How did the idea for the documentary American Symphony come together?
Jon Batiste: John Mayer and Dave Chappelle and I decided to do a spontaneous house party around the Emmys. Matt was there and we met. Not too long after, we worked together on Matt’s COVID film The First Wave. I did the score. And once that was finished, we were talking about what each of us was up to. Matt was telling me he was finishing his film Retrograde and I was telling him I was finishing my symphony.
And I felt him documenting the process of me composing the symphony—going on the road to get all of the incredible artists and influences that would make up this symphony beyond category, beyond what a symphony orchestra has ever been—would be incredible to capture on film. A filmmaker like Matt has this ability to get unprecedented access and create such intimate portrayals of people. Applying that to a symphony process film would be revolutionary. So I proposed that to Matt and he said, “Let's do it. Let's hit the road.”
And then COVID shut us down. But we still jumped in and started shooting, literally within the month that we had that conversation. And from there, it was crazy. We didn't know that I would get nominated for eleven Grammys over seven categories—which is a first in history—and that Suleika’s diagnosis would come that same week.
So in the process of making the symphony film, we captured so much more. Just based on those two anecdotes alone, you can see the extremes in our life at this moment in time—let alone the artistic Mount Everest of writing a symphony and all the other things that were already set in motion in our lives—coupled with the fact that we were in another wave of COVID. So it's a lot but that was the genesis of what occurred.
Suleika Jaouad: I first heard of Matt when Jon was writing music for The First Wave. And also he reached out to me—I was working on a project with The New York Times about a death row prisoner named Quintin Jones and a clemency campaign to get his death sentence commuted to a life sentence. I was an admirer of Matt's work and was really excited to hear that he and Jon were working on this process film about American Symphony.
My intention was never to be a part of the film. I'm sort of an unwitting participant, I would say. But the story took on a life of its own, and it became clear that it was impossible to tell the story of American Symphony without telling the story of the symphony of life that was unfolding behind closed doors and in doctor's offices and in hospital rooms.
Matthew Heineman: Being at that party and seeing Jon and Dave playing music was like a mystical experience. I had known of Jon, but I’d never seen him play live and it was incredible. And then as Suleika pointed out, I was separately trying to reach her about her amazing work. So I feel this film was somewhat destined to happen. And obviously, Jon, I worked with you on The First Wave.
I say this with every film I make, but it’s the case with every film I make—when I was 21 years old, I heard one of my mentors say, “If you end up with the story you started with, you weren't listening along the way.” That's beautiful advice for life and it's beautiful advice for filmmaking—be open to the story changing, don't be dogmatic. And that certainly was the case here. We planned a process film about Jon’s American Symphony but life intervened. And the film American Symphony became a beautiful meditation on what it means to be an artist and to persevere during tough times and good times.
Q: Matt, how did you begin the film and how did you handle it when you realized that the film was shifting?
MH: To be honest, I had no time in my life to make this movie. I had just gotten back from Afghanistan, I was on the road promoting The First Wave. But it felt like an opportunity I couldn't turn down. And once we collectively decided—Jon, Suleika, and I—to do this, we started filming on New Year's Eve, 2021 and basically filmed every single day for six to eight months, often from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night. And the access Suleika and Jon gave me was incredible. At the bedrock of any film like this is trust, and we developed a deep trust with each other that allowed me to become part of the fabric of their daily lives. I’m sure they often felt it was an intrusion.
JB: Oh, yeah. I mean, I was the one who was intruded on the most, for sure.
SJ: I beg to differ, Jon. [laughs]
JB: If you count the hours, for sure it's me. It was very much an invasive process. But we wouldn't have this one-of-a-kind film if we didn't allow for that to happen. I think Matt captured the process of the symphony more than almost any other process or music film I've ever seen. Plus, it captured the symphony of life, as Suleika put it, because the camera was catching all of the highs and lows. Without the camera, it would have been impossible for Matt to capture the humanity and artistry and struggle of both of our lives and the process of all these musicians from different walks of life coming together for the symphony.
To capture all of that in one film and have it feel like life unfolding, that's something you can't plan for. That's God's work, we can't take any credit for that. We showed up and let God do the work and we kept showing up. So I'm excited about the world seeing that because I've not seen another film that has been able to do that.
MH: To add to that, one of the original plans for the film was for Jon go on a road trip of sorts and explore different musical influences along the way. But given Suleika’s illness and where we were with whatever wave of COVID we were in, we ended up shooting way more in New York.
JB: At this time I was still doing The Late Show and I also wanted to be with my wife. And Suleika can speak more to this moment in her life, but she's the person in this film in the most vulnerable state. And the way that we were able to weave in the artistry—for instance, the painting in the hospital, and the backstory of us and how we met at camp and our wedding—so much was captured effectively in the film. It wasn't what we initially envisioned but I think a master documentary filmmaker is like a master musician. You can practice all you want, but the moment is the moment. If you can't live up to the moment and create, then you got a lot of work to do.
Suleika, what was it like to have cameras around in the midst of all you were going through?
SJ: Illness is something that makes you want to hide. It doesn't make you want to share and certainly the natural impulse is not to invite cameras into the space. Prior to this film, Jon and I were on a victory lap so to speak—during the pandemic, we’d both hunkered down and worked nonstop on various creative projects. And right around the time I got sick, you know, Jon's album We Are was out throughout the world, my book Between Two Kingdoms was out throughout the world.
And this thing happened that was very unexpected. There's less than a 1 percent chance of relapse when you're ten years out of a bone marrow transplant, and my prognosis was pretty grim. It was one of those moments where I felt my worst, I looked my worst, the ceiling had caved in on our lives. But I’ve learned from going through this before that as safe as it might feel to retreat when something like this happens, there's value in pushing through that impulse. When we dare to share our most vulnerable stories, there's a reverberation that happens: vulnerability begets vulnerability begets vulnerability and in a first-person story like this, the “I” can quickly become a “you” and a “we.” It felt important to me to go beyond the shiny narrative that we see of entertainers and writers and musicians and really show the behind-the-scenes peaks and valleys of what it means to be a creative person in this world with all the human foibles we all have.
I say this in the film, but I think for both Jon and me, survival has always been its own kind of creative act. When I got sick, it felt like an invitation to alchemize this relapse and try to transform it into something useful and artful and beautiful.
Why is making art so essential to your survival?
SJ: I grew up with two immigrant parents from very different cultures and backgrounds, speaking one language at home and one language at school. Like a lot of people who feel like misfits or who are trying to bridge different worlds, Jon and I always describe ourselves as fellow aliens on this planet.
Finding a universal language that helps you not only communicate but carve out your own space in the world is something that's been a central preoccupation for me, and the way I have historically always found and made meaning is through words and writing. When I write, I understand myself and I feel like I start to get closer to a better understanding of the world. And that was also music for me. I play the double bass, I’m a classical musician, Jon and I met through the music world. And later it became painting. And in a way all these different mediums to me are one and the same and film is yet another one.
I think it's an attempt to express the intangible. Something like illness is an experience that people have been struggling to communicate the reality of since the beginning of time. When you get sick or when a tragedy befalls someone, the first thing people often say is, “Words fail.” I've made it my mission to try to find those words because I think that's how we convert isolation into creative solitude and connection and even community. To give a very concrete example, when I was in the hospital, I wasn't able to write, I wasn't able to read because I was on a medication that made my vision very blurry. So I shifted to a different medium, watercolor, which is very messy and it's hard to be precise. It felt like an apt metaphor at a time in my life where things were very messy and I had very little control.
Taking these scenes of what was happening and rendering them into my own creative language is a way of infusing what can sometimes feel like a brutal reality with my own filter of interpretation, a way of hunting for those little moments of beauty that I believe can be found in any circumstance, even the grimmest of circumstances.
Art is also, I would say, our first shared language in our marriage. We haven't necessarily directly collaborated on creative projects until this one, but it's an ongoing focus on our household. Jon is always playing me his music, I'm always showing him my work, or we’re experiencing the art of other people. That kind of creative conversation I think is central to who we are and central to our partnership.
JB: Some people are hardwired to create. When you're going through a lot, people ask, “How you doing all of this? Aren't you exhausted?” We get energy from the things we make. We get energy from writing and performing, creating and gathering people into a community.
We also get energy from being together, the two of us, or being alone. We go through these periods of incubation, creativity, and refinement, incubation, creativity and refinement. You’re letting your thoughts come to you, you’re observing, you’re creating, then you’re putting it out into the world. Then you see what happens and you refine that process. That's a way of life and that's a survival mechanism. For people like us, if we aren't doing that, we feel like we’re dying.
And in general, I think when you come up as a weirdo—whether it’s like Suleika coming from immigrant parents in a very American town and moving around a lot or like me just being a strange, quiet, introverted kid in a family of performers—as a kid I didn't speak until I was 10—and being the youngest one.
The experience of growing into what you know yourself to be, even though the outside doesn't reflect it yet, that becomes a part of the creative process. And then when you learn to build community through that, you gather all of the weirdos and you realize everybody's weird because you’re being vulnerable about your weirdness and then everybody's free to show who they are. And then it's liberating. That's also a way of surviving. There's a lot of different ways it’s a survival mechanism.
When you met for the first time, at the Skidmore jazz camp, did you recognize that in each other right away?
JB: Yeah, Suleika was definitely weird. [laughs] Suleika, what was your impression? You can lay it out.
SJ: I have such a distinct first impression of Jon, which was yes: extremely weird. I walked into a dorm room at Skidmore, and there were a bunch of jazz musicians and Jon was dancing and singing something with the lyrics, “No pants dance.” And I was like, “Oh, no, what is going on in here?” I thought he was this funny, eccentric guy.
My second, very clear memory of him was at the camp end-of-summer recital. Jon took a solo and I remember this hush falling over the whole room. When he finished playing, everyone leapt up and gave him a standing ovation. To this day, I've never seen anyone get a standing ovation at a band camp—it's supposed to be a democratic process where everyone's kid is equally amazing. But even then—I turned 13 that summer and Jon was 13 or 14—it was obvious to me that he had something extraordinary.
We kept orbiting in and out of each other's lives. I went to Juilliard and Jon was a freshman at Julliard. The first time I saw him I was on the 1 subway train with my friend Michelle heading from Juilliard to Penn Station. We see this young man sitting alone playing air piano and singing to himself. All the other subway commuters are staring. I turned to Michelle and said, “I know that guy. That's Jon Batiste from New Orleans.” And then I blurted out without thinking, “That's the man I’m going to marry some day.” We giggled and hopped off the train and I didn’t give it a second thought—Michelle, who was at our living room wedding, was the one to remind me of that. But yeah, there was always something extraordinary and special about Jon and I think everyone in his radius sensed it.
Jon, how about you, when you first laid eyes on Suleika at jazz camp?
JB: She had on Birkenstocks. It was very hippie-dippie. It was interesting, cool. I was coming from New Orleans and they didn't really have a lot of people like that in the neighborhood. When we ran into each other at Julliard, Suleika always had a lot of people around her. She came across as a leader and people were drawn to her energy—the aura of her confidence was always there so people liked getting a contact high.
There was a natural chemistry. When she was graduating from Princeton, I was leaving to start the master's program at Julliard and she was going away to Paris. From the going-away party, I got a sense that maybe we could be some kind of relationship beyond friends. And that developed into us getting married, so I was right about that. I remember she said then, “We're going to take over the world, and we're going to change the world.” And the beautiful thing about that is we knew each other, but not well enough to share something that sounds so crazy and confident. It was amazing because that's how I thought and I could tell that we had a similar approach to life and to the belief of what it is that we can contribute to the world and optimism and artistry—all these incredible synergies were there. So from that day, things shifted.
We saw each other through all these different phases of life: the awkward teen years, the early college acclimating to being on your own years, the years of going out and having ambitions and being an incredible artist and citizen, and then the years going through the highs and lows that all of us go through in some form.
SJ: About a year after that very arrogant, youthful proclamation, I found myself in a hospital room in New York City, when I got my first leukemia diagnosis. I had been in the hospital for about two months at that point, and all of the treatments were failing. And the same friend Michelle, who was on the subway all those years earlier, told Jon that I was sick. He immediately got his whole band and came straight to the hospital and they put on an impromptu show right there in my hospital room. It turned into its own kind of second line as patients and doctors and nurses started to hear the sound of Jon’s melodica filtering out to the cancer unit. Doctors and patients were dancing together, and it was this incredibly joyous moment in a space that we don't typically associate with joy. And that is Jon's gift—among his many gifts—showing up in the most challenging moments and figuring out how to bring deep joy to spaces that we don't typically associate with joy.
Matt, spending six to eight months every day from dawn until late at night, documenting the really intense highs and lows that Jon and Suleika were going through—what was that like for you?
MH: It was an incredible experience. I think in some ways so much of my career has built to this point to be able to make a film like this. And it was also very clear to me that, despite everything I've done in my career, this was a very different type of film. Jon and Suleika are such unique people, such unique artists, and to do justice to them collectively and as individuals, to do justice to the symphony and the process of it, to do justice to Suleika and her battle with cancer and her own art—I just felt enormous pressure, honestly, every single day to try to capture these moments.
They both obviously have been around cameras and are incredibly intelligent people, so it was also an interesting process to have fellow storytellers in front of the camera and to open up about my own process more than I normally would. I normally just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. Throughout the process, we were having conversations and ultimately, it made the film better.
There were a million challenges. Jon and Suleika’s life was crazy during this time. Every day we'd have to figure out how to open a door that was closed, metaphorically and literally. I religiously believe in the power of vérité filmmaking. I believe that you have to spend the time, log the hours, be there to capture magical human moments. I've tried to do that throughout my career, but this was just a different setting, far more intimate. We were in bedrooms and concert halls and our presence was way more felt, I think. To be able to literally lie in bed with Jon after being at the hospital with Suleika—these were really sensitive things. I always wanted to honor the process I needed to do to make the film I wanted to make but also be sensitive to the depth of what they were going through. That was a constant dance.
When you think about the film now, what really stays with you from it?
SJ: I have so many favorite moments. I love the snowball scene in part because it speaks to how nuanced Matt is as a filmmaker. Someone else would have chosen to reveal the diagnosis in a dramatic way—you know, there's the lump, there's the bruise, there's the phone call from the doctor. And there was none of that. There's a snowball fight and Jon hits me with a snowball and I jokingly say, “Nobody's allowed to hit me with a snowball, I have leukemia.”
Having written a lot about illness and read a lot of illness narratives and watched a lot of films that deal with illness, I appreciated how artfully and sensitively and even humorously Matt did that because unlike what some people might think, your humor stays intact even when you get sick.
I would say the hardest moment for me, in terms of being a subject, ended up being one of my favorite moments. It’s this beautiful send-off from the hospital staff. I'm not someone who likes to cry in front of anyone, ever. And I was trying so hard to hold it together as we were leaving and I waited to let myself break down until I was in the elevator and my family had turned their backs. And Matt, being the very good filmmaker that he is, stooped down, got the camera there and captured me crying. I was so mad at him in that moment, but that's one of my favorite moments. He just has this uncanny ability to capture moments that most people would not be able to capture.
JB: So many moments of the film are so monumental in my life and in our collective life and in the life of my artistry. It was a very, very rich period of time. But for me the quintessential moment of the film is when the power goes out at Carnegie Hall during the performance of the symphony. That was so, so incredibly profound and so much of a representation of everything that had led to it. From the artistic perspective, it's a representation of how these gate-kept spaces and forces—these mammoth mechanics of the industry and of culture and of all of the history of America—have led to the position that we're in today of artists being marginalized, and for something like the symphony to be happening for the first time in 2022, for there not to be something like it in the canon and for so many of these moments in the past to not have been documented and in our collective memory.
And at the key moment in the symphony, where the electronics are needed to guide everybody on stage, the power goes out. That’s happening in a moment where we didn't know if Suleika was going to survive. We have all of these stressors going on in our personal life but all of these incredibly inspiring, light-filled things too, like our marriage and our friend group and our family and our community and the success of the Grammys and the world applauding our collective artistry. And the range of celebration and tragedy that led to that moment—not knowing if we were going to be able to mount a symphony, battling all kinds of other things that didn't even make it into the film—you can feel all of that in that moment. You know, where we’re supposed to just celebrate the symphony and all of the things that led to this moment—we finally get a moment to breathe and celebrate and cheer collectively—and the power goes out and it's about to be destroyed.
And then I don't know what happens in my spiritual body but some music just enters me. That piano movement I played was completely improvised. Nobody knew what we were going to do to overcome the power going out or how long the power was going to be out. I just started to play the piano. Matt captured that and told that story so beautifully and so accurately.
When you watch the film and I’m in this improvisation and you see the montage of Suleika and I on the sled in the snow and it's a call back to the scene where,” Oh, I can't be here with the snowball, I have leukemia,” and you remember, “Wow, that was going on.” And then you see the call back to me as a kid playing the percussion. And you think, “Wow, he went from being that little shy kid behind the drum to being on the stage at Carnegie Hall with the symphony.” You’ve watched the film, you got the whole journey, and then the subway and then Juilliard and the whole thing. That montage in that moment, the way that it was done, I think is the key moment of the film.
MH: I think one of the beautiful things about the film is that the three of us really view art and the artistic process very similarly. We dance with the reality that's put in front of us and we adapt to it.
In almost every scene, I could reference that. I mean, Jon, on the biggest stage in this film, the power going out—dance with that reality and figure out how to capture that. We were constantly figuring out how to adapt and capture this ever-evolving story. And to capture music and the artistic process is a really, really difficult thing.
Jon is so confident in his playing and his ability to improvise in any moment. And so to see the moment of challenge, the moment of finding something…. one of my favorite scenes in the movie musically is the scene that precedes the wedding where Jon’s practicing with the trombone player, Coleman, and you really feel him finding those notes, you really feel him finding the symphony. It's a beautiful moment that we carry through into the wedding.
But I wasn't ever sure whether I could really do that. I always strove to be there for those moments of discovery or revelation or change.
What do you hope audiences will take from American Symphony?
MH: I think this film will speak to a thousand different people in a thousand different ways. I love that about it. There are so many entry points, there's so much to chew on. It's a meditation on love, it’s a meditation on the artistic process, it’s a meditation on persevering during hard times, it’s a meditation on the power of art. I hope it will reach a really broad audience—people who care about music, who don't care about music, who've been touched by cancer, who haven't been touched by cancer…
It's so easy in documentary to wrap things up in a bow or force-feed an audience a thesis or an idea. That's never what I want to do and never what I like watching. This film, with Jon and Suleika at the center of it, is really an embodiment of the power and beauty of the human spirit, and a celebration of it in all its different facets.
SJ: One, I really believe creativity is for everyone. You don't have to do it as your day job. You don't have to call yourself an artist. All of life requires creative workarounds—we saw that during the pandemic. And facing your mortality is not a plot twist. We'll all have to do it at some point in our lives. So in these moments that bring us to our knees, my hope is that what we embody in the film is that there's always a third way and part of how we find that way is through creativity. I'm hoping that’s something people can reflect on in the context of their own ups and downs.
And two, is doing away with the binary of life is either good or it's not good, or we're well or we're sick. So much of what's in this film is a very heightened, extreme version of what I believe we all have to do, which is figure out how to hold the astonishingly good and beautiful things that happen in life with the extraordinarily hard things in the same palm of our hand.
JB: There's a lot people can take away from Suelika’s journey and not having to treat yourself like a “sick person.” Illness is not anything to treat someone differently over. We all are living life and we all are moving on the axis of what we consider to be the two kingdoms. That brings people back to the book that Suleika wrote, Between Two Kingdoms. I want people to connect the work that she's done in the past with the film, because the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick is represented in this work.
Another takeaway from the film is that you can be in the public eye and you can still have strong family values. You can prioritize what it is that you need to be doing for your family and still be a productive artist and a public figure as long as you keep those things in perspective.
I think that a lot of young musicians and artists and creatives, dancers, painters, and people who aren't even in the profession but are inspired to create can see: This is what it takes. It comes from living life and it comes from humanity. It comes from building the craft and toiling on the craft. It's a high level of dedication. And that's available to people who want to pursue it, it’s not just limited to this if you're a black artist, or this if you're a person of color, or this if you're a person who is not what's typical or what’s normalized in the popular culture. If you don't look like that or you don't think like that or you don't create like that, there's a space for you.
SJ: Jon, I feel you embody what it means to never give up. That has been an inspiration to me in my creative work, an inspiration to me in how I handle my illness, an inspiration to so many people around the world. When big life interruptions happen, it's tempting to just get under the covers and never come out. But you adjust your course. You never stop imagining what's possible. My hope is that that perseverance is contagious to anyone who watches this film.
MH: Jon and Suleika are both radically, inescapably authentic. I’ve truly never met people who know themselves so well. And despite all of the points at which they could deviate from being who they are, they both stay radically authentic. That was a beautiful thing to capture and it’s something I hope people take away. As Jon would say, “Be yourself.”
SJ: “Be who you are.” [laughs] I think you also have that great gift, Matt. You're always digging for the truth beneath the truth. It was awe-inspiring to watch you do that in the process of making this film.