‘In Restless Dreams’: Stephen Colbert talked with Paul Simon and director Alex Gibney about biographical documentary

Daniel Montgomery
·4 min read
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For documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, what made “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” different from other music docs he has helmed was “being up close and personal for that creative process. I’m a nut for those movies where you see how baseballs are made, how tennis balls are made. This was like how rock and roll is made with Paul Simon. It’s like, wow.” Gibney and Simon discussed the MGM+ documentary series with moderator Stephen Colbert after its New York City premiere at the DGA Theater on March 13.

“In Restless Dreams” tells the story of Paul Simon’s life and career while also documenting the creation of the singer-songwriter’s latest album, “Seven Psalms,” in the midst of sudden hearing loss in one ear. “That’s come back to enough of a degree that I am comfortable singing and playing guitar and playing a few other instruments,” Simon explained. At the time, though, he was really “dispirited” and “thrown off” by it, greatly complicating what had been a smooth and “effortless” process up to that point. But “after a while I said, you know, maybe it wasn’t supposed to be just great the whole time and easy. Maybe an obstacle is a thing you’re supposed to take into consideration … Maybe it’s a good thing. But it’s also a decent way to look at life.”

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What struck Gibney about Simon as he undertook this film was “the idea of the process that Paul goes through of letting the music flow through him. It’s almost a kind of mindfulness thing, where you’re in the present and you’re letting things happen. And then you construct the song out of that.” Likewise, during the making of the film, “one of the things that we discovered was that the movie began to speak to us at a certain point, and when you get into that zone, you think, okay, we’re on the right track now because it’s telling us to go in this direction rather than trying to force something.”

Simon admitted that he hasn’t watched the completed film, though, and wasn’t planning to, which allowed him to be more open and kept the documentary from affecting “Seven Psalms.” “I feel completely comfortable talking because I think, well I’ll never see this, so I’m fine, you know?” Watching himself also just makes him uncomfortable: “For example, we walked in at the end [of the screening]. And my first thought was, oh there’s [Art Garfunkel] and me, we’re so young, singing ‘Feelin’ Groovy.’ I don’t like that song. I wish I hadn’t had my hair down to here. So that’s why I say, no, I’m not going to watch it, because I’m going to find something silly not to like.”

Colbert wondered why Simon wasn’t a fan of “Feelin’ Groovy.” “It’s a fine song,” Colbert argued. “To me, that is evocative of you as a young writer just trying to find music in the world.” But Simon thinks of it as “a really good children’s song … I used to have to sing it with Artie all the time because it was a hit, but in my own shows I don’t do it unless I make a mistake, and then I do it to punish myself.”

Get more reflections on Simon’s career when the two-part doc premieres on MGM+ on March 17 and March 24.

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