Everybody digs Bill Evans, particularly the Berlin Film Festival.
The Irish-UK biopic on the jazz legend took the Silver Bear for director Grant Gee on Saturday night, his feature film debut impressing a jury headed by German director Wim Wenders as much as critics and audiences.
Gee took to the stage at a gala event looking amused – and torn – by his glittering prize for Everybody Digs Bill Evans. “Well this is lovely, also slightly lonesome,” he said.
He explained to the audience how most of the cast and crew were at the Dublin International Film Festival screening.
Backed largely by Screen Ireland, Gee said his feature film debut had been made “quite easy really” because of the talented cast and crew – with even the Irish weather cooperating.
Anders Danielsen Lie (at the piano) as Bill Evans in a scene from Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Photograph: Cowtown Pictures/Hot Property BE
“We made a bit of New York and a bit of Florida in the late spring in west Cork, against all the odds,” he said.
Ilker Çatak’s Yellow Letters won the Golden Bear at the 76th edition of the Berlinale.
German actor Sandra Hüller won the Silver Bear for best leading performance for her role in Rose. Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea won the Silver Bear Jury Prize as well as best supporting performance for Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay.
The moody and mysterious biopic of Evans – who rose to fame playing with Miles Davis – is shot largely in black-and-white.
At the film’s heart is a mesmerising turn from Anders Danielsen Lie as the introverted, heroin-using jazz pianist in a slow-burn performance that tips into self-immolation.
Director Gee thanked Danielsen Lie for giving “a lot of himself” in his performance.
Gee also singled out producer Janine Marmot of Hot Property Films for her “immense tenacity”, persevering with the production for a decade after optioning the novel Intermission by Welsh writer Owen Martell.
Northern Irish actor Valene Kane at a press conference for Everybody Digs Bill Evans during the Berlin Film Festival. Photograph: Fabian Sommer/EPA
The elegant, minimalist screenplay from Adam and Paul writer Mark O’Halloran plots a tragic decline once described by a friend of Evans as ”the longest suicide in history”.
Newry native Valene Kane delivers an intense yet fragile performance as Evans’s tragic on-off girlfriend, and fellow heroin user, Ellaine Schultz.
Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman give career-best supporting performances as the musician’s puzzled parents.
At the height of his fame, Evans deconstructed Leonard Bernstein showtunes to their harmonic bones while retaining their musical essence.
Director Grant Gee succeeds in the other direction, reconstituting a plausible essence of Evans the person without betraying the musician he hid behind.
Berlinale Festival director Tricia Tuttle, Alan Maher, Bill Pullman, Janine Marmot, Barry Ward, Valene Kane, Grant Gee, Mark O’Halloran, Anders Danielsen Lie, Katie McGrath, Albert Berger and guests attend the Everybody Digs Bill Evans premiere during the Berlin Film Festival. Photograph: Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
Film industry bible Variety said the “nimble, restrained but quietly plangent” film elicits “considerable beauty and feeling”.
Like Wenders and Gee on Saturday night, Variety singled out cinematographer Piers McGrail’s striking monochrome cinematography for boosting the dramatic appeal, allowing “Ireland’s County Cork . . . stand in for both New York City and costal Florida”.
The Hollywood Reporter praised the feature for its “artful direction, nimble structure, visual richness and impeccable performances” that delivered “something full-bodied, compelling and deeply affecting, its melancholy beauty lingering long after the end credits roll”.
Indiewire drew attention to how the film shrugged off music biopic cliches for a tight focus on the contradictions and countervailing forces on one period of Evans’s life: “It’s a riff, played with real skill, lingering on dissonance rather than release.”
Screen Daily said watching Everybody Digs Bill Evans “is a little like being in a darkroom and seeing the image of a creative artist gradually emerge”.
For Danielsen Lie, Evans remained a mystery even after bringing him to life on-screen.
“There’s this big contrast between the order, the classicism, the refinement, the pureness of his art,” he said, “and the total chaos of his life. And he was kind of constantly rationalising his own problems.”
Danielsen Lie said he was “so happy and proud” of a film which, he added, Gee did “such a wonderful job directing”.
Producer Marmot said the entire team were “overwhelmed and thrilled”.
“Every independent film is a combination of will power and patchwork funding,” she said, “and we’re enormously grateful to our funders.”
Fellow producer Alan Maher called the film’s selection in Berlin an “incredible honour”.
He added: “We’re also deeply grateful to Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland, whose support was instrumental in bringing this film to fruition.”