Documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler was in the audience for one of the truly amazing moments of Elton John’s concert career that has spanned half a century.
That would be when John was joined by John Lennon at Madison Square Garden in 1974 to perform their collaborative song, Whatever Gets You Thru The Night, and The Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There. “That was the concert that I went to (when I was 13),” said Cutler, with co-directed the new TIFF documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late with John’s husband and Torontonian David Furnish. The doc had its world premiere Friday night.
“It was one place where I was with Elton and David wasn’t.” Meanwhile, the 61-year-old Furnish — seated beside Cutler in a Toronto hotel room on Saturday — didn’t see John in concert “until the late ‘80s in London and it was at an AIDs benefit. Although the first concert, I felt very proud and very lucky to see, was Abba.
They came to Toronto in the ‘70s at Maple Leaf Gardens.” The MSG performance is just one of the many pieces of archival gold that have ended up in the emotional documentary, which gets a limited theatrical run on Nov. 15, and later streams on Disney+ on Dec.
13. But Cutler said the real rarity was John’s 1976 audio interview with Rolling Stone in which he came out as bisexual in a cover story . “The Cliff Jahr tapes, those were buried in an archive in Columbia University,” said Cutler.
The film starts and ends with John performing at Dodger Stadium.