Mysterious superstar Sia is co-directing a documentary about her mysterious superstar life
When Sia and her strange blonde wig began popping up in the music press, it was easy to write her off as yet another attention-seeking performance artist. But then she began winning over our hearts with her frank discussions of her social phobias and winning over our ears with cathartic tunes like “Chandelier” and “Elastic Heart,” becoming a bona fide music superstar (despite doing a fraction of the press and events that make up the backbone of modern celebrity). Now, the notoriously secretive star is finally going to be opening up about her rollercoaster life, in a documentary that’s being co-directed by her and her husband.
Sia and filmmaker hubby Erik Anders Lang are working on the project — tentatively called Untitled Sia Documentary Project, naturally — that’ll showcase the singer’s life story in depth. Though Sia’s revealed quite a bit about her life over the past couple of years, her decades-spanning career and the day-to-day of her music-making are both things that she’s kept hidden away.
For her to release that information is a big feat, but in the age of the celebrity overshare, Sia’s relative demureness in the face of fame is welcome; a woman sharing her work and life in her own terms, in her own way. However, this is far from the first time she’s talked about her life on film, and it’s definitely not the first time she’s worked within the film world.
Much like Beyoncé (a phrase I hope to one day hear applied to me), Sia’s going to be directing herself, and she already has a couple of directing credits under her belt. Most of them are for her music videos (“Elastic Heart,” “Chandelier,” “Big Girls Cry”), but she’s working with regular collaborator Maggie Ziegler in Sister, a full-length film she also wrote.
In a recent panel at film festival Venice Days, Sia shared, “I was too embarrassed to tell anyone I wanted to make a movie because I thought it would be seen as a vanity project because I was a singer. … And then last year, after I made the ‘Chandelier’ video, I realized that I was pretty good at directing, so I felt a little bit braver.”
We can’t wait to watch her documentary, and applaud both her music and her work behind, and now in front of, the camera.
FKA twigs puts a spooky spin on Sia’s ‘Elastic Heart’
We can’t stop listening to this gorgeous a capella cover of Sia’s ‘Chandelier’
Image via Shutterstock.
