Just when you thought that Peter Berg had already given Rihanna the best role of her cinematic career—that would be as Petty Officer Cora “Weps” Raikes from Battleship, and don’t you ever forget it—the filmmaker goes ahead and gives her a role she can really sink her teeth into: Herself.
Deadline reports that Berg has just launched a new non-scripted and brand-centric production shingle, Film 45, to go along with his narrative film production company, Film 44, and one of the company’s first projects is a Berg-directed feature documentary all about the Bajan songstress. (Now might be a good time to copyright “Film 46,” if for whatever reason you’re interested with messing with the ol’ Berg-man.)
The film is billed as “a contemporary take on the 1967 Bob Dylan rock doc Don’t Look Back, [and] the film is described as an ‘unfiltered look into Rihanna’s life and how she’s ascended to become a global icon’” which is, admittedly, not the first inspriration we would expect for Berg and Rihanna’s latest collaboration. Still, the outlet reports that Berg “liked the idea of examining ‘a young artist at the top of her professional field’ and that the project will be ‘much more a character study than a music film,’” which sounds suitably compelling. At the very least, it sounds like a good chunk of counterprogramming to the recent spate of musician-centric documentaries that have more accurately functioned as glossy advertisements for their supposed subjects. (Yes, I saw One Direction: This Is Us and I barely lived to tell the tale.)
Although the film is billed as Film 45’s next project, it’s unclear when Berg will start filming—hey, maybe he has already!—but it is notable that Rihanna does not currently have a major tour lined up on her schedule, lending credence to the stance that Berg’s film will be more about her very character, and not another shiny look behind the sparkly curtain of tour life.
There’s no word yet if Rihanna will feel compelled to utter her signature Battleship line, an eye-popping combination of the beautiful Hawaiian language and some classically dirty American slang, but we’re betting she’ll break out with something similarly catchy.