Grant Gee Turns the Music Biopic Inside Out

Grant Gee is not a fan of music biopics.

“You can tell from the work I’ve done in the past I’m really interested in musicians and how their lives interact with their art,” says Gee, whose filmography includes acclaimed documentaries on iconic British bands — Meeting People Is Easy (1998), about Radiohead, and Joy Division (2007). “But whenever I watch music biopics there’s that cringe moment when the actor playing the musician does the performance. It’s something about an artist I love being represented by a performance that doesn’t really work.”

So for his debut feature, Gee flipped the music biopic on its head. Everybody Digs Bill Evans, about the legendary ’60s jazz pianist, focuses on a period of his life when Evans was unable to play.

In 1961, after recording two seminal live albums with his original trio — Portrait in Jazz and Explorations, considered among the greatest jazz albums of all time — Evans’ beloved bassist and musical soulmate Scott LaFaro died in a car crash. Evans canceled all his tour dates, unable to imagine performing without him. He sought refuge with his retired parents in Florida, where he struggled to get off drugs (like so many jazz musicians of his day, Evans was a heroin addict) and find a reason to play again.

“When I read that in the novel about Evans — Intermission by Owen Martell, which Everybody Digs Bill Evans is based on — it was kind of an inverse selling point for me,” says Gee. “To do a music biopic without much music in it.”

Evans is played by Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie (Sentimental Value, The Worst Person in the World). Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman play his parents.

The film, which premiered at the Berlinale and won Gee the Silver Bear for best director, is primarily about the silences between the songs. Lie’s Evans is gaunt and distant, a shy man hidden behind a veil of cigarette smoke, unable to process — or even express — his grief.

“Having hung around musicians so much, I’ve come to realize that just because somebody’s got a remarkable talent, it doesn’t imply that they’ve got any social or emotional skills,” says Gee. “I did this documentary about Joy Division, and they were then in their late 40s, early 50s, talking about what happened to them in the 1980s when their band leader [Ian Curtis] committed suicide. They were like: ‘We didn’t even know he was depressed. Why couldn’t we connect?’ Were they ever anything other than slightly depressed men who couldn’t connect?”

In the film, alongside Lie as Evans, Gee sketches two parallel stories: his brother Henry (Barry Ward), a failed musician turned music teacher, both proud of and resentful of his sibling’s success, and father Henry Sr. (Pullman), whose jovial chumminess hides a life of quiet desperation. “I spent years squeezing myself into a life that was too small,” he confesses to Bill in a rare (and drunken) display of emotion. The performances play as variations on a theme — musicians interpreting the same songbook standard in a different key.

The core story, set in 1961, is shot in black and white, with Gee flashing forward in garish color to 1973, 1979 and 1980 to depict three other deaths that echo LaFaro’s, ending with Evans’ own. The structure, says Gee, was “found in the edit,” with a throughline informed by a life once described by a friend of Evans as “the longest suicide in history.”

“I was thinking about the structure of the film this morning, and it reminded me of the music video I did for Radiohead years ago [‘No Surprises’],” says Gee. “It’s a single shot of the singer [Thom Yorke] in a diving helmet. He starts singing, and the water starts filling the helmet until he’s underwater, and you can see him suffering. Then the water goes down again, he takes a big breath and gives the camera this unreadable look: triumph, resignation, fear, whatever. I thought: Christ! That’s a lot like this film. Man submerges. Man re-emerges. Endpoint ambivalent.”

For all the silences in the film, Everybody Digs Bill Evans has some mesmerizing musical moments. It opens with a four-minute improv jazz session: the Bill Evans Trio at its peak, performing at the Village Vanguard in New York shortly before LaFaro’s death. The communion — the “perfect conversation” — between Evans and his bassist is palpable. Lie, an accomplished jazz pianist, performed the session live.

“It’s Anders and these professional jazz musicians in that scene. His bandmates had never met him before, and they were kind of nervous,” Gee recalls. “They told me: ‘We’ve done this kind of thing with so many actors who say I’m into jazz, I’m a musician, and the guy’s useless.’” Twenty minutes into the recording, after the first take, one of the band members turned to Anders. “He just nodded and said: ‘Nice solo,’” says Gee. “We knew we had it.”

Lie returns to the keyboard in the film’s final sequence. Evans, after months of silence following LaFaro’s death, sits down at the piano and plays. It’s a Leonard Bernstein tune: “Lucky to Be Me” from On the Town.

“It’s our little gag at the end of the film,” says Gee. “After everything Bill’s been through, this is his final musical statement. Despite everything, how lucky he is.”

Everyone Digs Bill Evans was produced by Dublin-based Cowtown Pictures and London’s Hot Property. Mister Smith Entertainment is handling world sales. The film is still seeking distribution in the U.S..