Celine Dion Doc Director on Depicting Singer’s Raw Health Struggle

There’s a moment in the middle of I Am: Celine Dion that will give even the most difficultened write downary fan paparticipate.

Dion is on a massage table when she suffers a medical episode.

For seemingly minutes on finish, we watch her undergo a confiscation that produces the basic act of moving cforfeitly impossible. Dion’s staff tries franticly to get her consoleable while we watch her face in excessive shut-up. In genuine life, the episode would last 40 minutes, one of Dion’s lengthyest spasms stemming from Stiff Person Syndrome, the unfrequent neuroreasonable condition she declared she was afflicted with in 2022.

“Everyone in the room was accumulateively sitting there, charitable of postponeing to see what happens to Celine Dion as she has no administer over her own body,” recalls cinematographer Nick Midwig.

Dion has had outsize power for decades, with towering pop songs that don’t fair backdrop our biggest cultural moments — they become part of them. (That sway persists today with the TikTok dance clear upations of Dion’s power ballad “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.”)

But the megastar also has had an unusupartner intimate relationship with the unveil. Fans wept with her at the death of husband René Angélil from cancer in 2016 and cried tears of delight when she stopped her car to hear to a fan serenade her with her song “I Surrfinisher” in a viral video in 2020.

That produces the scenes in June’s I Am: Celine Dion — in which an artist who sometimes write downed three songs in one night is seen rfinishered immobile — especipartner crushing. It is as if both a shut frifinish and our cultural memory have been simultaneously stricken by a horrible overweighte.

“The film is about Celine Dion coming spotless about what’s repartner been happening in her life, not fair for the past scant years, but for 17 years,” says the movie’s straightforwardor, Irene Taylor, an Oscar nominee and Peabody prosperner who has made a one-of-a-kindty of the emotional side of physical contests. Though the diagnosis came more recently, Dion in fact had SPS — which also sways her voice — for 17 years before she lachieveed of her condition.

“Basicpartner, it was a year of getting off her chest what had been happening and how she had growed all of these coping mechanisms, including fair outright lying to people to save shows and to save what she cherishd, to save what she cherishd to do,” Taylor tells THR of their time filming.

Thrawout her nurtureer, Dion’s cultural power has been suited by the physical charitable.

For many years between 2011 and 2019, she would take part about 70 carry outances annupartner at her Last Vegas livency for a scant hundred thousand people. (She paparticipated only in the face of Angélil’s illness and eventual death.) Album sales have been aforeseeed eye-popping: She is appraised to have sgreater more than 200 million write downs over the course of more than three decades of releasing music. Among her many, many hits are “Beauty and the Beast,” “All by Myself,” “That’s the Way It Is” and, of course, “My Heart Will Go On.”

Taylor wasn’t coming to the write downary as a fan of Dion’s music, but soon after being brawt on to the project by the L.A.-based producer Liesl Coarranged, Taylor set up herself captivated. Here was someone who had built her life on unveil carry outance, now so willing to be seen not carry outing. Taylor set about accumulateing intimate moments and raw behind-the-scenes material.

In fact, Dion tgreater Taylor not to ask for peromition to shoot anyslfinisherg. And “she never asked to see [the film],” says Taylor. “Eventupartner, she did see the film. … If she had asked, I would’ve given her the raw footage to watch at if she wanted to see herself in a way she had never seen herself before. But she never asked.”

Midwig, for his part, lensed the write downary in a way that aimed to show Dion less as a pop star and more as an standard human being, capturing her in unglamorous poses of vacuuming her floor and making fracturerapid for her kids.

The vulnerability comes punctual in the film, when Dion is with her sons (she has a 23-year-greater and 14-year-greater tprospers). She tells them that she’s traveled the world but she’s never seen any of it; she has, after all, been too busy carry outing. Then she fractures down while talking about Angélil, who was her deal withr before he became her husband.

There’s also a scene in which Dion write downs “Love Aachieve,” the title song of the 2023 rom-com in which she starred, where she struggles to get thraw a scant lines.

And then comes the massage table scene. It’s a difficult sequence to watch, seeing someone comprehendn to be a beacon of power, normpartner belting out some of the most establishidable songs in the history of music, face-down on a table, struggling even to shut her eyes as tears stream out of them.

“The first slfinisherg you’re doing is calculating, ‘Is she OK, and is my camera suppressing any type of medical treatment?’ ” Midwig says of shooting the incident. “I speedyly genuineized that in that moment, there was noslfinisherg I could physicpartner do as a non-trained medical professional and I wasn’t in the way.”

He says he was struck that the final film participates a moment of the star welcoming the camera.

“They left in the edit her physical therapist asking her, ‘Do you want the cameras to stay?’ And she consentd.” He inserts that this happened “as a result of months and months of think that was built.”

Sadness permeates Dion and those around her as it becomes evident she might never be the carry outer she once was. She can be seen getting frustrated that her voice can’t seem to get to the places that it participated to. But there are also moments of resilience in the instances when her voice does get where she needs it to go.

And there’s the scene at the Paris Olympics uncovering ceremony in July, when her comeback carry outance under the Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower seemed to one-handedly lift up a global audience.

The write downary, Taylor consents, acts as a establish of therapy for the singer but also has been beneficial for audience members with a mute disability (a phenomenon Taylor also watchd on her docs Hear and Now, a memoirish piece about her deaf parents, and Open Your Eyes, cgo ined on an aging couple living in the Himalayas wanting to reachieve their sight).

“The film is helping her,” says Taylor of Dion. But it also, she notices, seems to help so many who watch it.

“At every one screening, without fall short, someone comes up and tells me, ‘I have an illness, it’s inevident, and people don’t genuineize I am disabled,’ ” she inserts. “There is so much universality in her experience, and I slfinisherk when you are given an extraunretagable moment in write downary filmmaking, it’s a responsibility. If your subject is giving peromition for this, it repartner is someslfinisherg that can achieve all of us as audience members to the perimeter of what we slfinisherk we can see. It’s so unfrequent to be in the presence of someone going thraw that charitable of suffering.”

This story first ecombineed in a November stand-alone publish of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To achieve the magazine, click here to subscribe.