‘In one scene, Celine Dion is dancing. ‘After this, she’s in trouble’: Making a film about the singer’s devastating condition Track Documentary

IRené Taylor has traveled to the region to tell stories about sexual abuse scandals and oil spills, fanatical conservationists and aimless Nepali farmers trying to regain their sanity. The Portland-based film-maker isn’t someone you’d typically find working in the celebrity-obsessed mainstream United States. However, the decidedly quiet atmosphere is the setting for her real mission: a documentary about Canadian pop singer Celine Dion and her attempt to deal with an unprecedented neurological disease called Stiff Individual Syndrome (SPS). The name of the film is I Am: Celine Dion.

Pop documentaries have become a reliable streaming-era trend, but if anyone has been offered a biopic to walk away from it’s Taylor, who eagerly admits to knowing nothing about Dion before signing on to the film. . “When Titanic came out,” she says of the theme track to that blockbuster Dion, “I was a mountain guide in the Himalayas. I don’t even think I remember when it came out.” When she was approached to work on the documentary, she said, “I wasn’t a fan. The Celine I understood was ‘Celine Dion’ – what I knew about her was the lowest hanging fruit.

In the generation of a few years, as Taylor and Dion have become friends and collaborators, this has changed. However, it wasn’t as if the Oscar-nominated director backed out of the project when she was first asked by a friend during the pandemic what she thought of Dion. “I didn’t really think I wanted to make a film about a celebrity. I was very worried about finesse, that I wouldn’t be able to get past that hurdle of overproduction. Even in today’s world, you can have Instagram and it’s supposed to feel personal, talking directly to your fans, yet it’s so obvious that you’re not writing your own posts.

However, during the first phase of talking to Dion using Zoom, Taylor’s doubts were dispelled. The pair talked openly without any pretense. Dion spent appreciable time inside those parts of Taylor’s house and a wood-optic look through a window. “She’s actually very open – she was not only unarmed, she was unarmed. His shoulders went down. It became clear that I could let my guard down and say to myself, ‘You’re actually talking to a fellow woman, a fellow mother, a person who loves trees just like you.’

Taylor “had the ulterior motive of becoming a puppet director while someone else was telling me how to make a movie”. But their respective collaborations with Dion – and Dion’s corporate Feeling Productions, and their file label Sony Tracks – have produced a film that is intimate and at times uncomfortably raw. After the pandemic, Taylor and two team members traveled to Dion’s home in Las Vegas to film her, as she struggled with secret physical spasms that reduced the length of her voice and made acting impossible. I went.

The film largely unfolds in the singer’s home, as she sees doctors, spends time with her young children, and plays with her beloved Labrador. There are no talking heads and no modestly archived live performance images. Taylor explains: “Celine said, ‘I want to ask you one thing: Is it possible that this movie isn’t about other people talking about me? Could it just be a movie like this? In which I am the only voice? I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? This is my imagination.’

Taylor’s preparation was minimal. As an “avid New Yorker reader”, he saw Dion’s name in the copy’s app and an editorial about Carl Wilson’s 2007 collection Let’s Communicate About Love: A Progress to the End of Style. She learned about Wilson’s accumulation, examining Dion’s business and why critics were so dismissive of artists like her, and was charmed by the editor’s keen awareness of Dion’s virtuosity as a cultural influence.

“I don’t want to put words in Carl Wilson’s mouth,” Taylor says. “But the way I understand it, he was saying, ‘Mea culpa. I thought she was the one and now I think differently. That’s also where I met him: I don’t like your music. In fact, some of their songs would probably make me change radio stations. But when I got to know him, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what Wilson was talking about.’ She is very kind and genuine. People who are fans, who bother to go down the rabbit hole – that’s really what they’re attracted to.”

Did she have any journalistic concerns about going to bed with Sonny and Feilding, not to mention being so smitten by Dion? “I couldn’t have asked for a better partner,” Taylor says. “Sony didn’t touch me until I showed them the rough cut, and we barely adjusted the film.” Sony executive Tom McKay, she says, was actually one of her closest confidants, providing relief and support on one of the most difficult blast days—when Dion had a full-body SPS episode and needed immediate scientific attention. was required.

This scene is not so terrible. It also offers an inverted version of the traditional pop documentary narrative. In the ensuing attempt and failure to record an unused track for the film Love Again, due to cramps in her throat muscles, Dion finally hits her notes, and we see her dancing happily and singing along to her unused track. Let’s see making a song. In the same scene, she is locked in a trash can, crying and unable to speak, with life therapists struggling to calm her down via telephone.

Taylor says the order reveals a grim reality about Dion’s moment: the drive for happiness and performance is the driving force behind his condition, which has at times threatened to explode. “I don’t think of Celine’s life as a tragedy,” she says. “But there are some tragic elements to her illness that most people don’t understand. She sings with a lot of emotion – and she’s learning that, every time she gets too emotional, the rug gets pulled out from under her. As a result, the singer had to begin curbing any enthusiasm. “Can you imagine? Having a show, thousands of people waiting for you, and you deliberately suppress your emotions.

As a documentarian, Taylor found filming that scene – which lasted 40 minutes but was shortened by 5 minutes – stressful. “It was a horrible personal experience,” she says. “I’ve never been in a situation where I felt like someone could die in front of me. My director of photography didn’t panic. She saw that I was trying to be the first responder, my human response, but if anything was going to help her, I was not the person to do it. His doctor was on the phone, his security guard was making sure he didn’t fall off the table, and his therapist was there too.

“It was so profound, how everyone did their job — and I realized, ‘I’m doing my job, too.’ At this point, I’d been filming for months. And he said, ‘Don’t ever ask if you can film something, because if you do, it’ll ruin it for me.’ She was only semi-conscious. I knew it would be very safe, so I wanted the option to keep it in the film.” When Taylor showed him the general overview of the film, Dion said: “That scene was cut short. Don’t – if anything happens, you can add it.”

Taylor says it was wonderful to work with Dion through the ups and downs of her problem. “She was so unarmed and so open, that she wanted to appear like an ordinary person living her life. She was not going to censor herself.”