A version of this story about “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” first appeared in the Editing Guilds & Critics Awards / Documentaries from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
The title of Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” clears up a few things about the music documentary. On the one hand, it focuses on the song “Hallelujah”, one of Cohen’s most influential, moving and frequently covered songs; and for another, the film will move well beyond that song, using it as a jumping-off point to explore the life and art of the revered French-Canadian poet who became an unlikely pop star.
Why make a movie based on just one song?
DAYNA GOLDFINE We were at dinner with David Thompson, the screenwriter, who posed the question. He said, “Have you ever considered making a documentary about a song?”
And you didn’t have a specific song in mind?
Dan Geller No. None at all. She seriously thought about doing it as a book with no song in mind, just an interesting writing project for him. But he couldn’t crack the code to do it, and then he thought maybe it would be more possible as a movie.
GOLDFINE I told David this afterwards: I was pretending to be excited about the idea. As a filmmaker, when someone like David, who really knows what he’s doing, says, “I have an idea for your next movie,” you lean forward. But then he said it was a documentary about a song, and I instantly backed down. I was like, “How am I going to pretend to like East occurrence?” But then the picture of Leonard singing “Hallelujah” came up at a show we’d seen, and it was like, “Oh my gosh, I actually know what song we’d use if we did this.” And the next morning I looked on Google “Leonard Cohen” and Alan Light’s book (The Sacred or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Rise of “Hallelujah”) arose. We read the book and we thought that there is more history here than we thought. So we got in touch with Alan, and he said, “You guys aren’t the first filmmakers to approach me, but it never came to fruition.”
He said that the number one turnoff after the initial enthusiasm from the other filmmakers was that Leonard would not be interviewed. And I thought that’s not a deal breaker. That’s just a challenge to be creative and figure out other ways to do it. Number two, other filmmakers decided that they couldn’t make it interesting to make a documentary where you hear a song multiple times. OK, another gauntlet thrown. And the third was that other filmmakers didn’t think it would be possible to get Sony Publishing to provide the rights at a reasonable cost. And we said, “Okay, that would be a deal breaker. Let’s see if we can make that happen.” And it took us 18 months.
Did you go to Sony Publishing saying, “We want the rights to this song” or “We want the rights to a lot of Leonard’s songs”?
GELLER We went in thinking we just wanted that song. That was a huge hurdle and we hadn’t even thought about what else we might need because we couldn’t even start without the rights to the song. So that’s what we asked for, and it took us 18 months to find out that we could pay the royalties. So really, it was only over time that we understood that the songs that led up to “Hallelujah” and the songs that followed “Hallelujah” were important in understanding the mind of Leonard Cohen and the search he set on himself. So we start adding more songs and conveniently don’t pay attention to how much it might cost.
GOLDFINE When it came to Telluride, we knew we needed to get serious about getting all the rights[Cohen’s manager]Robert Kory called us and said, “You should probably call Esther at Sony Publishing. If you want, I’ll make a call to warn her. Need, what, another dozen songs? And we said: “It’s 22”. (laughs)
What was the impetus behind pushing the movie to tell a story that was so much bigger than that single song?
GOLDFINE I think one of the big questions we were asking ourselves, and it’s not open in the film, is what it is about Leonard Cohen that made him the only person in the entire universe who could have invented a song like “Hallelujah.” ”? If that’s one of his thesis, then he needs the audience to know a little bit about his creative concerns, his spiritual concerns, his human foibles and concerns.
GELLER You could make it kind of an expository film, but it’s a different story to turn it around and intertwine those elements. You end up understanding aspects of his life and taking an emotional stake in his success when he says, “I want to be a songwriter, but I don’t know if I’m any good.” And then you can bring in all these other elements: looking at his Jewish roots, his feeling that there’s an empty, resonant presence in his heart that draws him into Buddhism.That gives you an emotional journey, which is the kind of movie I love to watch.
Leonard filled notebooks with alternative verses to “Hallelujah”, with estimates ranging into the hundreds of verses. You have seen the notebooks, how many verses are there?
GOLDFINE It is a tricky question. It’s worth asking, but there may be a section that Leonard is working on in “I know this room/I walked on this floor”, and there are three or four different versions. Do you count them as verses?
GELLER I think part of the fun is in exaggerating.
Read more from the Guild & Critics / Documentary Awards edition here.
