Docmaker Leo Chiang sat down with Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to discuss their Oscar shortlisted Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, which comprises an exploration of the life of the singer-songwriter as presented through the prism of his much covered and much renowned hymn.
Chiang kicked off the conversation, wanting to know how Geller and Goldfine settled on this project in the first place, after having suggested that the film’s longevity and ongoing popularity at film festivals reflected the enduring appeal of Cohen himself.
“Oh, I love that. And I love that metaphor,” Goldfine responded before explaining the evolution of the project.
“A story or a film starts sometimes years before you actually realize consciously that it’s starting. So in lots of ways, I think this project started in, gosh, probably around 2009 when we were taken to see a Leonard Cohen concert,” she said. “It was the first year that he was back on tour. As he says in the film, ‘I haven’t been on stage for 14 years. I was a 60-year-old guy who was just a kid with a crazy dream.’… And during that concert, when he came on stage to perform Hallelujah, he got to his knees.”
“You see it in our film, you see what he was giving to the audience when he was singing that song. And I think that image stuck in our heads,” Goldfine continues. “So years and years later, in 2014, we were having a conversation with a really dear friend of ours, David Thompson, who’s a film critic, and he said, ‘have you ever considered doing a documentary about a single song?’ And what came flooding back was this image of Leonard getting on stage in 2009.”
“So in some ways, the film started in 2014 with this kind of dare on the part of David Thompson saying, ‘would you consider making a documentary about a song? And in other ways, I think it started when friends serendipitously took us to see Leonard in 2009.”
Click here for the whole conversation between Leo Chiang talks to Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine.
