The Art-House Hit That Inspired a Classic <em>Simpsons</em> Episode Is Now Coming to the Criterion Collection
When Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould came to theaters in 1993, Gould had barely been dead a decade. Memories of the eccentric pianist—a master interpreter of Bach who famously gave up live performance at the age of 31—were still fresh for many classical music fans. François Girard’s unique film abandoned familiar biopic tropes in favor of a pointillist portrait, telling the story of Gould through narrative, documentary-style Q&A, animation, and orchestral performance—even, at one point, displaying the film’s sound strip in the center of the screen.
Now a new generation gets the opportunity to meet Gould and his work, as Girard’s audacious experiment comes to the Criterion Collection. I spoke to Girard about how he came across his innovative structure, why he never shows Gould playing the piano, and what he thinks about The Simpsons’ homage to his film. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dan Kois: Was it always 32 short films, throughout development? Was there ever a time when this project was One Long Film About Glenn Gould?
François Girard: No, but there was a time where it was a play, because I was invited to write and direct a play at a theater in Toronto. My idea—if you remember in the film, “Gould Meets Gould”?
Yeah, the early sequence of two Glenn Goulds interviewing each other.
I started working on it, and then my film nature took over, and I saw the Thirty Two Short Films. It came very early on in the process, when I realized how well framed the discography was with the Goldberg Variations. And it gave me the idea—it’s the idea you need, when you do a biopic, right? If you make a film about Glenn Gould, then the aesthetics, the structure, the content, the vibe, the soul should be Gouldian.
It was refreshing to watch this film after now having sat through 30 years’ worth of biopics of various musical figures. This movie removes pretty much all the baloney that most biopics think they need to include, because structurally there just isn’t room for it.
I wouldn’t call it baloney, but it’s a problem we face when we adapt a life. Squeezing a life into a film is always a challenge, especially a life so full of music and events and thoughts and intellect as Gould’s. So you need permission to reduce. You need an angle that will allow you not to deal with everything. And the principle here is very simple. It’s a dot-drawing principle. I drew 32 dots on a white page. And I’m telling the audience, Make your own portrait. So the game became about finding the 32 moments that I thought were the most significant.
And, as in a pointillist portrait, the things you leave out still register with the eye. The structure gives you an excuse to leave things out. You no longer have to justify that to the audience.
That’s it. Exactly. I don’t need to deal with linearity. What I need to find is the 32 gems. And it’s a fun game. The whole time I was preparing the movie, I felt like a kid in the candy store looking for the 32 most delicious candies.
But it wasn’t just that you were finding 32 great moments in his life. You were also experimenting with interesting and surprising ways to present those moments: not just dramatization but animation, interview, “Gould Meets Gould.”
Yeah, there’s a genre freedom. There’s no obligation to maintain style or language—quite the opposite.
If all the pieces seem too much like one another, that’s disappointing to an audience.
Yes, exactly. So then you bring the optical soundtrack into the middle of the screen, or you do microphotography on the inside of a piano. I come from video art, the experimental school of things. You take a recipe and you try to mess it up.
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You have said that your first step in this project was listening to Gould’s entire discography front to back. What was that like?
I’ve kept that as a method throughout my career. I call it the distillation method. So it happens that you face a giant corpus, like Gould’s music—it’s 110 hours of music, his official discography. You have to sit down and just go through it, live it, put it in a chronology. You just line up the records, starting with Goldberg, and you listen.
The first listening was probably three weeks nonstop. Whatever speaks to your heart or to your brain or to your soul, whatever fires you, just grab it, put it there, make some notes. And then you go first pass and you bring it down to 17 hours, and then you go to a second pass a month later or two months later, and you bring it down to nine hours, and then you bring it down to four hours. Often it’s unexplainable what it does to your brain or what it does to your heart, but if it does it, you grab it.
In these days of shuffle culture or streaming culture, to immerse yourself in one person’s art for so long seems like quite a singular experience.
Well, that’s the work. You have to digest the material. There’s no way around it. Otherwise, with what authority can you actually claim a right to talk? It’s certainly not a chore. It’s quite the opposite. It’s great fun, especially in the case of Glenn Gould. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than that. I’ve had many happy experiences. But the Gould years … I didn’t even know I had a career at that time. I remember very well, in those listening weeks, I couldn’t believe that I would actually be paid to listen to Gould’s music.
It seems like a dream. How old were you at that point?
I’m 27, 28 when I write it. I don’t have a career yet. I’m not established in any sense. And then Gould was my rocket.
At the center of the movie, you have Colm Feore playing Gould. How did you find him, and how did he end up with this role?
Deirdre Bowen is a brilliant casting director in Toronto. She put me in a car, brought me to the Stratford Festival to see Colm, who was playing Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. He dies before the end of the play, so after that we went to dinner. We went through a little bit of a courting, testing, reading, but he’s the only actor I considered for the part.
But unlike in many biopics, you didn’t ask him to pretend to play the piano.
No. There’s no way an actor is going to get anywhere near what Gould looked like when he played. I mean, you just forget it. But there was a permission because, fundamentally and conceptually in Gould’s world, he was in the brain-to-brain printing business. The piano was a necessary pain.
What do you mean?
If you do a film about Liberace, I think it’s a little more difficult not to see him play because he’s a flashy player. But if Gould could have done his career without playing for an audience, he would have. The piano was always imperfect. The mechanics were just annoying and a mandatory pain. If he could have, like—
Beamed his version of the music he’d memorized directly into the brain of the listener.
It’s very much an intellectual operation, and the actual mechanics of playing the piano is secondary to the thinking of it. Gould would be in his apartment in Toronto, open a score, flip the pages, close the score, put it down, drive down to New York, and record it. If he had the opportunity to print straight into another brain, he would’ve chosen that, I’m sure.
The film really had a huge reach culturally, and its structure in particular became a kind of byword for a certain kind of heady experiment. So I of course must ask you about the classic Simpsons episode “22 Short Films About Springfield.” A truly weird homage.
Well, at first we weren’t sure if it was. It was 22, not 32. Is it us?
Everyone definitely knew it was you.
Eventually, we got a confirmation because they published a book where it was actually written down. It’s probably one of the greatest accolades I’ve received in my career.
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