The multi-award winning documentarian who brought us ‘Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” and the Oscar-winning ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ — among many, many more gems — sat down with me for a Selfies Interview you won’t want to miss.
Alex Gibney stopped in London for the UK premiere of his latest film, this one an epic undertaking on the music of Paul Simon while the artist lives a particularly “vulnerable” moment of his life, as Gibney confessed. Simon’s latest album ‘Seven Psalms’ serves as a starting point for the film, and helps to explore the extensive, more than six decades long career of the music heavyweight, as he begins “reckoning with mortality,” in the words of Gibney.
Gibney’s rockumentary is nearly three and a half hours long and travels through what most of us feel is the soundtrack of our lives, Simon’s music. I mean, for me personally when the Netflix title NYAD — also in London at the festival — opened with ‘The Sound of Silence’ my floodgates opened. That’s how powerful Simon’s legacy has proven to be.
“Those songs are tattooed on my soul,” Gibney says it best, as his own career has been about explaining the unexplainable.
But don’t misunderstand me about the length, In Restless Dreams deserves to be watched on the big screen in one sitting, preferably on IMAX, perhaps only to be revisited in streaming, in two parts as Gibney suggests, somewhere down the line.
Paul Simon’s voice narrates, but I won’t bore you any longer, instead leaving the floor to Alex Gibney himself, as he once again puts before us something we may have gone in thinking we knew, but instead found deeper and more fascinating through his filmmaking.
Oh, and please watch the video above till the very end, as his choice of a go-to film on a day off is the stuff of legends.
Top image courtesy of the London Film Festival, used with permission.