‘It’s the story of what happens when the music stops’: bringing tormented jazz legend Bill Evans to life

Having directed documentaries about David Bowie, Radiohead and Joy Division, Grant Gee takes on a biopic of the turbulent and tragic American pianist 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?” Continue reading...