Associated Press
[Source: AP]
After a three-and-a-half-hour documentary on his life, Paul Simon had only sympathy for the audience.
“You’re probably exhausted,” Simon told the crowd after the premiere of Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The 81-year-old Simon, himself, hadn’t watched the film before its debut, and he didn’t watch it Sunday, either. “I’ll get up the courage to see it, no doubt,” he promised.
The film, which is seeking distribution at TIFF, is an expansive look at Simon’s decades-spanning career, from growing up in Queens, New York, with Art Garfunkel to the success of “Graceland,” the sensational 1986 album he made with South African musicians.
“In Restless Dreams,” which takes its name from a lyric in “The Sound of Silence” (“In restless dreams I walked alone”), also intimately captures Simon painstakingly assembling his latest album, “Seven Psalms,” which was released in May.
He began the album, his first in several years, he says, after a dream in 2019 in which he envisioned an album of seven songs. His work at his home studio in Wimberly, Texas, was made more difficult by Simon’s hearing loss in his left ear, throwing off his musical equilibrium.
“I haven’t accepted it entirely, but I’m beginning to,” Simon told the audience of his hearing loss in a post-screening Q&A.
Simon reached out to Gibney, the veteran documentarian of “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” after admiring his 2015 documentary “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All.” Though the cameras took some adjusting to, Simon was content for Gibney to assemble a narrative around his life.
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