Paul Simon Faced Unexpected Struggles. Cameras Were Rolling.

“That was a lovely moment that Andy intuited and put together,” Gibney stated. “The contrast between that love and then the bitterness laid over that sweet moment captured in a poetic way the ebb and flow of time and memory, happiness and sadness, all rolled into one.”

According to Simon, the inspiration for “Seven Psalms” got here to him in a dream in 2019. Gibney filmed him as he rehearsed and recorded the album in Wimberley, Austin, Houston and New York, directed singers and instrumentalists, and sang alongside his spouse, the musician Edie Brickell.

The filmmakers additionally pored by way of a whole lot of hours of audiotapes and archival footage and 1000’s of pictures, many from Simon’s personal assortment. Simon lived a lot of his life in entrance of the digicam, so it was much less a matter of discovering, say, footage of him singing “Cecilia,” than it was of selecting which model out of dozens of them was the very best.

The film provides a wealth of fascinating trivia, akin to how the actor Charles Grodin directed the documentary “Simon and Garfunkel: Songs of America” in 1969, after which appeared as a Garfunkel impersonator, full with a wig, alongside Simon in a “Saturday Night Live” skit. Or how the organizers of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival anticipated Simon and Garfunkel, in addition to fellow acts Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, to “perform without fee.”

As for the songs, there are a lot of, and lots of of them performed at size (the whole thing of “American Tune”; Aretha Franklin’s highly effective 1971 cowl of “Bridge Over Troubled Water”). Simon’s discography is so in depth and hit-filled that “Kodachrome” — “Kodachrome”! — doesn’t even make an look. “It’s already a three-and-half-hour movie,” Grieve stated. “If we put in every amazing song, you’d have a 10-part series.”

For Gibney, who has made many movies through the years about villains and cheats, corruption and deception, with the ability to inform the story of such a beloved songwriter was a welcome change. “I love his music, so this was a labor of love in the truest sense,” he stated.