“Proud, incredibly proud,” David Furnish sums up his feelings on that night two years ago when he walked out on stage at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles with sons Zachary and Elijah beside him at the end of his husband Sir Elton John’s final concert.
The footage of the rock star summoning Furnish and the boys provides the emotional climax to new feature doc, Elton John: Never Too Late, which Furnish directed alongside documentary veteran RJ Cutler. The film European-premiered at the London Film Festival and will be coming to Disney+ in December following a limited theatrical run in UK and US cinemas in November.
“I think it is a lot to ask a child to walk on stage in front of 60,000 people,” Furnish continues. “Our boys don’t crave the limelight. Their daddy asked them permission [to bring them on stage]. He said ‘it would be special to me and special to my fans because I am saying goodbye [to them] for the last time and I am proud of you.’”
The younger son, Elijah, “who’s a bit more extroverted,” offered to say a few words. Zachary is “more private” and needed some reassurance. Both, though, realised, this was a very important occasion. Elton John had played a legendary concert at the Dodger Stadium in front of more than 100,000 fans in 1975. Now, after more than 50 years of performing live and touring the world, one of the most flamboyant and famous musicians of his era was signing off.
“It was a special moment in the history of our family. It was also supporting their daddy – and they would do anything to support their daddy. I was really proud because they really stepped up. You can see the smiles on their faces. They can feel the appreciation and love for their father from the audience. They drank it in. As a father, you can’t ask for more than that.”
In the film, the build-up to the farewell concert at Dodger Stadium is intercut with moments from earlier in the Elton John’s career. We hear him talking very frankly to journalist Alexis Petridis (who worked with him on his autobiographical book Me). There are harrowing stories about his childhood; his loneliness and drug-taking during the 70s, and his turbulent relationship with his lover and former manager, John Reid, who sometimes beat him. Of course, Elton, now 77, is still standing at the end of it all. The film is a tribute to his powers of endurance as well as his musical genius.
Furnish has been in a relationship with Elton John since the early 1990s and has been married to him since 2014. He knows the musician inside out, yet says there were things he learned for the first time during the making of the film.
“Elton has never talked about his mortality to me. That moment when he sits down with RJ [Cutler]. I found that really upsetting because I just think Elton is going to be around forever. He is just so vibrant and he is always, always so passionate in everything he does…I was [also] very surprised and really quite emotional to hear that, in 1976, he wanted to have children. When I met him in 1990, I always wanted to have kids. When we started building our relationship, you have the conversations over the years about what kind of life you might like to have, Elton just said ‘I don’t think I’m cut out to be a father, I don’t think my life is cut out for children, I am away all the time and I am very selfish. I think if you’re a parent, you have to be there all the time.’”
“The fact that he had that desire and passion [for children] in 1976 but that a life in the limelight made him feel that wasn’t possible, the fact that it has become possible and it has become such a joyful thing for us,” Furnish reflects on how he and Elton became parents. “Also, the world has changed a lot. As a gay couple, the fact that we got civil partnership and then got marriage [shows] society is validating and supporting the relationship. Children need to feel support. They need to feel love. They need to feel accepted…and the world changed.”
One element dealt with at some length in the documentary is Elton John’s friendship with John Lennon in New York in the 1970s.
“It functions within the film in a way as a sort of little movie within the movie,” RJ Cutler says of the Lennon interlude. The filmmakers have gathered together some extraordinary archive footage of Lennon and Elton John performing but also of them backstage and hanging out together.
“It was very important for us to show all the joy in Elton’s life even during this very difficult time he was having, and the friendships. It touches on mortality, because it’s John Lennon. It touches on family because of the way that story ends with John and Yoko getting back together and having Sean,” Cutler says.
Cutler himself was a 13-year-old boy, sitting “in the rafters” the night that Elton brought Lennon on stage as a mystery special guest after his Thanksgiving 1974 Madison Square Garden show. This was the first time in several years that Lennon had performed live and the former Beatle was very nervous. It turned out to be a triumph.
Looking back on the concert, Cutler still remembers his teenage sense of wonderment at seeing Elton come out on stage on the shoulders of two huge loincloth-wearing bodybuilders, wearing six-inch heels and a headdress. As a kid from the suburbs, this was all wildly new to him. “I had never seen anything like [it]…and then John Lennon came out! In a way, that night was the beginning of this film.”
Cutler is a seasoned filmmaker and producer whose credits range from The War Room (1993) to The September Issue (2009) and Belushi (2020). Furnish runs film outfit Rocket Pictures. How did their collaboration work?
“I very much let RJ and his team take the lead,” Furnish explains. “Because I am so close to Elton, I would be the wrong person to make that first pass, that first choice…Then, as we started to shape it, I would come in with my own subjective knowledge about what feels like truthful Elton to shape and develop the film further.”
Elton himself was “completely hands off.”
Cutler talks of Furnish’s “extra layer of instinct. David was two people at once on this. He was an artist creating a film but he was also the intimate life partner of the film’s subject. His ability to respond instinctually to material was invaluable. It was David who very early on coined the phrase ‘desperate longing’ that became our emotional touchstone…Elton as a young man had a desperate longing. Elton as someone who achieved so much early in his career had a desperate longing. Elton as a seventy something year-old man on the road, yearning to be with his family and to give up the great last addiction of his life, which was touring…all of those things had that desperate longing in them!”
The original documentary from Disney Branded Television is produced by Rocket Entertainment and This Machine Filmworks (a part of Sony Pictures Television). Directors Cutler and Furnish also serve as producers alongside Trevor Smith. Elise Pearlstein, Mark Blatty, Luke Lloyd Davies, Rachael Paley, Jane Cha Cutler and John Battsek serve as executive producers.
