Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney was given one instruction by Paul Simon: “The music has to sound good.”
in 1962, Paul Simon was 21. When he approached documentary director Alex Gibney about the possibility of a project about his career, he was almost 81. The singer/songwriter had seen and been impressed by the prolific filmmaker’s two-part, about the legendary singer’s life and career, and thought that Gibney might also be interested in making a film about him. What clinched the deal was his invitation to Gibney to be an observer during the preparations for and recording of what became.
Earlier this year, at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s international documentary festival, Gibney acknowledged Simon’s influence on his approach. “It’s not until I went to watch him create, and found an interesting way of exploring his creative process, that I saw how the finished film needed to be about time and mortality. And, for me, understanding how to stylistically put it all together was a breakthrough.
Gibney’s route takes him back to his subject’s adolescence in Queens, NY, where, Simon explains, he wasn’t trying to do anything significant: “My culture was the radio. It wasn’t like I sang the music of Queens.” At high school, he met Art Garfunkel, and their fraught relationship began. Garfunkel declined to be interviewed for the film, but appears regularly via the archival material. After that comes Simon’s journey in search of different sounds.
‘In Restless Dreams’ is one of the most intimate and revealing studies of a musician’s methods that you’re ever likely to see. The contrasts between the downbeat mood of much of the deliciously harmonic music he made with Garfunkel, and the joyous bounce of songs such asGibney’s film is long, but his original cut was an hour longer. A lot was left out, he says, including coverage of Simon’s Broadway musical,, which bombed at the box office but which Gibney says he loves , and footage of the “demos” Simon did withduring his early years in the Brill Building. Perhaps there’s a part three waiting in the wings; perhaps not.
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