‘Rocketman’ Director Breaks Down a Scene with Taron Egerton

Hello, my name is Dexter Fletcher,

and I am the director of Rocket Man.

And I am Taron Egerton, and I play Elton John

in Rocket Man, and-- This is--

We're doing this at the same time?

I suppose so, yeah.

Cute little couple call out for 3--

Cute little couple.

1, 2, 3--

[Both] And this is Notes on a Scene.

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

♪ 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find ♪

♪ I'm not the man they think I am at home ♪

♪ Oh no, no, no, I'm a rocket man ♪

The film's a musical for those of you that don't know.

Right, there's some sort of a balance.

Valuable insights here. Yeah, yeah, very good.

From Dexter Fletcher.

Basically, Elton has taken a bunch of pills,

and thrown himself in the pool,

and meets the younger version of himself, actually,

down at the bottom of the pool.

And you get this idea

that the kid's trying to tell him something.

It's the start of the musical number, Rocket Man,

which goes through various different spaces,

and ends up at the most iconic performance

of his career probably.

[dramatic music]

So yes, Taron, or Elton, has attempted to commit suicide.

These swimmers have all dived in to save him,

who happen to be synchronized swimmers,

which was handy-- do freeze frame.

There's gonna be some really ugly--

Look at this guy here. Look at that.

Look at this little face here.

Real, real good place to stop.

Although this looks like L.A., it's a little

bit of movie magic, isn't it? Is is rather magical.

We shot this in Potter's Bar outside of London.

Where a lot of soccer players live.

A lot of soccer players live so it's like,

got the big houses.

Yeah. It is interesting because this is, yeah,

our attempt to create 1970s L.A.

Yeah.

But Taron here, as you can see,

has shaved his head, pretty much,

in order to recreate Elton's, kind of, iconic look, really.

Yeah. Didn't relish that for 6 months.

So the earlier part and also the very end

of the movie where I'm forty and in rehab,

then I do actually have a bald cut.

But that's not a bald cut that's just

my hair that's been decimated.

Yeah because the issue was is, you can put

the wig on but trying to create--

You can put the wig on, but you can't take the wig off.

Yeah it's gone for good.

So we shaved his head, and he hated it.

[dramatic music]

Ha! Look, perfect freeze frame!

I wanted to try and fix this digitally,

this eyeball. It was always slightly scriffy.

And I wasn't quite sure, I mean,

I don't know how you did it.

You were sort of in the midst of--

I can show you, I can show you. Watch.

[laughs]

It's just like that.

Learned that at drama school. Second year.

[dramatic music continues]

[multiple voices speaking at once]

It always felt really important

to have that gap in the teeth

because it's such a key part

of Elton's silhouette.

It's quite a hard thing to achieve

and you can use fake teeth and we did

try that, but during a camera test

I was singing a song and the teeth

flew out of my mouth.

It's quite hard to sing with fake teeth in.

Yeah.

And so what happened was, I was quite stressed out

at the prospect of us not doing it

and I went and sat in my trailer

and thought about it and we went to our lovely

make-up designer Lizzie Georgiou and said,

well what happens if we just paint the gap in?

And we tried it,

and it sort of worked really, really well.

[dramatic music continues]

I'm actually about to start singing here

and one of the fun things about making

Rocket Man was having all of these

really wonderful songs with these, kind of,

really beautiful poetic lyrics and trying

to give them new meaning.

So I think the lyric I'm about to sing is

'And all the science I don't understand'

Yeah

'It's just my job 5 days a week'

and we imagined that we would, sort of,

endow it with the meaning of him being

kind of perplexed and baffled at why

he's got everything he wants out of life

but is just completely miserable.

And so the song becomes a sort of,

almost soliloquy for him being upset and perplexed

at why he's so miserable.

Yeah, exactly, he has everything

but at the same time he's completely alone.

Yeah.

[dramatic music continues]

♪And all the science ♪

♪ I don't understand ♪

♪ It's just my job 5 days a week ♪

And this whole sequence is put together over like,

the entire shoot.

Of course, the swimming pool is a different day

from the ambulance an the different locations,

yeah, I mean, it seems a fairly obvious thing to say

'cause that's how films are made but it's really

about a transition as well about this journey

of how he gets sort of put back together after

going through this really huge emotional moment

of heartbreak and actually trying to kill himself.

In reality, he, there was, 24 hours between

him jumping in the pool after taking all of these pills

and him being on stage for, what was the most iconic

concert of his career, truly a zenith moment in '76

[Both] I think, The Dodgers, yeah.

♪ A rocket man ♪

There was always Rocket Man at this point.

When I first got hold of the script there were

different songs in different places or some songs

weren't in there at all but this was always

a kind of cornerstone of that draft from Lee Hall.

It was just finding this kind of, poetic way to show

this transition and what he was going through

emotionally and that turmoil.

♪ A rocket man ♪

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

♪ 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find ♪

♪ I'm not the man they think I am at home ♪

♪ Oh no, no, no ♪

♪ I'm a rocket man ♪

This silhouette, this ballet, as I like to call it

in front of this window, this window was at a location

that we were scouting for something else.

Mm.

And, I took a wander off on my own

to think about some stuff and I came across

this window here because this transition was always

the most complicated part of, how to we make him

get dressed and get on stage.

And so when I saw this huge window here

I of course realized at once there was a certain

time of day that it would just silhouette everybody

and that kind of gave me

the key into how we would transition.

And the choreographer Adam Murray put this together

fairly quickly, I must say.

Because like I say,

I found this location and said,

This is how I wanna do it,

this is what we're gonna do, the transition.

And of course, all of that L.A.

that's in the background here, you know,

you can see throughout the whole thing

the silhouette just worked really well

because you don't actually lose any of the detail

of what's going on with the actors, it's--

The thing is,

Your eye kind of fills it in, I think.

Him being carried as well, I love that

because Elton himself talked about the fact

that when he went to rehab, he didn't know how

to work a washing machine and I think the thing

about Rocket Man is it shows that you become

a product in your own right, that level of fame

of course it's glorious for many, many reasons

but there's also an element of you being kind of

shepherded around and losing your autonomy

a little bit and I think that's part of

the choreography, which I think--

And I think the lyric speaks to it brilliantly

he says, 'I'm not the man you think I am at home

I'm a rocket man'

♪ Touchdown brings me 'round again to find ♪

I don't wear Y-fronts I wear boxers just in case

anyone was wondering. But I, for this film wore Y-fronts

for everything because I know that Elton wears them.

[both laugh]

There's a scene where you come down the stairs

in your Y-fronts--

And I'm in a pair of Y-fronts there

And I just, we just--

Yeah we put the camera right--

Right on the Y-fronts.

Right on those Y-fronts.

It's funny for us. We laughed.

Yeah, there's a lot of us making ourselves laugh in this.

♪ Rocket man ♪

♪ Burning out his fuse up here alone ♪

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

♪ 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find ♪

Before we started making the film,

Dexter asked me to go and watch a really amazing film

called All That Jazz and there's a sort of catchphrase,

a recurring slogan in that film, 'showtime'

It's showtime, folks

Where this drug-addicted theater director

is kind of getting himself ready for the day

and putting on the show and it's, that whole

idea of tears of a clown and, you know,

what you have to do to go from the person

offstage to being the person who's onstage

became an idea that I was really, you know,

that whole idea of when does Reg Dwight

become Elton John and I was sort of fascinated by that.

♪ Burning out his fuse up here alone ♪

It's such a key part of the film and the character

and Taron would just deliver these incredible moments

sort of, out of his own, out of his back pocket

because I knew there was a transition here

but what is beautiful, not only is there

a cinematic transition which we spend a lot of time on

but there's an emotional and dramatic one as well

that is all part of that.

And I think it's really interesting when people see this

and they used it in the trailer, that shot.

Yeah

Because I think it really clearly tells the story

about someone who is one thing and putting a show

to come out and step out in front of the wider world

as something else and we all do that

in our day-to-day lives.

♪ Rocket man ♪

♪ Burning out his fuse up here alone ♪

That's a really famous Terry O'Neill shot

and there's very little footage of that concert.

There's a bit of sort of grainy Super-8, isn't there?

Yeah, Yeah.

But there are these amazing shots

which sort of adds to this incredible, y'know,

enigma and legend of this performance.

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

[crowd sings along]

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

You know none of this crowd or stadium or audience

was there, I created it as sort of like

there was this blinding light that he couldn't even see

beyond the end of the stage was the idea,

that he was sort of so wrapped in this bubble

and everything was a blur.

But that didn't work so I dug deep with the producer

Adam Bohling and we pulled out some resources

and created all of this stadium

and all the audience as well and I'm super glad

that we did because it needed scale,

the film really needed scale at this point

to show that there was a transition from something

really isolated because at the beginning of the sequence

he's alone in a swimming pool with his child self

all the way to being the man in front of 70,000 people.

You can see I asked them to put some,

I wanted sweat on my face. You can see it here,

on my top lip they put like, a sort of glycerine

thing on the top lip to make it look sweaty.

And I like the idea, that, you know,

coming off the end of a massive--

Bender.

Yeah, a massive bender.

This was a front shot that I just had of Taron

performing that we shrunk down and then rebuilt

the Dodgers night, the stadium there digitally.

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

What Taron was adamant about,

and I think we both were,

was that whenever it was possible for him to sing live

on set he would actually do that because the voice

is then directed connected to the emotion of that moment.

Yeah.

You play that over three or four takes and nuance it

and change it and develop it and keep moving it forward

like you would with any kind of dialogue--

Yeah exactly.

And that always was the approach.

I think it's dangerous in a musical if you start

thinking of singing as being something instrinsically

different to speech.

You've got to approach it in the same way.

It's like, you don't want a film

that's filled with dubbed dialogue because it feels

disembodied and it feels disconnected.

It's the same in a musical.

Characters don't just sing for the sake of singing

in a musical, they sing because, all of a sudden,

speech has become insufficient.

It no longer does the job required.

It's a level up in terms of expression.

And then also he other part of the musical element

for me is that we developed and built this musical

from the ground up.

There was no precursor to it.

There wasn't six months of a Broadway run and, you know,

a workshop and all that kind of stuff.

We had a couple of weeks' rehearsal, in truth of it.

Yeah.

I mean, aside from all the months in studio, but...

Yeah, but, when you're building a show that you get

in your workshop and you work on the songs

and you kind of know what the emotional landscape

is going to look like a lot clearer.

Of course we're well plotted out and we know what we're

going for but there is a massive element of, no one's

ever done this before.

This will be the first time it's ever gonna be done

and we'll do it live on camera.

That certainly happened with Your Song,

we didn't rehearse that.

No.

We just went in the set and went, okay we're gonna

go here and be there and do that.

That, I think, was one of the challenges that maybe

we kind of blindly went into in a way.

Only now, in retrospect do you go, oh yeah,

we did a whole musical from the ground up.

And I'm immensely proud of that.

[explosion]

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time ♪

So here, originally they had a little wobble ball

that had a cable that ran off here and it vibrated

and it vibrated me.

Yeah, it's like one of those plates

Yeah, like, you know those exercise machines you stand on.

It was felt that it was too extreme, the wobble.

[laughs]

It was very odd.

So I did a self-generated wobble.

And then he started squirting smoke at you as well.

Before we put in your head,

he started squirting at your feet,

And that didn't work as well either.

No.

So we kind of played around with that and got--

Here's just another, he's a little, that's just to show--

Is that wobbling?

That's wobble.

He's doodling, he's really taking it off.

Oh yeah, yeah. I do doodling and I do my own wobbling.

Yeah, I mean, your wobbling's phenomenal

but you've got a future in doodling.

Definitely.

There he goes.

And it works for both shots, which is excellent.

[laughs]

This is not real Taron, this is a Super Taron

flying in the sky.

'Cause Taron can do many things but he can't really fly.

That was the last thing that we ever shot

on the main shoot, that shot of me looking up

at the camera and the hat being blown off.

[explosions]

[music suddenly stops dramatically]

I love that last moment.

This is the bit we love, cause he's got smoke

coming out his head.

They spread smoke in me bald patch.

[laughs]

It's weird that way, look at that, I love that, yeah.

[laughs]

It's great.

I love that, yeah.

Shout out to Robbie who sprayed smoke in me bald patch.

I love those moments where, when you watch

it with a live audience they sort of laugh

but they feel a bit weird laughing

because they know they're laughing at something

that's kind of tragic but it's quite funny.

And it's quite nice to feel an audience sort of wobble

and not quite know where they are and I feel

that happens at that moment.

Yeah it's the whole thing of flying high and burning out

which are all things he sings about in the song,

the lyrics all pertain to it.

It's because of the nature of the film and how

we approached it that we have an unreliable narrator

coming into rehab in the beginning telling his story

which is really a collection of these feelings.

It meant that we could play very much around

with reality and fantasy.

The songs, because you've got your musical numbers

they can burst out in a way that, dramatically, it goes

beyond the dramatic so he gets to play with fantasy

element, the reality of him trying to take his own life,

or at least that cry for help,

into the fantasy of how he got put back together

and pushed out onto stage.

So, that's why it's a sort of particularly special moment

and it's really, it is what the story's about,

the man behind the legend or the myth.

[Interviewer off-screen] Do you think you guys will

work together again?

Yeah, definitely.

We will.

[both mouthing] No.

Yeah soon.

He's great, yeah. Great.

I like seeing it run backwards,

I've not seen that for a while.

[laughs]

That's good. Let's see you get undressed.

We've see you get dressed.

Let's see you take your clothes off backwards.

[laughs]

Woohoo!

Woohoo! Naked!

A bit of nipple there.

Cheeky nipple, come on, zip.

There you go, they're taking you out.

Love that.

There you go.

Insights in to the great filmic mind

of Dexter Fletcher and Taron Egerton.