Early in “Always Lalisa,” a fly-on-the-wall documentary chronicling a year in the life of Blackpink’s Lisa as she embarks on a solo career, the K-pop star runs through a list of things prohibited by their label YG. They are not allowed to drink, not allowed to date, not allowed to have a driver’s license, not allowed to go out and see their friends and their every movement is tracked.
Sue Kim’s doc, in theaters Oct. 12, is unique in that it not only follows the Thai superstar as she takes a break from her popular girl group to form a management company; drop her first solo album “Alter Ego”; sing a Bond theme at the Oscars; make her acting debut in “The White Lotus”; and play Coachella, but also a time when she was finally freed from those harsh label restrictions to do as she pleased.
“At first I was a little scared because I didn’t know how to start,” Lisa told Variety. “Nobody was telling me what to do and I’m the one who has to choose the road to go down next. At first, it was like, ‘What should I do? What should I do?!’ I tried it step by step and little by little, gained a lot of confidence and learned so much on my own.”
While you may be familiar with portions of Lisa’s backstory, such as her beating out 4,000 others at the age of 13 to become South Korean label YG’s first K-pop trainee and debuting as the resident rapper and dancer of Blackpink in 2016, “Always Lalisa” provides an intimate look at the performer learning to fly on her own, featuring interviews with friends, family and “White Lotus” creator Mike White, and even addresses Blackpink’s infamous leaked YG training videos that saw members using the N-word while rapping along to songs (and how the leaker made a series of threats against Lisa’s life).
We do not see any sightings of Frédéric Arnault, the billionaire scion who was heavily rumored to be dating Lisa at the time of filming, and Kim, who also helmed the Apple TV series “K-Pop Idols” and is working on a doc on Olympian Chloe Kim, explained why he’s not there — and how she captured Lisa at her most vulnerable and honest.
How did you become the go-to K-pop director?
Am I? I kind of hope I’m not the K-pop director because I think there are so many interesting K-pop stories that can be told wonderfully by other people. I wasn’t a huge K-pop fan but knew enough and appreciated it, and I was approached by Apple to do the “K-Pop Idols” series. They knew I didn’t know much about K-pop but knew I was Korean American, am very familiar with Korean culture and was talking to them already about making my last film, “The Last of the Sea Women.” The production company that they were working with sent me some development footage and it was such a fascinating, esoteric universe where there are rules and you have to do things a certain way.
Did Blackpink’s label YG have a say in “Always Lalisa?” How much freedom did you have in making the film?
Good question. I had complete and total freedom in making “Always Lalisa” from Sony Music Vision, who are my creative partners and the owner of this project. The reason why we were able to be so honest and so intimate and vulnerable with Lisa in this film is because it was her year away from K-pop, so those rules that she had to abide by didn’t apply this year. That was how I was able to get such unfettered access. Lisa also understood that this year of freedom meant that she could express herself a little more openly and honestly, so it was a gift for both of us. We did not work with YG at all on this film. I will say that we tried very, very hard to license some of Lisa’s earlier trainee footage or Blackpink music videos or songs, and we were unfortunately not allowed to. That was the extent of our interactions with YG.
I was struck by how intimate the film was. How were you able to gain her trust as a filmmaker?
Every subject is different. For me, I find that that trust really comes through time. I’m not someone that tries to win someone over in a dinner meeting and pitch them hard on how the film is going to work. I feel consistency and honesty is the best approach. I have good intentions, and I think if people get to know me, they feel that. When we first started filming, Lisa was guarded and didn’t know how much trust to give us, but over time she understood that we were there with her and weren’t against her. And we never talked about the movie. She never gave me any creative direction or ideas and that’s how I like it. We naturally developed a friendship and trust over time.
Lisa does let her guard down more and more as the film progresses. Did you feel like you were breaking down barriers that were established by her years of K-pop label training?
Yeah. I love that you observed that because that’s how I feel. If you start at the beginning of the film and look at it throughout, you start to feel the walls coming down more and more because that was the chronological process of her learning to trust us more. I wouldn’t say she was overly media trained, but she was getting more comfortable with freedom. She was just coming out of Blackpink, having this solo year and easing into what she was allowed to do. During the solo recording process, she didn’t even know if she could speak to the producers directly, so she has these behaviors to overcome herself and expand beyond that.
That’s an eye-opening moment in the recording studio — Lisa isn’t even making eye contact with her producers and struggling to interact with them. The film feels like it’s tracking someone who’s been let out of captivity and into the real world for the first time.
When I was first approached about this project, the thing that interested me is that she had this year off where YG had no say in what she was doing, so it sounded like a delayed coming-of-age — a year where she would find out what’s important to her and when someone wasn’t telling her what to do or where to go. What I found about Lisa is that she has this genuine purity of spirit and inborn innocence about her that is not fake — it’s truly who she is — and that’s why it feels like a genuine coming-of-age. She really wanted to do her job well, protect Blackpink and make their dreams come true, so to be given this new freedom is sort of like a young colt getting their first steps and realizing, “I can run?” It was so beautiful to be behind the camera and see her blossoming.
This is someone who’s essentially been robbed of her childhood and teenage years who’s finally able to let loose.
In the beginning, we put down all the K-pop rules — you can’t date, you can’t drive, you can’t drink — and I don’t know if people catch this, but then we show her doing all those things throughout the film.
I didn’t know Lisa has such a fondness for tequila. There are a lot of tequila shots done throughout the film. Did she make you do a bunch of tequila shots?
There might have been a few done last night. But she’s just a happy, fun person and was allowed to do that. We all were given this time in our lives at the end of adolescence and beginning of young adulthood where we could have fun, make mistakes and learn where our comfort zone is, and she was never given that freedom, so we’re watching her do that in the film. You’re looking at such an accomplished, successful and talented 28-year-old woman who’s so poised and incredible at what she does, so to think she had never been given that time of freedom or identity exploration… I’m just glad she had it.
Did Lisa request that you not film any of her boyfriends? Because none of them appear in the movie.
I will say this: We were with her a lot of the time and I never saw any boyfriends. I don’t know anything about her dating life, but I think she’s smart enough to conduct that outside of our filming. You see in the film why she has to hide her relationships — because she gets an incredible amount of hate — so honestly, I wasn’t really interested in it. I know that sounds counterintuitive because that would be juicy, but to me, this was a film about personal growth.