary musical prisms.'
The footage he shared Thursday night shows the extraordinary power of Elvis's charisma, his musicianship, and – how would one put it? – his interesting taste in performance attire. Some of his rhinestone-studded mini-capes, when flared, make him look like a flying squirrel.
The EPiC project grew out of his research on the Elvis narrative feature. 'When I was making the film, I had heard of this probably apocryphal footage that existed of Elvis in the Vegas [International Hotel] show, maybe on tour. And I thought that maybe we could find it and reconstitute, actually use it in the movie,' he said. 'I had the funds to get them to go and look for it in the salt mines and rather astonishingly… it not only existed, but we [also] found 59 hours of footage, including anamorphic 35, never before seen; 8mm [film], never before seen, from the '50s.'
Only problem? 'There was no sound,' on it, Luhrmann said. 'But what we were able to do, I've been with the wonderful Peter Jackson down in New Zealand, and he's been so kind on this because he's so brilliant at it, is we found [a way] to claw back the sound of some footage that you've seen. And we now know what he was saying in a lot of this footage.'
Sony Music Vision is coming off a highly successful run of documentaries leveraging its artist roster and music library. Luther: Never Too Much, directed by Dawn Porter, explored the late Luther Vandross; Usher: Rendezvous in Paris, directed Anthony Mandler, took viewers to the City of Lights with the R&B superstar; Cyndi Lauper: Let the Canary Sing, directed by Alison Ellwood, documented the She's So Unusual singer; and I Am: Celine Dion, from director Irene Taylor, revealed the triumphs and struggles of the chanteuse from Québec who has battled Stiff Person Syndrome and yet continues to perform at the highest level (you know what we mean if you saw her sing at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics last summer). The Celine film turned into a huge success.
Tom Mackay, president of premium content for Sony Music Entertainment, told the showcase audience, I Am: Celine Dion 'went on to become Prime Video's most popular documentary ever.'
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