‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ at Chiswick Cinema

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

New arthouse movie about the jazz pianist Bill Evans getting rave reviews, produced by Chiswick producer Susan Simnett

There are two screenings at Chiswick Cinema next week of a new arthouse film getting rave reviews, produced by Chiswick film producer Susan Simnett.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans won a Silver Bear for Grant Gee as Best Director at the prestigious Berlinale Film Festival and was rewarded with a four-star review from Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, who tweeted from the festival after watching it that he had just seen Bill Pullman give an Oscar-winning performance.

The NME also gives it four stars, and Uncut‘s reviewer has given it four and a half.

Bill Pullman (Sleepless in Seattle, Independence Day, Torchwood) plays a supporting role as the father of the legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans, while Anders Danielsen Lie plays Evans.

Set in 1961, the film focuses on Bill Evans’ grief after the death of one of his best friends, double bassist Scott LeFaro, in a car crash at the age of 25.

As the film opens, he is recording two groundbreaking albums at New York’s Village Vanguard, but when tragedy hits he is paralysed by his grief and is unable to play any more.

The film, based on the 2013 novel Intermission by Owen Martell, explores how he navigates his way through this to come back to the point where he is able to make music again.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans – Trailer

Bill vanishes off the music scene. He is a heroin addict, as is his girlfriend, and the impact of his friend’s death threatens to derail him completely. Various family members try to help – his brother, a musician also, less successful, teaching rather than performing himself, who has a young family and decides he can’t cope with Bill, much as he would like to.

His elderly parents – his mother Mary, played by Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne 1988-97, Big Bang Theory 2007-18, Hacks 2022), who was Bill’s first piano teacher, and his father: chatty, bad-tempered, relieved that he has escaped the straightjacket of working life to be retired and free to play golf in Florida, with whom Bill has an awkward relationship at best.

Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf as Bill’s parents

Danielsen Lie has won a bit of a reputation for playing emotionally complex, sometimes mentally disturbed, characters. The Norwegian actor played Anders Behring Breivik, who carried out the 2011 domestic terrorism attacks in Norway in which 77 people were killed.

He won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Worst Person in the World in 2021, which was named best film of 2021 by both Vanity Fair and The Atlantic. He is also a musician – a multi-instrumentalist who plays the piano, guitar, bass guitar and drums.

Susan Simnett

“He is an incredible pianist”, Susan told The Chiswick Calendar, “he is obsessed by Bill Evans and had been transcribing his work”, which proved a real bonus in making this film.

The film is shot in Black and White “in the style of Night of the Hunter”, she said, with flash-forwards in vibrant colour.

“It’s a real Indie art house film with a lot of visual heft that people will appreciate”.

Susan has been a film maker for ten years having come to it late after an earlier career in advertising.

“I was drawn into the industry, not realising how challenging it would be, but working with other people and supporting them has given me a greater understanding of the industry”.

Anders Danielsen Lie as Bill Evans

Susan has produced a number of short films and a 90 minute documentary, Fadia’s Tree, about a Palestinian woman in exile, living in a refugee camp in Lebanon, which has been shown at Chiswick Cinema. She was executive producer on Chuck Chuck Baby and Brides.

She is delighted by the reviews Everybody Digs Bill Evans has been getting since it was released two weeks ago.

“It is a really beautiful film – different, fresh, art house – and the window for these films to be seen in cinemas is very small”, she said.

This particular window is two screenings at Chiswick Cinema:

Monday 28 September at 8.00pm and Wednesday 30 September at 2.00 pm.

Tickets: chiswickcinema.co.uk