Everybody Digs Bill Evans writer Mark O'Halloran: “If you can construct a narrative in which a person has no knowledge of the language necessary to either narrate themselves or their experience within, then each moment becomes revelation"

There is something inherently intriguing about making a film about a great musician during a period when he cannot make music. Everybody Digs Bill Evans, the beautiful film about jazz pianist Bill Evans directed by Grant Gee and written by Mark O’Halloran takes that creative intermission as its starting point, focusing on the aftermath of a tragedy in Evans’ life that left him unable to create.

In June 1961, Evans and his trio played five sets at New York’s Village Vanguard, recordings that would become the acclaimed jazz recordings 'Sunday at the Village Vanguard' and 'Waltz for Debby'. But mere days later, Evans’s bassist and close friend Scott LaFaro was killed in a car crash, throwing Evans into a deep spell of grief, heightened by his heroin addiction. Adapted from Owen Martell’s novel Intermission, the film explores the months following LaFaro’s death, as Evans retreats from music, spending time with his family, and questioning his life.

O’Halloran was already a fan of Evans.

“I am just an unashamed fan of music,” he says. “I’m one of those really boring people who plays records, [goes to] record shops.” Evans’s music, he says, can feel “like rain falling through a house or something like that. It’s flowing and it’s gorgeous stuff.”

But it was the narrowness of Martell’s novel that appealed to him, its subversion of the usual structure of biopics that act as a highlight reel of an artists and its focus instead on a period where creativity stopped.

“Biopics are so difficult to get right sometimes, trying to put a whole person’s life on the screen,” O’Halloran says, “whereas this one, in a particular time in his life, it was kind of a channel into his personality.”

The resulting film is fragmented and fluid, moving through time and between stark monochrome and bursts of colour with Piers McGrail’s stunning cinematography transforming Cork into 1960s Florida. O’Halloran wanted the film’s form and language to echo the fragmented nature of grief and Evans’ music.

“Just listening to his music, you get a certain feeling of that kind of strange flow,” he says. “The dialogue in the film is not carrying the narrative. Sometimes it’s almost mundane, but it can have a flourish to it that feels small, lyrical or something like that.” O’Halloran says that he hoped that by allowing “small observations and small moments” to build, “a larger sort of piece of musicality emerges.”

Evans as a character, played beautifully by Anders Danielsen Lie, cannot articulate his grief. His parents, played by Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman, let his heroin addiction remain unspoken. And the competition and envy that sits between he and his brother Harry, played by Barry Ward, is expressed through the appreciation unspoken, the judgements subtly cast. O’Halloran, known for his work on Adam & Paul, Garage, Viva, Rialto and The Virtues, reveals that he has always been drawn to characters who lack the language to adequately describe their feelings, stating that he wants to bring his characters to “the borderlands of articulacy”.

“If you can construct a narrative in which a person has no knowledge of the language necessary to either narrate themselves or their experience within,” he explains, “then each moment becomes revelation in an essential kind of way. That’s kind of what I like to do.”

He points back to Adam & Paul, and a scene in which the two men visit a friend’s girlfriend. “What they want to say is, ‘I love you. I need you. I want you.’ But they can only say things like, ‘Your flat is lovely,’ or ‘The place is great.’ But you know that when you’re writing those lines, there’s stuff underneath.”

That inability to articulate emotion is particularly potent in Everybody Digs Bill Evans, where grief sits alongside complicated relationships between fathers, sons and brothers, and love frequently emerges through rivalry.

“If there was to be a continuity within my work, it is that,” O’Halloran says. “I have always been very interested in male loneliness, or the way that men experience loneliness, and the difficulties men have in talking about their emotions and connecting with each other, and how corrosive male competition can be.”

But he is equally interested in “the tenderness that men can have for each other”.

“I don’t like that phrase ‘toxic masculinity’. I don’t even like talking about - people talk about all the time - the crisis in masculinity. I don’t see it as being in any way bigger than it was when I was growing up.” What concerns him more is isolation. “Men can drift into isolation very easily. I think that’s a great danger. Even in my own life, after work, you do have to reach out sometimes.”

• Everybody Digs Bill Evans is in cinemas from September 11.