In a high-rise building just off Tottenham Court Road, documentarian Nick Broomfield is talking all things Leonard Cohen. The Canadian poet and novelist, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Quebec, became one of the most important singer-songwriters of his generation and forms a fundamental part of the British filmmaker’s stirring new movie, Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love.
Famed for songs such as Suzanne and Hallelujah, Cohen spoke to a generation; but I’m wondering if he can speak to young people today? “I think they would probably respond to his work or his poetry,” answers Broomfield, 71. “I don’t see his work being dated in the same way you would say The Eagles were. I think it’s very different, the way his work operates. One of the challenges of the film is to make it relevant to a bigger age group.”
It’s a mission he’s more than risen to in a story that touches on very universal themes: love, life, death, parenthood, art and creativity. At its core, it tells of Cohen’s on-off relationship with the Norwegian-born Marianne Ihlen, who became his muse and inspiration at one of the most fertile times in his career. Their turbulent time together inspired such classic songs as So Long Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye and Bird On The Wire.
The setting, largely, is Hydra, a Greek island paradise where artists, poets and musicians gathered to exist hand-to-mouth in search of something more spiritual. Cohen arrived there in the spring of 1960, two years after Ihlen, who already had a young son, Axel Jnr, with Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen. For Cohen, it was the perfect place to live, to write, to fall in love and— ultimately — make the transition to revered musician.
The twist here is that Broomfield — long before he became a respected director of films like Fetishes (1996) and Kurt & Courtney (1998) — arrived on Hydra too, back in ’68. “It was just a complete whim,” he says. Then aged just 20, he was having doubts about the law degree he was studying at Cardiff University, when a family friend, Rosalind Runcie, the wife of the future archbishop of Canterbury, suggested he visit Hydra.
It was here that Broomfield met Ihlen, and — in the spirit of free love — became her chosen partner for a while. But Cohen, who travelled back and forth America and Greece, was always on the horizon. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen had come out a year before Broomfield met him. “I didn’t hear his album until I got to Hydra. I think I had a pretty sheltered upbringing. I was pretty unaware of him,” he admits.
So he wasn’t overawed? “No, I wasn’t. But people held him in very esteem, and were always quoting him. I think he had a powerful impact on people.” None more so than Ihlen, who worshipped Cohen. Broomfield, who stayed in touch with Ihlen for years even after their short-lived fling fizzled, recalls just how much she admired him. Her apartment in Oslo boasted a shelf full of Cohen’s books. “It was a bit like a shrine,” he smiles.
This was despite Cohen’s evident difficulty with monogamy, “I don’t think she ever regretted her time with Leonard, even though it didn’t necessarily turn out the way she had wanted it to,” says Broomfield. “She was quite a positive person, so I think she took from it what she wanted. She wasn’t someone to hold someone responsible for not fulfilling her dreams or wishes. She was quite sophisticated, I think, in that way.”
Ihlen’s relationship with Cohen spluttered when he went back to New York; she followed him with Axel Jnr but their relationship was never the same outside the sheltered island of Hydra. At one point in the film, Cohen is on stage, introducing a song and talking about Marianne; as the years passed, gradually their time together got less and less each year — until, he says, they spent just two days together.
So Broomfield claims, Ihlen’s coupling with Cohen fell apart because he wanted to have Jewish children (he eventually had two kids, Lorca and Adam, with Jewish photographer Suzanne Elrod). I ask if Broomfield felt protective over Ihlen, who inspired him to take up filmmaking. “I don’t think I felt protective… I felt grateful,” he says, but you suspect that she — some twelve years older than him when they met on Hydra — was a big influence on him.
As for Cohen, Broomfield kept his distance. “I liked the first two albums a lot and then I guess I was less interested in him,” he says. They didn’t stay in touch after the Hydra years. “I went to some of his concerts. But I didn’t have such a close relationship with Leonard at all. He was somebody whose work I admired and who I think was a great poet and great musician, but I didn’t really have the same personal relationship.”
In 2016, Broomfield got word that Ihlen had passed away, aged 81, from leukaemia. “It all happened so quickly,” he sighs. Before she died, Ihlen’s close friend, Jan Christian Mollestad, contacted Cohen, letting him know that she didn’t have long left. Cohen, who’d spent years in a Buddhist monastery before re-emerging on the tour circuit in his Seventies, wrote back: “I’ve never forgotten your love and your beauty.” She died just four months later.
It was this that prompted Broomfield to make the film; he even returned to Hydra 40 years on to revisit it. Inevitably, there were changes; the idyllic lifestyle largely now swallowed up by the demands of capitalism. “It used to be, ‘Would you mind looking after my house for six months?’ Now it’s, ‘Can you pay 200 Euros a night to stay?’ That philosophy has changed and that’s symptomatic of some other changes.”
If Marianne & Leonard shows us anything, it’s that dropping out can foster brilliance — particularly in Cohen. “That search for an alternative way of living is a very healthy search,” says Broomfield. “Out of it comes greatness that you don’t have otherwise — some amazing work, some amazing experimental things in terms of music, painting and literature. It was a very fertile time, I guess.”
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love opens in cinemas on July 26.
