Alex Gibney is a film director who, as well as making journalistic documentaries on dozens of subjects, has also made inventive films about some key musicians, including James Brown, Fela Kuti, Frank Sinatra and now Paul Simon with In Restless Dreams: The Paul Simon Story.
“It was my Sinatra film, All Or Nothing At All, that Paul Simon and his people liked,” says Gibney. “So when they sent out feelers for me to make a film about Paul, of course I was interested. I’m a huge admirer of his work and, as with Sinatra, Paul’s career is like a history of America over a 60-year period. But it got interesting when Paul said, ‘I’m working on a new album, do you wanna watch me work on it?’ So that became the entry point – we move back and forth between the history and the present day. And, as well as being a biography, it becomes an extraordinarily moving story of a great composer struggling with his loss of hearing, making an album that deals with mortality and belief and suffering and spirituality, and allowing us intimate access to his creativity during a vulnerable moment.”
The film runs to three-and-a half hours, but doesn’t feel overlong. “I actually have a six-hour cut!” says Gibney. “So I’ve had to cut a lot out. But we had access to so much new archive footage that has barely been seen before. Paul was very generous with his archive, as were Sony Records. There was a lot of film in the vaults that we had to restore just to find out what it was, and then we’d have to transfer it. We found amazing footage of Art, Paul and Roy Halee working on the Bridge Over Troubled Water album, we found live footage from Zimbabwe, and from both the big Central Park concerts.”
Gibney wanted to avoid the standard music biopics that he finds “formulaic, dreary and routine-ised. Who wants to see a ten-second clip of a song, then a montage of famous celebrities saying how great an artist is? If the artist is any good, you don’t need people to tell you that! The only secondary voices we use are friends and collaborators who have something interesting to say – in this case, the likes of Lorne Michaels, Wynton Marsalis, Edie Brickell. And we wanted to play long clips of songs: once you get involved in a song, it takes you some place, like a dream. And, for an album that’s inspired by a dream, that’s fitting.”
In Restless Dreams: The Paul Simon Story is in cinemas for one night only on October 13 – buy tickets here – and then on Blu-ray and digital platforms from October 28