Grant Gee's reputation precedes him, but not in the direction of narrative cinema. Meeting People Is Easy (1998), his Radiohead documentary, is a landmark of music filmmaking. Patience (After Sebald) (2012) and Joy Division (2007) extend a body of work built on documentary observation and the authority that comes with watching something real unfold. So when Gee decided to make his first narrative feature—Everybody Digs Bill Evans (Berlinale 2026)—he was stepping into a completely different cinema. And he brought cinematographer Piers McGrail ISC with him.
The production faced a specific, almost impossible constraint: the film is set in 1961 New York and Miami, but it was shot entirely in Ireland. This is not a digital correction problem. This is a cinematography problem. McGrail had to construct the visual grammar of 1961 American cities from Irish locations, using black and white film as the common language between documentary observation and period narrative construction. Black and white is deceptive in its simplicity. Documentary B&W says: This is what was there. Period narrative B&W says: This is what the past looked like. McGrail had to speak both languages at once.
The collaboration between a documentary filmmaker and a narrative cinematographer produces a specific dynamic. Gee arrives with an eye for what is real—his career is built on the assumption that observation is enough, that the camera's job is to witness. McGrail arrives with the tools to make what is not real look credible. In a normal director-DP relationship, that tension might be productive or destructive. In Everybody Digs Bill Evans, it became the film's visual strategy. Gee's documentary eye meant that every image needed to feel observed, even though it was constructed. McGrail's period expertise meant that the constructed images needed to feel like 1961, even though they were photographed in Dublin or Cork.
B&W became the agreement that made both approaches possible. It removed the information-density of color that would have immediately betrayed the shooting location. It allowed McGrail to build period visual grammar—composition, lens choice, lighting ratio—that could convince the viewer through form rather than surface detail. It allowed Gee to maintain the observational clarity that defines his work. The film's opening scenes establish the visual logic immediately: we are in 1961, but we are seeing it through a documentary sensibility. We are watching something past, but we are watching it as though it were present.
For cinematographers learning to work with directors from different backgrounds, Everybody Digs Bill Evans demonstrates what happens when the DP understands that their job is not to impose a visual style, but to find the visual strategy that makes two different approaches compatible. That strategy was B&W. Everything else followed.
A documentary filmmaker in his first fiction feature. A DP who had to build 1961 New York from Ireland. B&W was the agreement that made it work.
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