Grant Gee, a filmmaker known for documentary explorations of artists including Radiohead, David Bowie, and Joy Division, has shifted to narrative filmmaking with his new feature “Everybody Digs Bill Evans.” The film centers on the jazz pianist whose influential work helped reshape the instrument and featured prominently on Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue.
Rather than chronicling Evans’s entire life, the film concentrates on a specific period in 1961 when the musician was processing profound grief following the death of his double bassist Scott LaFaro. Gee developed the project after encountering a 1961 photograph by Lee Friedlander showing Evans at the piano looking haunted and concentrated, which sparked his interest in learning more about the subject. The director adapted Owen Martell’s novel “Intermission,” which was inspired by real events and examines Evans’s temporary inability to engage with his instrument during this period of intense emotional turmoil.
Gee describes his approach as departing from standard music biography conventions. Rather than focusing primarily on musical performance, the film explores what occurs when creative output ceases due to personal crisis. The narrative follows Evans being cared for by his brother in New York and his parents in Florida before his return to his life in Manhattan.
Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie, who possesses physical similarities to Evans, a background as a trained musician, and lifelong familiarity with Evans’s work, plays the lead role. The film includes limited musical recreations, notably Evans’s well-known composition “Waltz for Debby.” Gee framed the project’s exploration of Evans’s heroin addiction without employing contemporary therapeutic language, instead considering historical attitudes toward substance use during that era.
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