In 1997, Grant Gee directed the video for Radiohead’s single No Surprises, a four-minute film that featured Thom Yorke miming the song inside a water-filled diver’s helmet, apparently almost drowning in the process. In the three decades since that promo, Gee has made a host of diverse feature-length films about artists: Radiohead, David Bowie, Joy Division, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, the émigré German novelist WG Sebald. They are often impressionistic, dreamlike explorations of art, memory, place and the strange pressures put upon artistic lives.
“It’s a narrative form I’ve used again and again,” says Gee. “A character begins in one condition; a crisis slowly develops; the viewer watches that crisis in a forensic yet empathetic way; the crisis passes; the person returns to something like the original state, but transformed. Someone comes very close to drowning, but doesn’t drown. What does that do to them?”
Gee’s new film, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, is also a study of an artist, only this time it is not a documentary but a narrative feature. Yet it feels like a fictional extension of his longstanding preoccupations. The subject is Bill Evans, the jazz musician whose lyrical introspection helped reshape the piano; he was a crucial voice on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the man who introduced Debussy-ish romanticism to jazz. But the film does not attempt the usual biopic sweep. It concentrates instead on a few months in 1961, a time when Evans was numbed with grief after the death of his double bassist Scott LaFaro.
“All my films start from a fan’s perspective,” says Gee. “It’s like falling in love. An initial interest turns into an obsession that turns into wanting to find out everything you can about the subject. In the WG Sebald film, the novelist Rick Moody uses the phrase ‘textual compulsion’, which I like. It describes the way a work of art can compel you to keep going, a love for something non-human. Innocence of Memories started with me falling in love with Istanbul and wanting to immerse myself in the museum that Orhan Pamuk had created.”
Gee’s love affair with Evans started with a photograph. “It’s in an old book of photos by the great Lee Friedlander, from late 1961 or early 1962. It shows Bill hunched over the piano, with his new bassist and drummer smiling behind him, thrilled to be there. Evans is plumb centre, this super-cool, Ivy-League-looking guy, but he looks haunted, shocked, concentrated. I hadn’t even heard of Bill Evans at that point, but I felt that I had to know everything I could about him and why he looked so spooked.”
The answer came in Intermission, Owen Martell’s novel about Evans. Inspired by real events, it lingers on the few months when a grief-stricken Evans was unable even to sit at a piano. It follows Evans as he is babysat by his brother in New York, then looked after by his retired blue-collar parents in Florida, before returning to his heroin-fuelled life in Manhattan with his girlfriend Ellaine.
In adapting Martell’s novel, Gee says he relished the shift from nonfiction to drama. “With documentaries, you get used to working with whatever situation you’re presented with. You don’t have a script; you just have to react to what your interviewees say. In contrast, every shot in a narrative movie is blocked off and beautifully lit and choreographed. I was surrounded by so many brilliant actors and photographers and designers that I had little to worry about.”
The novel also offered a way out of one particular biopic cliche. “The moment where I quite often lose interest is when they start showing the actor playing the music,” he says. “In a way, this is the story of what happens when the music stops. I liked how Martell’s novel suggested the possibility of a music biopic that didn’t have any performance in it at all. In the end, I didn’t quite have the guts, or the madness, to follow that through – you’ve got to show people what the fuss is all about.”
It is a quiet, emotionally turbulent film, but it does contain a few short recreations of Evans’s music (including his best-known tune, Waltz for Debby, written for his beloved niece). Most are performed by Anders Danielsen Lie, the Norwegian actor who seems to have been born to play the role. “Anders has the same physique and bone structure as Bill, he has the same quiet intensity, and when he gets in movie mode he looks frighteningly like Bill,” says Gee. “And, as well as being a qualified doctor who was working as a GP in Oslo until very recently, Anders is also a great musician. When I approached him to play the role, he told me that he had been listening to Bill Evans’s music since he was a child and transcribing his solos for piano since he was a teenager.”
The film’s celebratory title, borrowed from a 1959 LP of the same name, has a darker inflection, says Gee. “Everybody digs Bill because everybody’s eyes are on him; everybody is trying to care for him and he can’t handle that.” It recalls the ironic title of Gee’s 1998 Radiohead film Meeting People Is Easy, a queasily beautiful montage of gruelling, disorienting interviews and promotional appearances, filmed backstage by Gee over the course of a world tour, that shows the biggest band in the world spiralling into mental exhaustion. “Musicians are often only themselves when they’re playing music, which is why they do it so intensely. But I guess what the Bill Evans and Radiohead films have in common is that they’re about artists forced to live on some other trajectory, one they’re much more uncomfortable in.”
A delicate subject was the portrayal of Evans’s catastrophic heroin habit. Gee was keen not to impose modern therapeutic language about addiction on to the story. “I’m just about old enough to remember 1960s attitudes, when addicts were seen as criminals. It was like having a burglar in the family, rather than someone with an illness. It also had a slightly romanticised, underworld glamour.”
He cites interviews with Evans in the late 1970s, when he was reluctant to talk about the music that he made in the 1950s and 1960s, but instead recounted the high jinks of scoring drugs and fixing up. “He was really proud that he had a fake police ID, which he’d flash at dealers if they were giving him trouble.”
Although largely set in 1961 and shot in a crisp monochrome, the film shifts into garish colour for a few flash-forwards into the 1970s, where we learn how Evans’s last decade was haunted by two suicides: first Ellaine, in 1973, and then Harry, the hitherto ultra-reliable brother who had tried to hold him together, in 1979. After Evans’s death at 51 in 1980, from a combination of cirrhosis, pneumonia, peptic ulcer and untreated hepatitis, the critic Gene Lees declared that Evans’s protracted struggle with drugs was “the longest suicide in history”, a phrase that recurs in almost every article and biography of the pianist.
Gee, whose 2007 film Joy Division covered the death of Ian Curtis, who killed himself in 1980, rejects this diagnosis. “Me and Anders talked a lot about this while making the film,” he says. “And we both agree that Evans was far too disciplined in his art to contemplate suicide.”
However, for the last few years of his life, Evans would regularly perform an instrumental version of Suicide Is Painless, the theme from his favourite TV show, M*A*S*H. The song developed a horrific poignancy. “Apparently, the versions he played in the days after Harry’s death didn’t sound anything like Bill Evans,” says Gee. “So, for the recreation of that 1979 performance, we got [the Welsh pianist] Joe Webb to create this heavy, noisy, furious, virtuosic freakout that’s quite unlike Bill’s usual performances.”
The film is an Anglo-Irish production, partly funded by Screen Ireland, but manages to convincingly recreate Manhattan apartments, upstate New York and sun-drenched Florida on location in County Cork with a largely Irish cast (although heavyweight Hollywood support comes from Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf, who play Evans’s parents). But its real territory is interior: the place an artist goes when the thing that makes him himself suddenly becomes unreachable.
It ends with Evans playing a version of Lucky to Be Me, a song from Leonard Bernstein’s On the Town. The title sounds almost cruel after everything the film has shown us. “I liked the irony,” says Gee. “I thought it interesting and sweet. It seemed important to have some kind of minor lift after everything we’ve been through.”
• Everybody Digs Bill Evans is in UK and Irish cinemas from 11 September
