Big Giant Wave is a cinematic homage to music

Marie-Julie Dallaire’s documentary Big Giant Wave is, to put it as simply as humanly possible, about music. It’s not a concert film or a musical biography — it’s a movie that looks at the tapestry of music in its various forms. It’s sort of an insurmountably large topic on paper. There’s music everywhere, of course, and so many people making it that simply finding a place to start is a task in itself. 

“At the start, we wanted it to be a cinematic homage to music,” says Dallaire. “I say ‘we’ because, at the beginning, I worked a lot with my colleague Andrée Blais, a sociologist who did a lot of the research and is a content producer and co-writer on the film. The idea was to transcend in images the affection we might have for music. That was the first idea. After that, we worked very hard. Andrée did a lot of research everywhere to discover where scientific research was at when it came to music. I don’t mean academic research of music itself, but rather of scientific research: neuroscience, ethnomusicology, music therapy. She really looked at it from a wide perspective. She’s a scientist herself, so she could really go and find the most up-to-date information on all of it. One of the first surprises we had was to discover that Montreal was one of the academic leaders in the world when it came to music studies; there’s a lot of research being done right here. It worked out well. We got to meet lots of people right here! (laughs)

“It’s the way I like to work,” she continues. “I like to have a very solid base of research before I start to look at the project from a more artistic perspective. It needs to rest on something. As we were doing the research, we came up with a very simple hypothesis: music is vital and universal. Scientists don’t want to say that, because in order to be able to make such a claim, you would have to have isolated the music gene. (laughs) That was the idea at first, and it remained our throughline as we kept working on it, but the idea got more precise over time. The film became an ode to the power of music as we started ‘casting’ it. All of the people we filmed represent, in various different ways, the intrinsic power of music. They all embody it in their own ways.”

Though its starting point is academic, the film encompasses many different aspects of music — some popular, some classical — in the people it chooses to showcase. The most famous person in Big Giant Wave is most likely Patrick Watson, but the film also focuses on house DJ Osunlade, luthier Tom Wilder, music therapist Tiana Malone, an amateur orchestra for refugees in Europe, cellist Stéphane Tétreault and many more. The music with which these interviewees are involved runs the gamut — the music Malone plays for hospitalized babies is nary more than a rhythm, while we also watch Watson put together a complex live show with many moving parts, including a choir. 

“Some people have told us that they thought classical music was the basis for all music before seeing the film, but really, the basis of all music is rhythm,” explains Dallaire. “As far back as we go in history, if there are humans, there’s music. It’s the most visceral, most human form of art. We couldn’t really cover it all, of course. I could spend the rest of my career making variations on this movie! (laughs) We chose these subjects and this music. The idea wasn’t to make a movie that’s about every style of music or the history of music; the music in the film is the music that came with the people we chose to talk about music. Classical music fans think there’s very little classical music in the film, even though it’s the most represented style! (laughs) The film was shot in blocks, focusing on one character at a time, and some were added along the way. As we were shaping the film, we were coming up with ideas to approach different people in order to complement ideas brought up by others in the film. We built it in a rather natural way, but it was a lot of work!

“It never happened to me before that a topic guided me this much,” says Dallaire. “There was a real push and pull happening just by the nature of what we were exploring in the film. While we were preparing the film, I went for a walk in a park with Patrick Watson and he was explaining to me that he never chose music — it was as if music chose him. I was explaining to him that we were maybe halfway through the process of making the film and I felt like I was constantly running behind the subject, like I always needed to catch up. It sounds esoteric, but that’s really how I felt. He told me, ‘Oh, that’s normal. That’s what music does!’ (laughs) That’s the topic. Music just does that. I was worried about sounding pretentious, because it is a huge topic to begin with. But something I didn’t expect was how moving it was going to be. That we’d have so many emotions while filming with the premature babies, with Ezra, the street musician. We’re often quite moved. We found out, in the end, that we never outran the music, but that making a film about music meant making a film about inclusion, about empathy, about resilience, about beauty, about love, about peace… If you write that in a synopsis to get funding, you won’t get it! (laughs) But music is what brought that into the movie.”

A lot of Quebec documentaries are made with the small screen in mind; a longer version may play in theatres with an hour-long edit being broadcast on TV some time later. But the theatrical experience of Big Giant Wave is undeniable. From its black-and-white photography to its sound mix, it’s best experienced in a theatre.

“I think all directors would say that,” says Dallaire. “It’s pretty rare that you want your film to go directly to a streaming platform! That having been said, it’ll happen more and more, which is fine. But this film was conceived by the whole team to be seen in theatres — because of the big screen, yes, and because of the great sound quality, which was really painstakingly mixed. Sound is the main character, after all. But we also conceived it as a sort of concert. A concert on TV is fun — the pandemic showed us that it was possible — but it’s never the same as being in a room with strangers and living that collective experience together. It’s about sharing moments.” ■

Big Giant Wave opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, April 2. Watch the trailer here:

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