When married filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine look at a potential subject for a documentary, they always ask themselves, “Do we know much about this subject?” says Goldfine over Zoom. “If the answer is ‘no’, then we’re more inclined to want to lean into it.”
The Emmy-winning duo can spend years making a film, and “part of the joy is the process of discovery”.
Their latest film, the expansive, seven-years-in-the-making Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, was no exception. They knew that Cohen had a Jewish background, but it was not until they started to do research that they realised how integral it was to the Canadian’s identity and to his work, and how “deeply Jewish” it meant the film was going to be.
Over coffee, Goldfine told Rabbi Mordecai Finley, Cohen’s rabbi for the last 15 years of his life, that people had always asked them, “When will you finally do a Jewish film?” “He looked at us,” she recalls, “and said, ‘Well, I think this is your first one.’”
It was unavoidable: the man and his faith were inseparable. When Cohen retreated to a Zen monastery on Mount Baldy, California, for six years, seemingly having hit a spiritual wall, people would ask him if he had left his heritage behind, says Goldfine. “He would say, ‘No, I’ve got a perfectly good religion. Being up here developing Zen practice does not negate my Judaism.’”
The idea for the documentary was planted when the directors’ friend, the film writer David Thompson, asked if they would ever consider doing a film about a song. They had never thought about making a music documentary before.
However, the couple had seen Cohen perform at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, in 2009, when he was on the first of two multi-year legs of a “comeback tour”, and his performance of Hallelujah was seared into their memories.
They had heard Jeff Buckley’s sensual version of the song, but this was different, Geller remembers.
“When we saw Leonard perform it live, there is this man who has lived and has all the wisdom and accumulated experience to put into that song, and to see him get down on his knees in a prayerful gesture, not to the audience, but to something inside him, or around him, or above him, to see that live and to feel that live, took it beyond anybody’s cover.”
“It was the most profound experience ever in a concert,” says Goldfine. “So it was this one-two punch: It was like Leonard Cohen, the emotional and spiritual impact of that moment, and watching him sing that song, and then it was like, ‘Oh, it would be kind of amazing, at this point in our lives, to venture into music documentary territory.’”
Inspired by Alan Light’s book,The Holy or the Broken, they decided to chart the journey of Hallelujah from its creation to its current status. In fact, it almost never saw the light of day.
The 1984 album (Cohen’s seventh) it featured on, Various Positions, was dumped in the United States by the then president of Columbia Records, Walter Yetnikoff, who told Cohen: “Leonard, we know you’re great. We just don’t know if you’re any good.”
The album appeared on a tiny label in America with a pressing number too small for it to gain widespread public recognition. But then Bob Dylan played it in his concerts. In the 90s an album of Cohen covers called I’m Your Fan was released. John Cale performed Hallelujah on it. People at an arts organisation working with Jeff Buckley then suggested he perform it.
When Shrek was being made, Cale’s version was chosen in a cut-down form.
Rufus Wainwright performed it on the double platinum soundtrack album. Shrek pushed it into popular culture and it became a staple of talent shows.
When Buckley drowned in 1997, artists started singing Hallelujah as a tribute. The song then became a kind of hymn for all occasions, being sung at everything from weddings to funerals.
To get the documentary rolling, the filmmakers approached Robert Kory, Cohen’s manager, in 2014, for the musician’s “tacit blessing to move forward with the project”. Cohen was about to turn 80, and had been interviewed ever since becoming a poet and author of note in Canada.
“We made it clear up front that we didn’t require an interview, which was really paramount to Leonard,” says Goldfine.
He gave them what they wanted “very quickly”.
Filming began in the summer of 2016, a few months before Cohen’s death on 7 November, with Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who first met Cohen in 1974 as a young writer for Rolling Stone, when the songwriter was 40, and continued to interview him into the early 2000s, amassing a trove of taped interviews that the filmmakers were able to access.
In one of many intriguing insights in the film, Sloman reveals that Cohen was “exploring his Jewish roots” at the time of their first encounter, and told him that his ambition was to become an elder.
Nowhere in the film is his attainment of this position better illustrated than when he movingly gives the priestly benediction, in Hebrew, at the end of a 2009 concert in Tel Aviv. Knowing that he had seen the consequences of conflict after appearing in Israel to sing for the troops during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, makes the mesmerising footage all the more spine-tingling.
“Every time I see that in the movie, it actually brings me to tears for everything it stands for: for himself, for the audience, or a wish for peace, for a wish for ‘shalom’,” says Geller.
While they were clearing the rights to the music, Sloman told the filmmakers about journals he had seen at Cohen’s house in Los Angeles. After Cohen died, the filmmakers asked Kory, who now ran the Leonard Cohen Family Trust, if they still existed. It took him a couple of years, says Goldfine, even to admit that they did.
“Robert has told us that he knew that Leonard wanted this project to succeed,” says Geller. “But Robert was very careful to make sure that what we were doing was an accurate representation of the entire Leonard Cohen.
He wasn’t looking for a hagiography, clearly, and we weren’t going to give one, but that what we were doing was true to the spirit of Leonard and what Leonard’s preoccupations had been.”
They began showing Kory rough edits. “I don’t know what clicked for him,” says Goldfine, “but one day he said, ‘I’ll show you one of them.’ And then we looked at it and we’re kind of drooling.”
Eventually, Kory let them look at five notebooks covering the years during which Cohen wrote, revised, and re-revised verses of Hallelujah, reflecting, as Cohen remarks in the documentary, the importance in the Jewish faith of questioning God.
While writing the song, Cohen told Sloman that he found himself sitting in his hotel room in his underwear, banging his head on the floor, and crying out that it was too hard. “You can see the underlying feeling through the revisions of those verses,” says Geller.
“You know what he’s grappling with as far as the spirituality, as far as the biblical references, but the grappling with the poetry itself, I believe, took him far longer to realise.
Wrestling with God is one thing; wrestling with words, that’s another thing altogether.” (Cohen later moved the song away from the Old Testament allusions of the Various Positions version in an attempt to push it, in his own words, “deep into the secular”.)
In what Geller calls, “one of these Kismet moments that make documentary filmmaking so exciting”, the couple found that they were able to match pages from the notebooks they were allowed to film at a secret location, to Sloman’s recordings of Cohen reading from them.
“We had gotten the tapes from Ratso about a year or so before we got access to the journals,” says Goldfine, “so we knew that he had been reading from these journals, and actually the page turns [heard in the film] are Leonard turning pages.”
Penmanship was not one of Cohen’s strengths, adds Geller, laughing, “so to have him reading what you’re seeing helps to make it more legible”.
As well as the notebooks, Kory gave the filmmakers Polaroid selfies that Cohen shot of himself, one of which became the cover of Various Positions, and put them in contact with the producer of unseen footage shot at concerts during Cohen’s final tour.
Along the way, they also heard about the album Cohen was recording, You Want It Darker, which would be released just before his death.
“So we were aware of that,” says Geller, “and gobsmacked at the profundity, beauty and complexity when it came out. I liken it to what David Bowie accomplished as well on his final album [Blackstar].
Both of those albums are masterworks, and not just in terms of beauty and recording, but in both cases, people are aware of their imminent mortality and wrestling with those feelings and themes in such a sophisticated way. To have both of those albums that same year, I couldn’t really listen to any other music for a while.”
Did they learn anything being in Cohen’s world?
For Geller, Cohen’s transformation from a seeker of answers into someone who reached out during his later concerts, where he would say, “Thank you, friends, for all of us gathering here,” reinforced the importance of seeking connection.
Goldfine says the wish he articulated at 40 to get to be an elder “is something that we never can hear enough, especially in this culture that we live in, which tends to venerate youth. Getting older is a blessing, and we should savour the knowledge that we glean along the way.”
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song opens in cinemas today
