A Q&A with the director of the Elliott Smith documentary Heaven Adores You

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When director Nickolas Rossi began thinking about what his first feature-length film subject should be, he thought back to his time in Portland, Oregon, where he moved in the mid ’90s as a young college student. As soon as he moved there, Rossi had become infatuated with the city’s already well-established alt-rock scene, going to shows to see bands like Hazel and Crackerbash on weekends. One of those bands Rossi went to see often was Heatmiser, a noisy quartet with a guitarist by the name of Elliott Smith.

“At that time, he was just a guy in a band,” Rossi says of Smith, who began releasing solo records and eventually quit Heatmiser to focus on his career as singer-songwriter. Over the next decade, Smith would go on to become one of the most revered, well respected songwriters of his era, releasing a half-dozen albums that inspired thousands of intensely personal connections with his music.

Toward the end of the first decade of the new millennium, Rosis decided it was time for a feature length documentary on Smith, who had died, tragically, in 2003. Over five years later,  Heaven Adores You, Rossi’s directorial debut, is a moving look into the singer-songwriter’s life, featuring dozens of interviews with friends, former bandmates, producers, ex-girlfriends, family members and a variety of men and women who knew Smith during various stages of his life.

Heaven Adores You is not the first documentary film about the beloved singer (see 2009’s Searching for Elliott Smith), but it is the first film to feature Smith’s original music, and accordingly, the first film to place Smith’s music at the center of its focus. “At the total core of the film, we were just interested in talking about the music,” says Rossi.

Heaven Adores You, which opens this week in New York, is a loving testament to the singer’s extraordinary life in music. American Songwriter recently caught up with Rossi to talk about his new film, Smith’s Portland years, and some of the most enduring myths about the late singer.

Why tell Elliott Smith’s story now? Why is his story so worth telling?

Because he was so talented and so good at what he did that I would hate for his music to be looked over in the coming generation. He was an incredible influence in the canon of American singer-songwriters, he deserves to have the recognition. He did amazing work, and it wasn’t half-assed and it wasn’t gimmicky. It was really just beautiful, true poetry and incredible music. The purpose of making the film is just to give the people who weren’t there in Portland in the ’90s and never got a chance to see him live something to help explore Elliott Smith and his music. It just kind of felt like, here’s a guy who made a beautiful contribution to the world, why not celebrate that part of it?

Your film does such a great job capturing the Portland rock scene in the late 80’s and early 90’s that Smith came of age in. His music is so rarely contextualized and thought of as being directly tied to that time and place.

At that time, he was just a guy in a band. He’s Elliott Smith now, and he was Elliott Smith towards the end of his career and that sort of put him on a pedestal in a way. But he was just another dude in a band like all those other guys, just chugging away and trying to do his thing  and taking odd jobs in the meantime. He was just a normal guy that you would see at the same bar that you were going to have a beer at, seeing the same show that you were going to see. And I love that aspect of looking at musicians, where we kind of idolize them and think they’re amazing, but they were just a local dude in your neighborhood.

Your film seems actively uninterested in the gossip and mythology surrounding Smith’s life, particularly his death. Was it a conscious decision to avoid that?

It was a conscious decision to not dwell on it. At the end of his life, and certainly when he died, the media was sort of globbing on to those last few years as a way to sum up his career and the music of Elliott Smith: “Sad singer-songwriter writes sad, depressing music.” What I found really enlightening was everybody that I talked to who actually knew him and spent time with him, they would say that there’s an aspect of him that was depressed and there was some issues with drugs, but that he was so much more than that, that he was really this incredibly funny, witty, well-read, generous, great person to be around.

I loved the point that a number of his friends kept making: that Elliott was singing about drugs and addiction and creating these characters in a third-person, almost novelistic way before he fell victim to any of that himself.

Yeah, as soon as we started hearing that over and over, that became a theme of the conversations. We talked to Larry Crane [Elliott Smith’s archivist] for hours about the lyrics of his songs, and he would just say ‘he was actually a really amazing storyteller. He would observe situations and then go and write about them, as opposed to having to necessarily do this autobiographical thing.’ There was a light switch that went off when I heard that, because I thought ‘there are other ways to listen to Elliott’s music.’ It shouldn’t always be listened to in this autobiographical ‘I’m a sad guy, here’s a sad song’ way. He’s actually much more creative than I think we gave him credit for.

Elliott playing the Oscars plays such a big role in this movie. Why is that moment so important to you?

For a lot of people, that’s their first introduction to Elliott Smith. If you weren’t in Portland or in the Northwest in the ’90s, it may be the first time that you ever really saw Elliott. So it’s an important moment because he comes from out of nowhere and he is just this dude onstage with Celine Dion in a white suit playing his song. And what’s really important is I love how Elliott just thinks it’s so absurd, that he was that guy who had that experience. It really shows how normal of a journey this guy was having, and then was just sort of plucked and put on this stage and he handled it like a champ. He did an amazing job. It was also the moment where thing were never going to be the same after that. There was such a spotlight put on him, for better or for worse, and probably for both.

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