Boxoffice - May 2019

COVER STORY
PHOTO: GAVIN BOND/PARAMOUNT PICTURES
DEXTER FLETCHER ON THE
THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE
“There’s nothing better
than music and images
and a dark room and a
group of people all sitting
together having a shared
experience.”
was never the desire with Bohemian Rhapsody—
they were always very clear about what they wanted
in terms of the rating. So when the opportunity
came to do an R-rated musical about Elton John,
I jumped at the chance, because all of that fervor
and ambition for Bohemian Rhapsody that had not
been realized kind of found its outlet. And then,
of course, they had some issues with Bohemian
Rhapsody. I’d worked with Fox on Eddie the Eagle,
and [Eagle producer] Matt Vaughn, who works on
Kingsman with Fox, said, ‘Dexter would be good
for this because he knows the material, he knows
Queen.’ I was already in pre-production with Rocketman
... it’s just one of those extraordinary things:
Fate came together and sort of put me in the right
place at the right time.”
Unlike the more traditionally linear Bohemian
Rhapsody, Rocketman is a full-blown musical, with
fantasy sequences depicting the journey to stardom
of Northwest London native Reginald Dwight,
his adoption of his flamboyant stage persona,
his coming out, and his battles with bulimia and
cocaine addiction. “What I’ve learned about doing
biopics is that artistic license has to be involved,”
Fletcher insists. “You can’t tell a story without it.
And this created what I understood to be a really
interesting dynamic. A bit like All That Jazz—you
have someone retelling their own story and looking
back on their own life. And it allows for fantasy
that you can absolutely buy into, because our Elton
comes into rehab at the beginning and he sits
down and says, ‘I have a problem and I need to fix
it.’ And memory is a fallible thing. It’s a beautiful,
wonderful thing, because memory is a storytelling
device. When you tell what you remember of what
it was like to be a six-year-old kid growing up, it’s a
story now. That’s what’s really exciting about it for
me as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, is that we have
a character who is kind of unreliable and addled
by memories that are overlapping or tinged by
substance abuse. It’s not in the third person. It’s
not like Bohemian Rhapsody, [which] is in the third
person and we look at it from the outside. We’re
inside the story with Elton; we’re inside his recollection
of what happened. With cracks and breaks
and the way he misremembers things.”
With John as an executive producer and his
husband, David Furnish, as a producer, Fletcher
and screenwriter Lee Hall (Billy Elliot, Victoria &
Abdul) had their blessing to delve into the dark
chapters of the pop superstar’s life. “It’s not something
he’s ever really shied away from or hidden.
And I think that if we tried to tell the story and
ignore that or hide it, people would have felt like
it was a self-serving fluff piece or something. But
it’s not. Elton was like: Tell it how it was, give the
idea of what he went through. For me, the film is a
story of a survivor, someone who has his problems
and fights his way out to survive. And that’s something
that we can all relate to. That’s something we
all have to experience one way or another. That’s
what humanizes it.”
Rocketman reunites Fletcher with his Eddie the
Eagle star Taron Egerton, best known as the lead
in the Kingsman spy action comedies, who does
all his own singing in the film. “He loves playing
characters whose name begins with an E and
who wear glasses,” Fletcher jokes. “But the thing
about Taron is he’s an actor with incredible,
incredible range. There is that strange similarity,
but it’s just coincidence.
“What’s phenomenal about Taron is that he not
only has this breadth and range and this incredible
vulnerability that he seems to be able to bring to
whatever he does, but there’s a level of commitment
he brings as well, and attention to detail. If
90 MAY 2019