Dr. Celine Dion director talks about singer’s raw health struggles

there is a moment in between I am: Celine Dion Even the most die-hard documentary fans will balk.

Dionne was on the massage table when she became ill.

For several minutes we watched as she had seizures that made simple movements nearly impossible. Dionne’s staff worked hard to make her feel comfortable as we got a close look at her face. In real life, the episode lasted 40 minutes, one of the longest convulsions Dion has had due to stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder she announced she had in 2022.

“Everyone in the room was sitting there, waiting to see what was going to happen to Celine Dion because she couldn’t control her body,” recalls photographer Nick Medwig.

Dion has been a huge influence for decades, writing universal pop songs that not only provide the backdrop for some of our most important cultural moments, but become a part of them. (The influence continues today with a TikTok dance interpretation of Dion’s power ballad “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.”)

But the superstar also has an unusually close relationship with the public. Fans cried for her in 2016 when her husband, René Angélil, died of cancer; in 2020, they shed tears of joy when she pulled up in her car and listened to fans sing her song “I Surrender” in a viral video .

This makes the scene in June I am: Celine Dion — The artist would sometimes record three songs at night, only to become motionless – especially heartbreaking. It was as if our closest friends and our cultural memory had been struck by a terrible fate at the same time.

“This movie is about Celine Dion coming clean about what’s really happened in her life, not just over the past few years, but over the past 17 years,” said the film’s director, Irene Taylor. aspects of particularity. Although the diagnosis was recent, Dion had actually suffered from SPS for 17 years before she learned about her condition – which also affects her voice.

“Basically, this was a year where she opened up about what happened and how she developed all these coping mechanisms, including blatantly lying to people in order to save the show and save what she loved to do,” Taylor told THR The time they were photographed.

Throughout her career, Dionne’s cultural power was matched by material power.

For many years between 2011 and 2019, she performed approximately 70 shows per year in front of hundreds of thousands of people at her “Last Vegas” residency. (She didn’t stop until Angelil fell ill and eventually died.) Album sales were equally eye-popping: It’s estimated that she sold more than 200 million records in more than three decades of releasing music. Among her many hits are “Beauty and the Beast,” “On My Own,” “This Is It,” and of course, “My Heart Will Go On.”

Taylor didn’t come to the documentary as a fan of Dion’s music, but soon after Los Angeles producer Liesl Copeland brought her on board the project, Taylor found herself hooked. This is a man who makes a living performing in public and is now so willing to be seen no Performance. Taylor began collecting intimate moments and raw behind-the-scenes material.

In fact, Dion told Taylor not to ask for permission to film anything. And “she never asked to see [the film],” Taylor said. “Eventually, she did see the movie. … If she asked, if she wanted to see herself in a way she’d never seen before, I would give her the raw footage to watch. But she never did asked.

Medwig shot the documentary in a way that made Dion less of a pop star and more of a regular person, capturing the tedium of vacuuming floors and making breakfast for her children. posture.

This vulnerability emerges early in the film, when Dionne is spending time with her sons (she has twins, 23 and 14). She told them that she had traveled all over the world, but she had never seen a single place; she had been busy acting, after all. She then breaks down when she talks about Angélil, who was her manager before he became her husband.

There’s also a scene where Dion is recording “Love Again,” the title song for the 2023 romantic comedy in which she stars, and she struggles with a few of her lines.

Then there’s the massage table scene. It was a difficult scene to watch, seeing someone who was considered a beacon of power, often belting out some of the most awe-inspiring songs in music history, face down on a table and even trying to close his eyes with tears streaming down his face. Tears flowed from the eyes.

“The first thing you have to do is calculate, ‘Is she OK? Is my camera impeding any type of medical treatment?'” Medwig said of filming the incident. “I realized very quickly. At that point, there was nothing I could do as an untrained medical professional, and I wasn’t going to get in the way. “

He said he was shocked that the final film included a moment where the stars welcome the stars.

“They left her physical therapist in the clip asking her, ‘Do you want the cameras to stay?’ and she agreed. It was “the result of the trust that had been built over many months,” he added.

Sadness permeated Dionne and those around her as it became clear that she might never be the performer she once was. She can be seen getting frustrated that her voice can’t seem to reach where it used to be. But there are also moments of resilience when her voice does get to where she needs to be.

And then there was the scene at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July, when her comeback performance beneath the Eiffel Tower’s Olympic rings seemed to single-handedly inspire a global audience.

Taylor believes the documentary was a form of therapy for the singer, but could also be beneficial for viewers with mute disorders (a phenomenon Taylor also observed in her documentary) heard and nowa memoir about her deaf parents, and open your eyesfocusing on an elderly couple living in the Himalayas who want to regain their sight).

“This movie is helping her,” Taylor said of Dionne. But she noted that it also seemed to help many people who watched it.

“Every time I go for a check-up, without fail, someone comes up to me and says, ‘I have a disease that’s invisible and people don’t realize I’m disabled,'” she added. “There’s so much universality to her experience, and I think it’s a responsibility when you get an extraordinary moment in documentary filmmaking. If your subject gives permission for that, it can really connect us all as It’s very rare for an audience to be brought to the extent that we think we can see it.

This story first appeared in the November issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.