When Selena Gomez began filming her abruptly halted 2016 tour, she had no idea the resulting film would become her most confessional project to date: “The documentary took on a life of its own,” she tells Vanity Fair via email. Over the course of six years, what began as footage of her Revival tour morphed into Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, an unflinching look at the pop star’s mental health journey that debuts on Apple TV+ November 4. “It was never this thought-out plan thinking we were going to capture these very personal parts of my life,” Gomez says. “It just evolved from there.”
The documentary’s origins can be traced back to the sultry 2015 music video for Gomez’s “Hands to Myself.” She was introduced to director Alek Keshishian, best known for his groundbreaking 1991 Madonna documentary, through his sister Aleen, Gomez’s manager since 2014. “I had seen Truth or Dare and thought it was one of the most brilliant music documentaries that’s ever been shot,” Gomez tells VF. “I watched it seven times. It’s an actual work of art. This isn’t just, ‘Here I am on tour and I’m going through things.’ It was a glimpse into someone’s life, and it had respect and love and empathy, and nothing was sugarcoated.” She continues, “I knew if I were ever to make a doc, I wanted Alek to direct it.”
The only snag? Keshishian had long sworn off movies about musicians. “I’d said no to all music docs,” he tells me in his first interview about the project. “I was like, I don’t want to repeat myself.” Still, the filmmaker couldn’t help but be charmed by Gomez. “I kind of fell in love with how authentic and vulnerable and real she was. I was expecting a very manufactured person, and I didn’t get that,” Keshishian continues.
“[Madonna] was one of the top three most well-known people in the world because there wasn’t a constellation of stars. There was [Princess] Diana, Michael Jackson, Madonna,” he explains. “By the time Selena came to me, it was a very different universe. So what was revolutionary during Madonna’s time—ironically I think it’s stopped being revolutionary now. I didn’t need to see more stars trying to outrage the public. For me, I got that enough on social media.”
“But what was fascinating to me was, there was this girl who somehow hadn’t put on that armor of the public facade. This young woman has no guile. She is not someone who is savvy about how she should present herself. It doesn’t give her any pleasure and it’s not in her DNA. So in that respect, for the time we’re living in, I was like, This is a one-of-a-kind subject matter.”
Keshishian did have one condition: “You have to give me access to everything,” he told the then 24-year-old. “And she did.”
Two weeks into filming Gomez’s turbulent Revival tour, which would be scrapped after 55 performances amid her struggles with anxiety and depression, cameras went dark. “Things were starting to go off the rails a little bit with her personally. You see it in the movie,” he tells me. “And it didn’t feel like the timing was right. It felt intrusive and, I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right to me as a human being.”
The pair stayed in touch over the years as Gomez underwent a kidney transplant due to her ongoing battle with lupus (she announced her diagnosis in 2015) and sought treatment after receiving a bipolar diagnosis. She would officially reignite the documentary process by inviting Keshishian and his crew to film her 2019 advocacy trip to Africa. “He is very kind and nurturing, and I have complete trust in him,” Gomez says. “Most of the time, I forgot he was even around. Sometimes he was just using an iPhone hiding in the corner.”
The intimacy and trust Keshishian builds with Gomez—who shares her “darkest secrets” via journal entries and bedroom confessionals—was hard-earned. “See, with Madonna, in four days, we were like best friends,” he says. “Selena, we had a connection, but I was much older than she was, and she looked up to me as a filmmaker. I couldn’t have had the relationship I had with Selena in the beginning that I had with her when she had her lupus relapse [in 2020] and asked me to keep shooting. That was earned over time.” He’d also establish trust within Gomez’s inner circle, securing interviews with her mother, Mandy Teefey, and best friend, Raquelle Stevens. “So when I say it was a six-year labor of love, it needed six years to ripen on the vine.”
And Gomez gave that trust in full. “She never wanted to come into the edit room,” Keshishian says. “She never micromanaged a single thing about this film.” When he showed her a two-and-a-half-hour original cut of the film, they both agreed it wouldn’t be the final version. “She said to the people financing the movie and Apple, ‘I want to give Alek more time,’ which was huge. So she supported me as an artist,” he adds. About nine months later, Gomez watched the near-final edit. Her reaction? “It’s what needs to be said.”
