Fuelled by a visiting horde of Hollywood A-listers, the promotional mouse-wheels of the annual Toronto International Film Festival could keep us all in free electricity, if only we had the sense to plug them in. But this year’s festival – known to locals as TIFF – brought a different kind of energy to Hollywood’s often-superficial marketing machine. Some people laughed.
Some people cried. And everybody suddenly got honest – including British singer-songwriter and pianist Elton John. Elton John waves from a purple golf cart which delivered him to the red carpet in Toronto.
Credit: AP “Fame is a dangerous thing if you don’t have something else ...
and if you don’t have honesty to go with fame, then you’re going to be in real, real trouble, like I was before I got sober in 1990,” John said, taking a typically promotional question-and-answer session down a more candid path. “It took me so long to tell the truth [about my sexuality], and it made me so unhappy,” John added. “It was so stupid, the amount of years that I lost by not telling the truth and by fooling myself.
And when I stopped fooling myself, my life turned around.” Elton John: Never Too Late , directed by R.J.
Cutler and John’s husband David Furnish, mixes a trove of footage from John’s early career, between 1970 and 1975, with footage of the lead-up to his retirement, and his final US concert at Dodger Stadium in 2022. The film will be released in Australia on the streaming platform Di.