This article contains spoilers.
Celine Dion welcomed the cameras. For the new documentary “I Am: Celine Dion” (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), the singer placed no restrictions on what she filmed.
What follows is a painfully intimate portrait of a pop star’s body in battle. Dion announced in 2022 that she suffered from stiff person syndrome, an autoimmune neurological disease that causes progressive stiffness and severe muscle spasms. During a session with her physiotherapist filmed for the documentary, Dion has a seizure. The camera continued to roll throughout the medical crisis.
In a video call interview Monday, director Irene Taylor discussed filming the documentary and why Dion’s emergency was included in the final cut. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
At what stage of pre-production did you learn about Dion’s illness?
I spoke to her for a long time and I didn’t know she was sick. We were in the middle of the pandemic and I didn’t mind having her home. Most of us were, and artists around the world were temporarily out of commission.
We got to the point where we agreed to make the film. It was several weeks after this mutual decision that his manager asked me to call him. I told myself that it must be something serious because we called each other that day and he told me that Céline was ill and that they didn’t know what it was. We filmed for several months before there was a definitive diagnosis.
After making the diagnosis, was the conversation on the table to stop filming?
Definitely not. When I realized that a) she had an unnamed problem and b) when I started filming, I could see how different her body was, how different her face was, I was able to focus. My perspective iris became much smaller.
There was a point where I decided I was going to make the movie and I was like, “What am I going to do?” Go on tour with her? When I learned of the diagnosis, it reduced the scope of my entry into his life.
Music documentaries licensed by their subjects aren’t known for their depth or intensely personal moments. This, on the other hand, is very crude. Was there any discussion at the beginning about what you could show?
There was no discussion about the parameters, and that’s because Céline did not ask for these parameters. She told me from the first day: “You are in my house, the fact that you are here means that I let you in. Don’t ask me for permission to film anything.
I felt like I had to take this access with tenderness, dignity and class. There are a lot of things the camera doesn’t see. If there was a little tension or discomfort, I would back off. That’s part of what built trust over time: she gave me everything but I didn’t accept it.
Tell me about your reaction at the end of the documentary, when Dion starts having seizures during physical therapy.
I just saw this stiffness which didn’t resemble that of the fluid and supple dancer I had been filming for several months doing her physiotherapy. After a few minutes, she moaned in pain.
I wanted to know if she was breathing, because she was moaning and then she stopped. I put the microphone, which was at the end of a boom that can be discreetly brought closer to its subject, under the table. I couldn’t hear his breathing.
I was very panicked. I looked around and saw that his therapist had called his head of security. His bodyguard immediately entered the room. I immediately saw that these two men were there to take care of her and that they were trained to do so.
Probably in about three minutes, once that human reaction of wanting to be helpful and dropping everything had calmed down, Nick (Midwig, the film’s cinematographer) and I started filming everything as it happened. that this was happening. It was very uncomfortable. I’ve never been in a situation with such a tactile camera.
There’s a shot of her face for almost two minutes, forcing us to see her truly torn apart by pain. Why did you make the decision not to cut as much from this shot?
I spent my twenties in Southeast Asia and learned a lot about observation from Buddhist teachings. There is a Tibetan Buddhist parable about this goddess named Green Tara, who is said to be disguised and living in the world as a suffering human.
The parable teaches you that when you see someone suffering on the side of the road, when you see the body of someone ravaged by poverty or ravaged by violence, you should not look away because if your love can touch someone’s experience, you cultivate compassion. .
I love my job because I try to access a human experience with which I may not have direct contact. But if I don’t look away, if I look at that and I don’t flinch, it cultivates something in me that pushes me to try to understand this person better.
So we didn’t cut it. There were times when I was like, “Okay, this is really intense. » I let the film go on for two or three seconds longer, then I cut it. I wanted to go just far enough for people to think about their own experience and not run away. There are uncomfortable aspects of being alive, and if cinematic storytelling can help us tolerate that discomfort, I want to do that with my films.
What was the conversation like with her once she saw the documentary?
I didn’t discuss it with her until I showed her the entire film months later. I started showing it to her with the idea that she could just say, please let’s not include it. That wouldn’t have been unreasonable.
She cried for most of the movie. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, but I was a little embarrassed to look at her because it was a very intimate moment for her. The first thing she said to me was, “I think this movie can help me.” Then she added, “I think this film can help others understand what it’s like to be in my body.” »
Deeper into our conversation, she said, “I don’t want you to change anything about this movie, and I don’t want you to shorten this scene.” She just called it “this scene,” and we both knew what she was talking about.
Have you talked about the reaction of Dion’s family, including her three sons?
Céline didn’t tell me about it. I really let her lead the way on anything sensitive.
I showed him the film a second time. She said: “I’m going to let the younger boys watch the film with me, I’m going to introduce them to the film and I’m going to make them understand what’s happening to my body. »
If I could have filmed this scene, it would have been the quintessence of Céline. Céline, the mother. Céline, the woman who suffers. Céline, the woman who tries to learn something and teach something from her own suffering to her children.
She held their hands and they didn’t seem visibly upset to watch. I think it was because their mother said, “It’s okay, it’s just the illness.” This is exactly what is happening.