A Celine Dion family trip-tour becomes a film
Celine Dion didn’t sound disingenuous in the least when she said she wasn’t sure whether there’d still be an audience waiting for her when she went back out on the concert trail in 2008 after bringing down the curtain on her five-year residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
“The show in Las Vegas was so successful, so many people came year after year, I really thought . . . Who’s left to perform for?” Dion said from her home in Florida on Thursday, the day of the public premiere of “Celine: Through the Eyes of the World,” the concert film documentary about that 2008-09 Taking Chances world tour. “I was a little bit nervous about that.”
As much as she wanted to play for fans in various parts of the world who hadn’t been able to travel to Nevada, the overriding impetus was to take advantage of a window of time for “an adventure that was extraordinary for my family.” That would be her husband and manager, Rene Angelil, their young son, Rene-Charles, and Dion’s 82-year-old mother.
“My family is my No. 1 priority,” Dion said. “I don’t like to postpone things, and my mom was willing to come on this tour. You never know what to expect: Is she going to be there to do this three years from now? You never know. I didn’t want to regret not taking this opportunity.”
Additionally, Rene-Charles was soon to be shifting from home schooling to attending school with other kids, and Dion said that once he started that routine, she wouldn’t want to interrupt it with more extended touring away from home.
She also brought along a film crew as part of an entourage of more than 100 people who traveled for 13 months across 93 countries.
“The idea was not to make a movie,” she said. “We’re not into reality TV shows; we’re not playing roles, we’re living. We just wanted to bring it back home with us. . . . It didn’t take long for Rene and the team who were looking at footage to start saying, ‘There are things in there that are just unbelievable. . . . Maybe we should do something more than just bring this home.’ ”
With that tour behind her now, Dion recently announced she’ll return to Sin City in 2011 for a three-year residency at Caesars, where she’ll do about 70 shows a year, in performances built around Rene-Charles’ school schedule.
“We just finished something extraordinary, and you think you can’t come back and compete with that,” she said. “But other people bring us ideas that make us excited again. . . . We’ll have a 31-piece orchestra, we’re going to do a Hollywood tribute to the movies, along with my own repertoire, of course, in a show that’s going to be classy and very beautiful.”