The Elton John biopic Rocketman hits theaters this weekend, and Elton himself made sure that it stayed true to his real life.
“Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven’t led a PG-13 rated life,” he wrote in an essay for The Guardian.
“I didn’t want a film packed with drugs and sex, but equally, everyone knows I had quite a lot of both during the ’70s and ’80s, so there didn’t seem to be much point in making a movie that implied that after every gig, I’d quietly gone back to my hotel room with only a glass of warm milk and the Gideon’s Bible for company.”
There are also some "fantasy" elements in the movie that the studio didn't really like, but Elton insisted that they were necessary in order to understand his mind.
“I lived in my own head a lot as a kid. And when my career took off, it took off in such a way that it almost didn’t seem real to me," he said. "There’s a moment in ‘Rocketman’ when I’m playing onstage in the Troubadour club in LA and everything in the room starts levitating, me included, and honestly, that’s what it felt like.”
(via Page Six)