Grant Gee was awarded Best Director at the Berlinale for this intense, fragmentary and inventive portrait of Bill Evans, in an interval of the American jazz great’s career when he grappled with grief and opioid addiction.
Grant Gee’s film thoroughly inhabits the creative and personal torment experienced by the American pianist – with a terrific supporting Bill Pullman turn.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans 2026
Sometimes an intermission is part of the music. That’s what American jazz pianist Bill Evansis told in a music biopic that, unconventionally, focuses on a period of his life when hestopped playing. It’s the first fiction feature of British filmmaker Grant Gee, renowned formusic videos, and documentaries including 2007’s Joy Division and 2012’s moody Suffolk walking tour Patience (after Sebald).
Adapted from Owen Martell’s novel Intermission, in which Evans was written as if he were a ghost, the film was shot mostly in high-contrastblack and white. In smoky bars and living rooms, Evans contends with the death of his trio’sbassist in a 1961 car accident days after they live-taped two of the most revered jazz recordsof all-time in New York. He decamps to Florida to shake a debilitating heroin habitand co-dependent chaos with partner Ellaine, only to land in the midst of a blue-collar familyplagued by their own demons.
Norwegian actor and frequent Joachim Trier collaborator Anders Danielsen Lee brings a piercing, on-edge quality as a musician trapped betweenprecision and collapse.
- Carmen Gray