I am: Céline Dion: When Céline Dion hated herself for not being able to sing: Valium and pain in the singer’s most personal documentary | Culture

Twelve minutes of footage mark the beginning of the Céline Dion documentary. The 120-minute running time of I am: Celine Dion — the film by Irene Taylor, which will be shown on Amazon Prime Video from June 25th – does not begin with a very young Dion with raised eyebrows and frizzy hair saying that her dream is “to be an international star and to be able to sing all her life” while an aria from Bizet’s Carmen plays in the background. Not even with her teenage twins Eddy and Nelson, who jokingly interview her and ask her about her favorite color. Not even with the poster explaining that Dion – after releasing 27 albums, selling 250 million records, and being nominated for Grammys and Oscars – had to interrupt and cancel her 2021 tour due to stiff person syndrome.

The moment when the viewer really sits in front of the 56-year-old artist is when she – in dim light, without makeup, her face swollen from medication – tells how one morning after breakfast her voice was no longer her own. “I freaked out a little bit,” she recalls. Everything had gone well the night before. But that morning everything went wrong. She was plagued with anxiety and nervousness. And then she shows how it affected her. Dion opens her mouth, makes a sound … and it doesn’t come out. Her voice breaks. As if she were a mortal, not the Canadian who belted out the power anthems My heart Will Go On And The power of love. She can’t sing the note and starts crying. The whole scene is recorded by the cameras.

It’s an incredible moment. It doesn’t matter how many times she repeats the story (many times) or how many times the viewer rewatches it (maybe even more). It’s a huge surprise that Dion can’t sing. That broken notes come out of her highly trained throat and don’t even reach the tenth power of what they once were. Crying, she describes how much she hates those notes.

Equally shocking is the scene in which Dion has a five-minute seizure that paralyzes her in the middle of filming and forces her to seek medical attention. It makes your hair stand on end. But what is most surprising is that it was Dion herself who decided to film the worst moments of her illness. Director Irene Taylor, 54, is the director of the documentary. In an exclusive interview with EL PAÍS, Taylor explains that it was the singer herself who wanted to give her complete access and record these difficult scenes: she set no limits on what should be shown about her. “The first day I filmed with her, I was really shocked. Really shocked at how open she was with me. She wanted to share so many things with me, things I didn’t even know about,” the director recalls the filming of the documentary, which lasted months.

“I think this year she made a very conscious decision: I’m not going to tell Irene what to do. I’m going to trust her and let her do her job. And you know, that’s how she works with the people in her life,” the director reflects in a video call. “She has managers, assistants, musicians that she works with, and they’ve been working with her for decades. That tells me a lot about her. She knows how to delegate, and then she lets people have autonomy, and that’s very important.”

As a chronically ill person and a global artist, showing her struggles is a conscious choice – even when she’s wearing necklaces that belong to Maria Callas and living in a mansion in Nevada. It connects her with a worldwide audience and allows others to identify with her, too. She is seen with her wrinkles and blemishes, without hair and makeup, walking to physical therapy sessions in socks. The singer tells how she started with “one pill, two pills, five pills, too many pills” and eventually took “80, 90 milligrams of Valium a day” – and that was just medication. She remains calm when she says her condition affects “one in a million.” And that, like so many others with other illnesses, she developed this disease, which doesn’t make it any less tragic.

In the documentary, which will also be shown in select cinemas from mid-week, Dion herself tells her story. She is surrounded by many people – musicians, assistants, her children – but Dion’s voice is the only one telling the story. According to Taylor, that was the only request the singer ever made of her. “Before we decided to make the film, she asked me, ‘Is it possible to make a documentary where people don’t talk about me by just letting me talk about me? What if my voice was the only voice in the film? Is that possible?'” says Taylor. “And I told her that’s absolutely possible. And in fact, that’s my dream film. So if you want that, tell me, but you have to prepare for it because it’s going to take a lot of time and effort. You’re going to have to spend a lot of time with me,” she adds with a smile.

It is true that the documentary about Céline Dion could be a compilation of her life and work, almost a eulogy, a testament that could be seen today or in 50 years, in which you can see the singer talking to her children, showing her warehouse full of haute couture clothes and even receiving medical treatment. But what makes I am: Celine Dion so unique and powerful are the incredibly personal scenes in which Dion breaks down and gets angry with herself for not being able to control her body: “I’m so ashamed,” she says at one point, throwing her hands in front of her head. The scenes in which she describes how her voice was her compass, which guided her, but that she has suffered from cramps for 17 years. In which she talks about how she tried to hide the cramp when she had a fit during a performance (“I did what my mother said”). And in which she says that she cannot live without music, and even less without the support of the audience: “The fans give me energy, lots of it.”

Is I am: Celine Dion perhaps the most influential documentary about the world-famous Canadian artist? Taylor has no answer to that, as she was conscious of learning as little as possible about the singer and intentionally did not watch any of the other documentaries about her. “I respect the filmmakers, but you know, in my process I didn’t want to rely on other people’s interpretations. I wanted to take a fresh look at it,” says the director.

Producers looked for material about the artist – the documentary includes a lot of old, professional and private footage – and told Taylor only about the singer’s “basic biographical details, family life and the like.” “But I really didn’t want to ask questions that were wrong. I didn’t want to ask her trick questions, like, ‘I know the answer to that, but I’m going to ask it anyway,'” she says. “Over the course of the year (of filming), the questions I asked were very honest questions that I didn’t know the answer to.”

Taylor, on the other hand, takes every question. The interview is very short, but she is happy to explain the documentary so that people can see it, “having given birth to it,” she laughs. The Amazon team only asks that one question not be asked of Taylor: no questions about Dion’s health or her future plans. Taylor is not Dion, after all. The singer has given very few interviews (in conversation with Fashion And People) and stays in her house in Las Vegas. Sometimes she can’t walk or warm up her voice. She spends her time getting care, taking naps and taking lots of medication. And she’s training for his next show, because Dion is sure she’ll be back on stage. As she herself says in the documentary: “It’s not hard to do a show. It’s hard to cancel a show.”

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