Everybody Digs Bill Evans
“Sometimes an intermission is part of the music,” jazz pianist Bill Evans’ (Anders Danielsen Lie) mother Mary (Laurie Metcalf) advises him. Grieving the loss of his bass player Scott LeFaro in a car accident only days after a triumphant 1961 engagement at New York’s Village Vanguard, Evans stops playing and retreats to his uncomprehending parents’ Florida home, unable to relate even to his girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane). Grant Gee’s (Joy Division) drama is a stunning achievement that unreels with the rhythm of improvised jazz, capturing the musician’s isolating discombobulation. Except for a handful of deeply color-saturated flash forwards limning other key points in Evans’ life, Piers McGrail’s cinematography is a moody black and white, further evoking the pianist’s mournful state. Lie and his supporting cast are terrific, including Bill Pullman as Evans’ retired blue-collar dad Harry who hides a well of bitterness beneath a veneer of voluble good cheer. A superb character portrait, it’s easy to see why Everybody Digs Bill Evans. —Pam Grady
Director/s
Grant Gee
Grant Gee is an award-winning feature documentary director. His most recent film, The Gold Machine (2022), won the IFFNY Outstanding Documentary Award. It completed a trilogy of acclaimed feature-documentaries that began in 2012 with Patience (After Sebald) and Innocence of Memories (2015), which won the Master of Art Film Festival Award for Documentary in Literature. His documentary Joy Division (2007) won the Grierson Award 2008 for Best Cinema Documentary. Grant is Senior Tutor on the Master of Fine Arts course in Documentary Filmmaking at University College London.
Expected Guests
BILL PULLMAN: Actor
ALBERT BERGER: Producer
RON YERXA: Producer