American Symphony: Jon Batiste on filming private anguish behind his musical success

Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste has said making a documentary with his wife at the height of his career was an "act of faith", as the recurrence of her life-threatening cancer meant they had no idea how their story would end.

American Symphony follows Batiste enjoying top honours at 2022's Grammy Awards, while writer and artist Suleika Jaouad was receiving treatment for leukaemia.

She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in 2011, and 10 years later she wrote Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, a best-selling book on her experience and recovery.

"We didn't know how the story of the film was going to end, because we didn't know how the story of my illness was going to end," Jaouad explains.

"But in some ways that not knowing felt important to capture, because the truth is none of us know what the next day is going to bring."

"You move in, and you walk in faith, that's the key," says Batiste of the decision to continue rolling the cameras during that time.

"You may not know what's ahead, but the faith is constant."

This wasn't meant to be a film about their relationship.

The movie Jon Batiste agreed to make, by Emmy-winning documentary maker Matthew Heineman and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, was supposed to be about the performance of a symphony he was composing.

He believed it would challenge stereotypes about his music.

Batiste attended the Juilliard School in New York for music, and he and his band Stay Human performed on the streets of New York, including recording an entire album on a subway train, before becoming the house band on CBS chat show The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

He composed music for Pixar's 2020 Soul movie, for which he got three Grammy nominations, alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and received another eight nominations for his studio album We Are.

"This film was going to be about the process of building a symphony which I felt hadn't been done before," Batiste says.

"But a month into Matt and myself deciding to make that film, we found out I got 11 Grammy nominations.

"In the same week, we found out that Suleika's leukaemia had returned. So that was a choice we had to make to continue filming. And it wasn't easy, but Suleika decided we'd share this."

The film follows the couple in some of their most private moments, including their marriage ceremony, where they exchange bread bag ties instead of formal wedding rings.

Almost immediately afterwards, Jaouad had to go to hospital. She had a second bone marrow transplant during this period.

However, Matthew Heineman adds that her agreement to be filmed didn't come quickly.

"She didn't want to be part of it," he relates.

"She was very, very clear when I started filming, saying, 'this is Jon's film, make the film about Jon. I don't want to be the sick antidote to Jon's success'. It took a lot of conversations and gaining her trust.

"So, it was really important for me to honour her story and make her fully formed, both as a person and an artist herself, not just Jon's wife. I owe a lot to them both for being so vulnerable to me."

Jaouad says now that she has no regrets about going ahead.

"I'm so grateful that this documentary exists for a lot of reasons, but I think in this age of Instagram and this age of curated lives, it's so important to show what it means to be human," she says.

"There's joy and sorrow because you don't have one without the other. This was really a heightened moment in time for us where we were figuring out how to marry those two things."

American Symphony is tipped for an Oscar best documentary nomination as it led the way at the recent, prestigious Critics Choice Documentary Awards with six nominations.

It was beaten to best feature by another film with the theme of navigating illness - Still: A Michael J Fox Movie deals with that actor's success and his diagnosis with Parkinson's disease.

Both films are reflective of the private anguish that can be going on below the façade of celebrity success.

Heineman's camera follows Batiste to his night at the 2022 Grammy Awards where he won five of them, including album of the year for We Are.

Afterwards Batiste has his head down in his trailer, praying and meditating as he thinks about his wife.

"I didn't want to just show the veneer of who they are, and I think Jon is perceived by many as this unbelievably positive ebullient person. That is true," Heineman says.

"But I wanted to dig deeper into who he was and to show the complexity of who he was and what drives him. And that person on The Late Show works hard to put that smile on.

"The Grammys were the biggest night of Jon's life professionally, and I think a lot of people would think that he'd go out to a club and go out partying.

"But that scene when he is alone afterwards and praying and meditating and sort of soaking in this moment, we're also soaking in the duality of that high with him, and the reality that Suleika was getting readmitted back into the hospital.

"That was his life and that's who he is."

But there are some critics who say they feel they still don't meet the real Jon Batiste in American Symphony, with one Guardian reviewer writing that the film, "though moving … rarely digs deep" and saying that some scenes "come off like curated intimacy."

Batiste says however, that the film is "the truth, ultimately, and that's what we wanted to show."

"The thing about being a person who is known, you're much more than the public vision of you as that person. To express that isn't something that's the trend, maybe it's not advisable even, but it's real."

He calls Heineman's documentary "a gift to have the capture of these precious moments."

The couple has said to reporters recently that Jouad is now doing "so much better", and since Batiste has been nominated for another five Grammys this year, they hope to attend the 2024 awards together.

"We talk about this period all the time and I feel really proud of the way that we navigated it , not just individually, but jointly," Jaouad says.

"And I think it's really a testament to the power of love. We went through this thing and now we have this beautiful film that will hopefully create a reverberation."

American Symphony is released on Netflix on 29 November