Grant Gee's new film explores Bill Evans's

Grant Gee has directed a new narrative feature film about jazz pianist Bill Evans. The film, titled 'Everybody Digs Bill Evans', concentrates on a few months in 1961 when Evans was numbed with grief after the death of his double bassist Scott LaFaro.

Gee, who previously directed music videos and documentaries for artists like Radiohead and David Bowie, describes his approach as starting from a fan's perspective. "It's like falling in love," Gee told The Guardian. "An initial interest turns into an obsession that turns into wanting to find out everything you can about the subject."

From photograph to film

The director's specific interest in Evans began with a photograph by Lee Friedlander from late 1961 or early 1962. The image showed Evans hunched over a piano, looking haunted while his new bandmates smiled behind him. This visual sparked Gee's compulsion to understand the musician's story.

Gee adapted his film from Owen Martell's novel 'Intermission', which is inspired by the real events of Evans's life during that silent period. The story follows Evans as he is cared for by his brother in New York, then by his retired blue-collar parents in Florida, before returning to his heroin-fuelled life in Manhattan with his girlfriend Ellaine.

A biopic without the music

A key creative decision was to largely avoid depicting musical performances. Gee stated that the moment he often loses interest in biopics is "when they start showing the actor playing the music." He explained, "In a way, this is the story of what happens when the music stops." The director liked how Martell's novel suggested a music biopic without any performance, though he admitted he did not fully follow through, including a few short recreations of Evans's music.

Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie portrays Evans. Gee highlighted Lie's suitability for the role, noting his similar physique, bone structure, and quiet intensity. Lie is also a trained musician who had been transcribing Evans's piano solos since his teenage years.

The film's celebratory title, borrowed from a 1959 Evans album, carries a darker meaning for Gee. "Everybody digs Bill because everybody's eyes are on him; everybody is trying to care for him and he can't handle that," he said.

Portraying addiction and an interior world

Gee was deliberate in portraying Evans's heroin habit, aiming to avoid modern therapeutic language about addiction. He referenced 1960s attitudes, where addicts were seen as criminals, and noted the slightly romanticised, underworld glamour associated with it at the time. Gee cited late-1970s interviews where Evans seemed proud of having a fake police ID to flash at drug dealers.

Although largely set in 1961 and shot in monochrome, the film includes garish colour flash-forwards to the 1970s. These sequences reveal that Evans's last decade was haunted by two suicides: his girlfriend Ellaine in 1973, and his brother Harry in 1979. After Evans's own death in 1980 at age 51, critic Gene Lees called his drug struggle "the longest suicide in history."

Gee, whose 2007 film 'Joy Division' covered the suicide of Ian Curtis, rejects this diagnosis for Evans. He said he and actor Anders Danielsen Lie agreed that Evans was "far too disciplined in his art to contemplate suicide." However, the film notes that Evans regularly performed an instrumental version of 'Suicide Is Painless' from MAS*H in his final years. For a recreation of a 1979 performance after Harry's death, pianist Joe Webb created a heavy, noisy version quite unlike Evans's usual style.

The Anglo-Irish production was filmed on location in County Cork with a largely Irish cast, though it features Hollywood actors Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf as Evans's parents. The film ends with Evans playing 'Lucky to Be Me'. Gee liked the irony of the title. "It seemed important to have some kind of minor lift after everything we've been through," he said.