My name is Dexter Fletcher, and I'm the director of Rocket Man.

And I am Taryn Edgerton.

And I play out John in Rocket Man.

This is weird being in the same time.

A couple 3123 This is note some of the scene way films of music over there.

You don't know, but it's also a valuable insight here.

Yeah, very next election.

Basically, Elton has taking a bunch of pills and thrown himself in the pool on Dhe meets the younger version of himself, actually down at the bottom of the pool.

And you get this idea that the kids trying to tell him something It's the start of the musical number Rocketman, which goes through various different spaces and ends up with the most iconic performance of his career.

So, yes, Taran is off.

Ellen has attempted to commit suicide.

These swimmers of all dived into saving happen to be synchronized swimmers, which was handy free from really ugly guy Here.

Look at that little face.

Really, really good place to stop yet.

Although this looks like L.

A.

It's a little bit of movie magic, isn't it?

Is.

We show this magical in pop's bar outside of London, where a lot of soccer players live.

Eyes is interesting because this is your hour attempt to create 19 seventies ally.

Yeah, about Tarrant.

Here is you see, has shaved his head pretty much in order to recreate Elton's here.

Kind of iconic look, really in that very didn't relish that didn't really apart.

And also the very end of the movie where I'm foreign in rehab that then I do actually have a couple.

But that's no, that's just my head has been decimated.

Yeah, because the issue was his.

You know, you could put the wig on, but trying to create Wait, you can't You can't say the way good.

So he shaved his head and he hated it.

Look perfect.

Freeze frame.

I wanted to try and fix this digitally.

This eyeball was always slightly squiffy, and I wasn't quite sure.

I mean, I don't know how you did it.

You would still live in the big show.

You know what?

I'm not a drama school.

Second year I always felt really important to have that gap in the teeth and because it's such a key part of Elton Silhouette, but it's quite hard thing to achieve and you could use fake teeth.

And we did try that.

But during a camera test, I'm singing a song and the teeth flew out My max.

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

What happened was I was quite stressed out the prospect that was not doing it.

And I went and sat in my trailer and thought about it, and we went to our lovely makeup designer, Lizzie, Georgia.

You said What happens if we just paint the gap in When we tried it and it worked really, really well, I'm actually about to start seeing in here.

And one of the really 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 they're coming back to sing is on all this science I don't understand.

Yeah, it's just my job five days a week and then are we imagined that we would sort of endow it with the meaning of him.

Look being colored, perplexed and battle that why he's got everything he wants out of life, but it's just completely miserable.

And so the song becomes the song becomes a sort of almost a soliloquy for him, um, being upset and perplexed that why he's so miserable.

Yeah, exactly has everything.

But at the same time, he's completely alone and all the signs I don't understand.

It's just a job this whole sequences put together over like the entire shoot.

Of course, you know, the swimming pool is a different day from the ambulance, and they're different locations.

Um, I mean, it seems fairly obviously success out was made, but there is because it's really about a transition as well about this journey of how it gets put back together after going through this really huge emotional moment of heartbreak and actually trying to kill himself.

And in reality, in reality, he was 24 hours between him jumping in the pool after taking all of these pills on him being on stage for, you know, what was the most iconic concert of his career.

Him a truly as any moment in 76 I think.

Yo, Rocket Man.

At this point, when I first got hold of the script, there were different songs into places or some songs running in there it'll but this was always a cornerstone of that that dropped from legal.

Andi It was just finding it was just finding this kind of poetic y two show this transition and what he was going through emotionally in that turmoil rocket this silhouette, this ballet as I like to call it in front of this window This this window was at a location that we were scouting for something else.

And I took a wonder off on my own to think about some stuff.

And I came across this window here because this transition was always the most complicated, complicated part of how do we make him get dressed and get on stage?

And so when I saw this huge window here, I realize that once there was a certain time of day that would just send away everybody on DDE that that kind of gave me the key into how we transition.

And the choreographer Adam Murray put us together fairly quickly.

Yeah, because I say I found this location and said, This is how I want to 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 details of what's going on with the actors.

You know, I kind of feel was anything him being carried as well.

I love that because Elton himself talks about the fact that when you 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 he's you become a product in your own right.

You know that level of fame, of course, you you know 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.

That's part of the choreography.

And I think the lyrics speaks to breathe brilliantly, says I'm not the man you think I am.

You wear y fronts highway boxes, just in case anyone was wondering.

But I for this film will y fronts for everything, because I know that there's a scene where you come down the stairs in your time in a pair of y fronts way.

Put the camera writer right on the Y fronts on those y fronts.

Funny for us, we love.

Yeah, there's a lot of us making ourselves laughing this way started making the film That's to ask me to go and watch a really amazing phone called All That Jazz.

And there's a sort of catchphrase of recurring, a recurring slowly in that film.

Showtime.

Theis, drug addicted here director is kind of get himself ready for the day and put it on the show, and it's on that whole idea of tears of a clown.

And you know what you have to do to go from the person off stage to being the person is on stages became an idea that I was really, you know, that whole idea of Wendy's Reg Dwight become out John.

I was sort of fascinated by that.

Ah, such a key part in the film in the character Andi Taryn would just deliver these incredible moments sort of out of his own 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 when on dramatic one as well that that's all part of that.

I think it's really interesting that when people see this and they used it in the trailer, that shop because I think it really clearly tells the story about someone who is one thing and putting on a show.

You come come out and step out in front of the wider world of something else, and we'll do that.

Really.

Terry O'Neill shot.

There's very little, very little footage of that concert.

There's a bit of a grainy Super eight, but there are these amazing shots.

Sort of adds to this incredible, you know, enigma and legend of this performance.

None of this crowd of stadium or audience was there, created It was like there was this blinding light he couldn't even see.

Beyond the end of the stage was the idea that he was sort of so wrapped in this bubble, Andi that everything was a blur.

But that didn't work.

So I dug deep with the producer Adam bowling and we we pulled out some resources on created all of this stadium and all the audience as well.

And I'm I'm super glad that we did because it needed scale.

Yeah, film really needed scale at this point to show that there was a transition from something really isolated because in the beginning of the sequence, he's alone in a swimming pool with his child self away, too.

Being the man in front of you know, 70,000 people we can see, there's I asked them to put some Well, I wanted to sweat on my Facebook.

It sit here on my top lip, they put like a blistering.

You talk to me, he looks way on.

I like the idea that, you know, coming off end of a massive thing was a front shop that we just had a tear in performing.

We shrunk down and then rebuilt the Dodgers night stadium there digitally.

Taran was adamant about it.

I think you both were.

Whenever it was possible for him to sing live on Set, he would actually do that because that is the voices then directly connected to the emotion off that moment.

You play that over three or four takes and new wants it and change it and develop it and keep moving forward like you would with any kind of dialogue.

Exactly.

That's the way it was.

The approach.

I think it's dangerous in a musical.

If you start thinking of singing as being something intrinsically different to speech, you've got to approach it in the same way that you don't want to film.

That's filmed that's filled with dubbed dialogue because it feels this embodied, it feels disconnected.

It's the same in a musical.

Characters don't just sing for the sake of singing in a musical, they're saying, because all of a sudden speech has become insufficient.

It's no longer does the job require a level up in terms of expression and also the other.

The other part of the musical element for me is that we we we developed and built this musical from the ground up.

There was nothing.

There is no precursor to there, wasn't, you know, six months of a Broadway run and you know, ah, workshop.

That kind of we didn't We had a couple of weeks rehearsal with intrusive it, Andi.

I mean, aside from all the months in studio, but yeah, but even so you know, I mean, it's like when you're building a show that you get any work, We work on the song, and you kind of know what the the emotional landscape is.

Gonna look, look, look clearer.

Way have to Of course, we were well plotted out.

We know what we're going for, but there is a massive element off.

No one's ever done this before.

This will be the first time it's ever going to be done, and we'll do it live on camera.

That's certainly happened with your song.

We didn't rehearse.

No, we just went in the set.

And when?

Okay, we're gonna go here and be then do that.

That, I think was one of the challenges that maybe we kind of blindly went into.

In a way, Yeah.

Only now respect you go.

Oh, yeah.

We did a whole musical from the ground up, and I'm you know, I'm proud of that, Theo.

Originally, they had a little wobble boulder at a cable.

It ran off here and it vibrated and it vibrated me.

It's not one of those plates.

You know, those machines?

It was felt that I think it was too extreme.

The wobble, It was very odd.

So I did itself himself.

And then he started squaring Smoke you as well before we put in your head and that didn't work.

Really know.

So we kind of played around with that.

His mother is a little that's just to show troubling.

That's that's what doodling is really taking.

Oh, yeah, do doodling and I do my own wobbling, Yeah, I mean, you're wobbling is phenomenal, but your future doodling There he goes, and that works for both shots, which is excellent.

And this is a not real Tarrant.

This is a super Terram flying in the sky because Tarrant could do many things, but you can't really fly.

That was the last thing.

We have a shot on the main show that shots right.

Me looking up at the camera had been blown off.

I love that.

That's mine.

This is a bit what we love because he's got smoke spreads, spreads smoking the bald patch way.

Love that.

It's great.

I love Chad rubber.

You sprayed smoking with the patch.

I love those moments where when you watch it with a live audience, they they saw a laugh.

But they feel a bit weird laughing because they know they're laughing.

It's something that's kind of tragic, but it's it's quite funny, and it's quite nice to feel an audience or wobble and not quite know where they are.

And I feel that happens at that exact.

I mean, it's the whole thing of, you know, flying high and burn it out.

Which of those things that you see things about in the song, the lyrics because of the nature of the film and how we approached it, that we have an unreliable in the rate of coming into rehab in the beginning, telling his story, which is really a collection of of his feelings, it meant that we could play very much around with reality and fantasy and songs because you've got your musical numbers.

They couldn't burst that in a way that dramatically you know, it goes, it goes beyond the dramatic.

So you get to play with fantasy element of reality, of him trying to take his own life, or at least that cry for help into the fantasy of how we got put back together and pushed out onto stage.