Inside the making of the Celine Dion documentary

“The voice was the conductor of my life,” Celine Dion says in an interview that’s part of “I Am: Celine Dion,” the most popular documentary on Amazon Prime Video. But what happens when the powerhouse of a voice that has defined Dion’s singing career — and her life — can no longer perform to its highest capacity?

Directed by Irene Taylor, the documentary tells the story of the French-Canadian singer’s heart-wrenching struggle with stiff person syndrome, a rare and debilitating neurological disorder.

Dion lets the cameras in her home in Las Vegas, Nevada, where we see her taking pills, interacting with her twin boys, and experiencing a medical emergency. The singer, who released her first album when she was 13 and subsequently went on to sell 250 million records and win six Grammys, opened up about her diagnosis in December 2022.

“I wanted my fans to know because they deserve this,” Dion said in an interview at the New York premiere. “It’s been very hard and I can not any more be by myself alone. The world needs to know, because I love my fans, I love my family and I respect myself too much to just keep going in the dark.” Over a month after the release of the documentary, Dion returned to the stage to perform at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Christian Jensen, an award-winning filmmaker and editor who, along with Richard Comeau, edited the documentary, was not a huge fan of Dion prior to the project, he told me. But, “Working on this movie really made me fall in love with her in a way that maybe some of her fans already did love her,” said Jensen, who is based in Teton Valley, Idaho, and is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“It was also just really fun to see her kind of kooky personality and the side of her that’s very unvarnished,” he said.

Jensen has also worked on “Anthem,” Hulu’s documentary about a group of artists trying to create a new American anthem; HBO’s “Trees and Other Entanglements”; and the Netflix documentary series, “Last Chance U.”

Jensen spoke with the Deseret News recently about working on the Dion documentary and what it was like to help shape the moving story of the singer’s life and and struggle. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Deseret News: When you started working on the documentary, how did you go about shaping Celine Dion’s story?

Christian Jensen: I worked with the French-Canadian editor Richard Comeau, who did the first pass on the film — there were hundreds, probably thousands of hours of footage. There was footage that Irene (Taylor) had shot with cinematographer Nick Midwig, where they were in Celine Dion’s home in Las Vegas. We were also given full access to Celine’s archive of all the shows and concerts that she’s done and other behind-the-scenes footage, as well as other featurettes or documentaries that had been done of her.

Richard went through all the footage of her performances and he was specifically looking for little moments in her performances — a gesture or an expression or a little interaction that he felt distilled Celine’s personality into a moment of passion, of joy, or goofy moments that showed additional personality. He set aside all these moments which we then ultimately spread throughout the film, almost like little seeds that were planted throughout the film to give the audience a sense of her personality through her performance. The performance footage was just a reminder of how long she’s been an entertainer and how much her identity as a person is tied up in her life as a performer, which she’s been doing since she was a child.

I came on the project and continued working with the film, iterating it, solving various problems and tightening the film all the way through its completion.

A lot more people are watching documentaries now than were 10 or 20 years ago, and a lot of those people are getting at documentaries through either celebrity documentaries, true crime, sports or nature documentaries. The thing with the celebrity documentaries is that so many of them are kind of these ego pieces or puff pieces, sort of vanity projects. They’re so tightly controlled and so gilded that it’s hard to actually tell if what you’re watching is really authentic.

Celine had the same kind of veto power that most subjects of celebrity documentaries have — she could say no to anything. But to her credit, she didn’t do that in this film at all. We presented her our first pass at the film, which contained all of the challenging parts of her life and things that happened including the medical crisis that she had. We were really nervous that she was going to be like “no way.” But instead she was like: “I see what you’re doing, I’m totally on board, I don’t have any notes.”

DN: What kind of decisions did you have to grapple with during the process of editing the story?

CJ: One of the major early questions that I was asking myself and discussing with Irene was this moment in the film when Celine has a traumatic medical crisis. We knew that was just so important to the audience’s understanding of the reality of what Celine Dion was facing. Initially, it was the question whether her team would even allow it to be seen, because she’s so vulnerable in it. But once she’d seen it and was OK with this, the question was: Where is the best place for this scene to occur in the film?

From the very beginning, I was a very strong proponent that that’s how the film needed to end, more or less. We needed to see that moment and maybe some resolution afterwards. But to me that was the strongest and most important part of the film and I wanted to end the film on that emotion. So that was one of the first contributions that I made — advocating for that, then essentially reverse-engineering the film from that moment, such that it would have maximum impact and meaning.

There were also questions: How do we set up Celine? Most people know who she is, but people are going to come to the film with varying degrees of knowledge about or interest in her. So how do we quickly and efficiently get the audience into the story, understanding who Celine is, but also setting up the expectations for the kind of film that we’re going to have.

This is not a film about the wild behind-the-scene antics of a huge world tour or performance. It’s really a film about a woman coming to terms with her age and her health and her identity as a mother and her identity as a performer. And she’s doing all of this at a point of real vulnerability. Most of the film takes place during COVID in her home — in addition to the pandemic, she’s also grappling with the potential end of her entire identity as a performer and entertainer. It was a perfect place for her to reflect on her life and her legacy and how she was going to move forward with her life given the new realities with her health.

DN: There are a lot of sad moments in the documentary, yet you walk away from it feeling inspired. How did you balance the emotions of hope and sadness in the film?

CJ: One of the ways is that Celine herself is a very hopeful person. She’s generous and thoughtful, and she’s both vulnerable and tough. There is something in the way she has responded to her diagnosis that is both relatable — she goes through the same stages of grief that all of us do when we’re confronted with something like that — and she also rises above it and responds in the way that I think most of us hope we would respond to something similar.

There are a lot of times when Celine is sad as she’s reflecting on what she feels she’s losing and the person she used to be — the person who used to deliver at the highest level, the most belting notes. And suddenly she’s no longer able to do that. But she’s committed to overcoming it the best way she can, and there is hope in that. Most of us have or will have to face the declines of age; we may experience a medical emergency to which we have to adapt a new reality. I think being able to see someone so iconic go through the same struggles can feel comforting.

DN: How is this documentary different from other documentaries you’ve worked on?

CJ: It was the first celebrity documentary I’ve cut. I was nervous up front when I was first approached about being involved. Some of the first questions I asked were about the degree to which Celine was going to be giving us access and leeway as we told her story. It became fairly quickly clear that in some ways she was the perfect celebrity subject because of just how willing she was to open herself up and to be collaborative in the ways that we wanted to tell her story.

I think with a project like this you’re dealing with a really broad spectrum of the ways that people come into that film, from the casual observer to a super fan. You want to satisfy all those people. This is definitely a general audience film in the truest sense of the word.

To me it’s a film about the complexity of Celine’s personhood. Most of us have a very narrow view of who a celebrity is based on their public performances or what’s reported or spoken about them. And Celine is no different — we know her from the “Titanic” days and some things that were written in the tabloids. But she’s a woman, a mother, an employer, a French Canadian woman who has been diagnosed with a rare and debilitating disease. And I think it was important that we could show the complexity of the many faces of Celine and go beyond the superficial.

DN: People were obviously drawn to this emotional intensity and vulnerability — it’s the most viewed documentary that Amazon Prime has ever streamed.

CJ: We live in a world where everybody now is presenting themselves in some way or another through social media. We both value vulnerability on some level, or at least the appearance of vulnerability — but we’re also engaged in so many levels of curation of ourselves. Look, Celine is a huge performer with teams of people whose job it is to also curate her look and her personality. It’s not that she doesn’t do that as well, but there is something just true and refreshing when you see her in her home, interacting with her kids without makeup, just being kooky, which is just one of the aspects of her personality that I love. But she’s also a diva in the best sense of that word, and that’s refreshing to see both of those aspects of her personality.

The younger generation might describe Celine as “cringe”— it’s so sincere that’s it’s kind of too much? She’s so emotive and breaking into song off the cuff. But I was reading an interview with Donald Glover and he said said something that stuck with me — when you’re on your deathbed, you’re not going to sit back and think: I’m glad I wasn’t cringe in the way I interacted with my family and friends. I have a respect for the way that Celine is so emotive — the name of her production company is “Feeling Productions Inc.” That’s totally Celine.

It’s a film that eschews cynicism. It’s not an ironic film — it’s earnest and I think that’s very much Celine’s brand.

DN: What feelings did you experience watching hours of raw footage and then multiple cuts of the documentary over and over again?

CJ: Editing is sometimes a monotonous process. A lot of your time is spent in a dark room by yourself poring through the minutiae of footage and interviews. For me, what keeps me coming back to the editing process is those moments where you may be the second person after the director who sees footage and then have your hair stand up on end and think: “Wow, this is something.”

I felt that, particularly when I saw the medical crisis Celine goes through, and then even more so, her response to that medical crisis, when she sings this song of resistance. It’s so triumphant and so hopeful. When I saw that, it was so electric.

I feel like this happens once or twice on every film, where I find myself in the edit room completely emotional, whether I’m misty-eyed or weeping or grinning to myself because I know that there is something real, deep and meaningful in that moment. ... And for me, those are the moments that I build an entire film off of. In some ways, it’s the starting point and I often reverse-engineer films from those moments for maximum impact. So much of the editing process is a process of distillation. You’re taking so much and you’re trying to distill it down to the most elemental, gestural moments that are just going to really catch somebody. Even at the premiere, at the Lincoln Center in New York, having seen it a hundred times, I was experiencing all the same emotions with the rest of the audience.

DN: What do you find the most rewarding in your role as an editor?

CJ: In some ways, I am the biggest advocate for the audience that the film has, and I can do that because I’m watching it as an audience member from the very beginning and constantly asking myself how might they respond to this, what are the potential pitfalls.

As an editor, I have the advantage that the director doesn’t have — the directors have to answer to the studio and to the subject to make sure their promises are being fulfilled. I have the advantage as an editor of not being responsible for that. I am subservient to the director if they have particular notes, and they have the veto power over decisions, but I don’t have the same level of baggage that anyone else on the film has.

With this particular positioning that I have, I can just devote myself to thinking what the audience wants or needs. There are many, many other factors that go into ultimately finishing a film, and my role is just one small part of it. That’s how I see myself: perhaps the purest advocate of what the audience wants and could experience.