With “I Am: Celine Dion,” Montreal’s superstar dramatically reveals why she’s stopped performing and her hope that her long-hidden medical issues may be treated.
Her physical issues – stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disease — often left her paralyzed and in horrible pain.
Dion, 56, entrusted her story to Irene Taylor, an award-winning documentarian (“Beware the Slenderman”).
“To be frank, I had some considerable reservations,” Taylor allowed in a Zoom interview. “I pretty much got over that in the first hour of talking with her. She was very willing from the get-go to be open. She also had a kindness about her.
“I thought we could talk about anything because Celine knew she was ready to be very open about something she had been hiding for 17 years.
“She’s always called herself ‘an open book’ but in fact, she was a very closed book about this really important thing going on with her. The pandemic gave her a good excuse to stop and try to get to the bottom of what was happening in her body.”
Taylor had full access to Dion’s archive: Costumes, shoes, jewelry, concert videos, journals. “There was 600 hours of personal footage, concert footage that hadn’t been seen before. Who knew Celine performed ‘River Deep, Mountain High’?”
Inevitably, the most talked-about moment is the harrowing, up close, unrelenting sight of Dion suffering a sudden seizure as we realize so graphically how terrible this disease is, how her life is at stake.
As a glassy-eyed Dion is flipped over and given a nasal injection, the medic says, “Should we turn off the cameras?”
“I was there in the room next to her, two feet from her head the whole time because I was holding the microphone.
“You called it harrowing. I would call it horrifying. Frightening. It was scary. I was very worried but as a filmmaker, I knew what to do — keep filming.
“I know Celine is only semi-conscious when she has these episodes. It was very, very unlikely Celine would have an episode this severe while our camera was rolling. And so we never prepared for it, never even talked about it.
“I know it’s very hard to watch,” Taylor acknowledged, “but as a filmmaker who’s been doing this for 25 years, I worship in the church of nonfiction filmmaking. I believe that through seeing authentic, real-life scenarios in my character’s lives, we cultivate compassion and understanding for one another.
“I certainly don’t find suffering crass. What would have been crass is if I showed the whole episode, which was about 10 times longer than what’s in the film.”
“I Am: Celine Dion” streams globally on Prime Video June 25
