Director Dorsay Alavi’s 25-year working relationship (that also blossomed into a true friendship) with jazz legend Wayne Shorter was greatly helpful in terms of the access and intimacy needed to make Zero Gravity, Amazon Prime’s three-part series on Shorter’s life and career. Still, she was faced with the daunting task of doing that life justice. The full width and breadth of Shorter’s significance to jazz as music and as a distinctly American art form is nearly impossible to quantify, but through Alavi’s unconventional approach to the material, Zero Gravity is a three hour and ten minute landmark of a documentary that proves to be much more than a travelog through Shorter’s 89 years on Earth.
Zero Gravity eschews the typical workmanlike methods that most music-based documentaries take. By using animation, greatly limiting “talking head’ interviews, and not overly leaning on archival footage, what Alavi has achieved is more than just a film (which is what Alavi sees the “series” as), but instead something more experiential, and even groundbreaking.
In our conversation, Alavi and I discuss her remarkably creative process (that was part choice and necessity), as well as her abiding affection for a man who was a quiet giant in his field, and perhaps a bit overlooked due to his sweetness and uncontroversial nature. If it is true that Shorter’s place in musical history is not quantified in the way that he deserves, Zero Gravity corrects that notion in glorious fashion.
Awards Daily: You took an unconventional approach to this documentary project. The use of visuals, in particular, makes Zero Gravity more of an experience, almost like the David Bowie film, Moonage Daydream.
Dorsay Alavi: For me, as a narrative filmmaker, that’s my background, my interest has always been to tell stories from a character’s point of view. So I approached the film from the perspective of Wayne Shorter as a person first, and I wanted to capture his evolution as a human being and his internal creative process. I didn’t approach it like a documentary, but more like a narrative film. I did want you to have that kind of experience with his music. I used a lot of visual translation rather than performance because I wanted you to experience the music and the layers without any distraction.
Awards Daily: There are some talking head interviews in the film, but that’s mostly Wayne. Was there a conscious decision to not have standard interview footage on a consistent basis?
Dorsay Alavi: Very much so. I didn’t wanna do that. That was the first thing I said to everybody was, I’m not interested in a bunch of talking heads. I’m not interested in photographs and archival footage as the dominant visual representation of Wayne’s life. I wanted to capture his essence visually and cinematically because of his love for cinema, but also that he was a visual artist as well.
Awards Daily: He loved movies, sometimes very, very bad movies (Laughs), which I thought was just charming as can be. And also one of his late career projects was a graphic novel attached to one of his records. He had a cinematic approach to his music that clearly informed the series.
Dorsay Alavi: Wayne came to music through film–watching movies. In his mind, when he was creating his music, he saw pictures, he was seeing movies when he was writing his compositions. It made sense to me that if I’m going to have an audience listen to his music, I want it to be visually represented. And so in that way we were aligned. How we became really good friends is he knew I was a filmmaker and we always talked about movies. He does that with everybody, but in particular very much with me. It made sense that we treated this like we’re making a movie. Just like he made movies without pictures. That’s what he always said.
Awards Daily: This is considered a series because it’s told in three portals, but it felt to me like a three plus hour movie, that just was broken into segments. You cover his life from stem to stern, and with a life this full, that means it needed to be long. Even though this is considered a series, were you thinking of this as more of a film?
Dorsay Alavi: It is a film. When I started shooting, I was just capturing as much footage as possible, and then I started creating the piece. I said, there’s no way I can do justice to Wayne’s life story in two hours. He’s accomplished so much and he’s such a fascinating human being. I felt that it would diminish many of his accomplishments by trying to fit it into a two hour film, then I would have had to rely on the talking heads, or narration, because I wouldn’t have had any space to allow for the experience of the music. I wanted people to listen to his music because ultimately I wasn’t just interested in making a film about a jazz musician and something that would appeal to musicians. I wanted it to appeal to the general public.
Awards Daily: I‘m a person who enjoys jazz, but I only, I like to say I know enough to be dangerous. There’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. I think for anybody Wayne is a fascinating subject matter because the arc of his life covered so much history that he was near to. And then his own personal life itself, with the amount of tragedy that he suffered. He’s a fascinating human being to have come out the other side of those tragedies and remain humble, kind, and forever searching.
Dorsay Alavi: I think Wayne used his instrument to speak to people, to have a dialogue. Most of what he was trying to say is that you are the master of your own destiny. Freedom was very important to him and he wanted young musicians. or anybody who was an artist, to speak through their medium and to make a conscious decision to shape the world using their individual voice. That’s what I loved about him. He was a very conscious person and he was always aware of what was happening in the world, and he was thinking about how to create sounds to touch people’s hearts and activate their minds to take action in their own life.
Awards Daily: He remained so incredibly creative into his final years. In the history of modern music, there’s a tendency to go out and do nostalgia tours and do acoustic versions of your or your songs that had loud guitars on the original recordings. But he was like, what’s next? He became more interested in classical music and music from other cultures. A lot of documentaries about artists close with “well then he got old and he got tired and he and he died.” That didn’t happen with him. Time ran out, because it does for everyone, but creativity never did.
Dorsay Alavi: That’s absolutely right. In fact, I think he was more creative in his eighties than in any period of his life. People have resurgences of creativity throughout their life. Wayne was fortunate that he lived as long as he did and was a master at his craft and could use that. You could see he was ready to do another project right before he passed, which is incredible to me.
Awards Daily: There’s a sense of sweetness about him. I almost wonder if being uncontroversial as opposed to Miles Davis, or not dying young like Coltrane, maybe has made it unclear just how great he was in his field.
Dorsay Alavi: Absolutely. His reserve is where his power is, and in that time period, those grand hero types and overt personalities took center stage and Wayne was the quiet genius behind the scenes. As time shifted, the genre transformed and changed through the decades. Wayne was at the forefront of all of those progressions. I think that people started to recognize that Wayne was such an important figure in jazz. But also in music in general, because he had moved beyond jazz and was collaborating with other artists in other genres. I think in many ways, Wayne’s longevity allowed him to surpass John Coltrane, and even Miles Davis, through the type of work that he did because of the amount of years that he lived and how he continued to create.
Awards Daily: He was very focused in his later years on younger people who were playing jazz. There’s this sort of tendency with jazz where I think like a lot of classical music is that a lot of new great works aren’t created. Musicians are often playing something somebody else played. He was continually pushing people to create their own sounds while he was also doing that himself.
Dorsay Alavi: Again, he used his instrument as his voice and he felt that the genre was limitless. It was important for him to help other musicians recognize their individual voice and recognize that they had an individual voice and the sounds that they might create is their contribution to shaping the world.
He was always saying find your sound and use it to make changes in the world. He really spoke to young people because there was so much going on in the world and they felt some, a sense of helplessness and how do I participate? I can’t just be an activist. He was saying, use your instrument.
Awards Daily: I’m not sure if there’s a second, maybe there is, where his music isn’t playing in the film. In that way it almost reminded me of a Spike Lee film where it is wall to wall music. I assume that was a very specific choice that you made, that even in the quiet moments, Wayne was always playing.
Dorsay Alavi: I felt that the music itself had its own character in the film. It had its own trajectory and. When you’re making a music documentary,people should be hearing the music, not just what people say about the music. The last thing I wanted to do was have a bunch of musicians talking about how the music was made, because Wayne never liked to talk about the music in that way, so I approached the film in the same way. I wanted people to hear as much of Wayne’s music as possible and to feel in those portals that they were really there at that time period, and how that sound was so important to that period of time.
Awards Daily: I want to come back to the word “portal” because typically what you would see in a series is part one, part two, part three. “Portal” is a very specific choice of word.
Dorsay Alavi: When I say portal, it is so that the viewer will feel transported to
that time so that when you are there, you feel completely immersed in that time period, visually, sonically–all the layers.I didn’t want people to feel they were ever pulled out of that time period. That’s why each portal has a specific look to it. It represents that time period. In fact, when Wayne and I sat down, the first meeting we had, I wanted him to talk to me about the colors, what did he see? What did the clubs look like? It was all visual conversations so I could understand what it actually looked like so that when people watched it, it’s almost like they went back in time. So, it has a little bit of a time travel element to it.
Awards Daily: Did you have much of a background in jazz before you started working with Wayne?
Dorsay Alavi: No, I listened to jazz—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the more famous artists, but I was not an aficionado. When I met Wayne, that sort of changed. I learned so much from him and listening to his music and became actually, I think, a more astute listener. I wanted the audience to feel very much like I did. I wanted them to learn more about Wayne and I wanted to share what I actually learned about music through Wayne and all the people that were in his life.
Awards Daily: You worked with Wayne a couple times before this. You made a music video for him, and shot a live performance as well. Obviously, that must have played into you being able to do this, but this is so much bigger than those two projects. Were you ever intimidated by the scope of what was before you?
Dorsay Alavi: Of course. Even though I knew Wayne on a personal level, it was still daunting. I had to rely on interviews and research and as much as I could. It was helpful having Michelle Mercer and her book. She consulted on his history and childhood. Initially it was intimidating. The music part of it was a little bit more intimidating for me than the personal because I knew how to tell his story narratively as a filmmaker, but I also had all this information I needed to, to have right. I needed to be able to speak for Wayne Shorter, and there’s certainly a lot of people who will correct you if you’re wrong. (Laughs). So I wanted to make sure I was doing it exactly right and, fortunately, I had Wayne there. So I could ask Wayne, “what do you think of this?”
I always ran things by Wayne and he would help guide me in terms of his point of view. I always stuck with his point of view. I think that when I first put the film together, it was four hours long. It was four portals and we knew that that was going to be a challenge because he was a jazz musician. A lot of the industry didn’t know who he was. There were a lot of conversations about cutting this down to two hours. Every time I thought of it, it didn’t make any sense. So what I did was find a happy medium, three hours focusing on three pivotal periods of his life and then I cut it down. It took about a year to really get the balance right, and I feel like this format, Is the right format. I’m so glad that we have streaming services that will allow you to show something like this because the film festivals were not as open to showing a three hour cut. That was a challenge for us. And so we thought we’re just going to go straight to the streamer. We’re not going to go the conventional film festival route. We wanted a distributor who was open to a three hour film about a jazz musician.
Awards Daily: I don’t want to lose sight of the Weather Report. That’s an area where there is some great archival concert footage, and seeing these incredible musicians play live was revelatory.
Dorsay Alavi: There were only a handful of concerts. Even the Miles Davis footage, there were maybe two or three performances that I could use. There was very little footage of Wayne with Art Blakey that we could use.. Weather Report had a little bit more, but I wanted specific concerts. Luckily Wayne had a lot of VHS and DVDs. Some were things that people gave him. I was able to get some footage from them, and I had a great archival researcher who was able to find things for me as well.
Awards Daily: The use of visuals throughout the film, animation and graphics and so forth. It felt like to me that you were trying to explain to me as a viewer what it might be like to think in art or more specifically, jazz . Was that the idea?
Dorsay Alavi: Absolutely. Yeah. I wanted you to be immersed. I wanted you to experience the music, subtexturally, and by giving you those visuals, you suddenly were able to just take the music in on a different level. Also, I didn’t have a lot of footage to work with, so I had to create a lot of those images. I know a few people have mentioned that maybe there’s too much animation, but they have to remember that if I didn’t have the footage of them playing. How were you going to experience the music? I had to make that choice and I had to create that space, so that somebody would say something and then you would listen to it and experience it. It was essential to have these visuals so that you could actually experience the music.
Awards Daily: If your greatest goal was to get across that Wayne Shorter never stopped. He never quit searching. That comes across completely.
Dorsay Alavi: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m glad to hear that. I worked really hard on that part of it and had to stay true to my mission as a filmmaker along with Wayne’s mission as an artist. We had to be completely aligned on that mission in order for this to work. And it just came very naturally, because I knew Wayne for so many years and already had that sort of kinship with him early on.
Awards Daily: How much of this did Wayne get to see?
Dorsay Alavi: He saw it all. I think he watched it six times. I kept asking like, you’re gonna watch this again? He said, oh yeah, (Laughs).
Awards Daily: It must be wonderful to know that you were able to complete this while he was still alive and he was able to see it.
Dorsay Alavi: Yes. It is very hard to have lost him without it coming out into the world. But in some ways it was almost more important that it happened the way it did. I think his legacy and the words that he, and the things that he said in the film will have such a lasting impression on so many people who are open to listen and open to see it.
Awards Daily: This is an obvious question and it could come off as overly sentimental, but just how much do you miss him?
Dorsay Alavi: Oh, tremendously. After he passed, it was quite difficult for me to look at the footage for a little bit of time. So I had all of my team work on it, and then there was a period where I just started watching it and every time I did, I actually could feel his presence. I know that’s a little crazy, but actually the night that it premiered, I was with my family. And my extended family as well. And I was in England a lot of the time. I could actually feel him everywhere. I actually went and bought Raisinettes, because he loved chocolate raisins. Something compelled me and my husband to go and buy those and have those out for everybody as this acknowledgement of Wayne, knowing he was with us. I miss him a lot, but I agree with him, life is eternal. He’s here with us on another plane.
Zero Gravity has been submitted for Emmy consideration in multiple categories.
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