LOS ANGELES — On Christmas Day, pop legend Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, met their son, 7-pound, 15-ounce Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, born via a surrogate mother.
Elton’s first project since becoming a working father would be a children’s animated film. He’s the executive producer of, and provides the music for the animated tale, “Gnomeo and Juliet,” a garden gnome adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”
The last times that I spoke with Elton John in Chicago were at his Wrigley Field concert and then at the opening of “Billy Elliot: The Musical,” for which he also did the music. I asked him about his time here.
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I always have a great time in Chicago; it’s one of my favorite cities. I remember playing years ago at the Auditorium Theatre very fondly. It’s always been one of my best venues to go to as a city. Also, I got sober in Chicago, so I have a special place in my heart for it. I have friends there and my sponsor lives in Chicago. I love Chicago. What’s not to like about Chicago? The problem is, it’s a little cold.
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I wish “Billy Elliot” would’ve lasted a little bit longer here.
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It was a good run; I just think we were in too big of a theater, to be honest with you. But we had a good run and we’re moving it now to Toronto, so we’ll see what happens there.
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What does an executive producer do?
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When crunch time comes, I’m the one who has to support my production team, and phone the bigwigs and say, “C’mon, let’s rally around here, we’ve got a good thing going.” … Essentially, I’m really the head guy, when things go wrong, I have to step in and say “Listen, let’s have a meeting.” It’s called the Elton effect.
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Creative types don’t always relish that kind of business role.
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I don’t particularly like it, but I have to do it. If you have a relationship with a studio (like) I have with Disney, which goes back to “The Lion King” in 1993, I have to do that. We’re in business together. We don’t want to be enemies, we want to be friends.
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How is doing the music for this different than doing the music for “Lion King” or some of your other more traditional musicals? The characters don’t sing the songs here.
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This was going to be the same way. We wrote four songs for … and probably were going to write more. And we decided to have a classic Elton John catalog in it, which we hadn’t thought of doing. I’ve never used my back catalog for a film before, so we decided to go that route. When you write songs for a film or musical, you have to be aware that some of them might bite the dust. Things change, things get too long, and you have to leave your ego at the door and accept that. So we ended up with only two new songs and a lot of back catalog. Lucky enough, the back catalog was arranged by James Newton Howard, who used to be in my band, and is now one of the top arrangers for movies in Hollywood. I phoned him and said, listen would you do this, you know my catalog, you’ve seen the film; can you see what you can use from my catalog but don’t “over-egg the pudding,” because I don’t want it to be Elton John, Elton John, Elton John. I think he got the balance right.
Travel expenses were paid for by WGN-TV and Touchstone Pictures.
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