Elton John

Interview, Dec, 2004 by Robert Downey, Jr.

EJ: Wipe off the forehead, yeah. [laughs]

RD: But what I remember most from The Red Piano show in Vegas, too, was the joy in your performance. You were just ripping it up.

EJ: I am enjoying it more and more, and if people like what I'm doing with things like The Red Piano show, then that makes me feel good about taking the kinds of risks I've been taking. I took the risk of producing my own album, which I think has paid off. Then I took the risk of coming to Vegas when everyone said, "Oh, Elton's going to Vegas. Well, you know what happens when people go to Vegas."

RD: Which is funny because before the first chord struck, there was nothing but unconscious bias about you doing a Vegas show. But with the way people have reacted, you would have thought that they all told you to do it beforehand.

EJ: People must think I'm stupid if they thought I would come to Vegas and not do something special. What's the point? If we were going to play in Vegas, we really wanted to raise the bar. The city has changed, anyway. It's a different town now than it was in the 1970s, when Elvis Presley played here and people did come here to end their careers. It's a much hipper town, a younger town, a more fun town than it was back then.

RD: And in addition to Peachtree Road and the show, you've also completed a couple of musicals: Billy Elliot and Vampire Lestat.

EJ: It's really fun to write something when you already know the characters. When you're writing the music, you've got a beginning and an end; so you start at the beginning and end at the end, and that's kind of the way we did Billy Elliot. With Vampire, it was a little different. I literally couldn't stop working on it--I was practically drinking blood. [laughs] It was also far more complicated for Bernie because it was his first musical and he had so many historical facts to check out. But his work on Vampire Lestat is just astonishing. There's no electronic music in Vampire. It's all kind of classical and operatic.

RD: So, what's the plan now?

EJ: I'm going to spend next year playing in Vegas and touring North America. The great thing about my career and my life right now is that there are so many different variations. I mean, I can play on my own or with my band or with Billy Joel. I've got The Red Piano in Vegas, and I can go out on the road with the orchestra. I can write musicals, and I'm doing a movie for Disney based on Romeo and Juliet with garden gnomes, called Nomeo and Juliet. I'm also chairman of the Old Vic Theatre in London, which Kevin Spacey is now getting his teeth around, and I have the AIDS foundation. So I have a life.

RD: And you really work your ass off.

EJ: Well, everything is so enjoyable at the moment--mind you, if my album does horribly, it probably won't be. But you know what? You have to face that when it comes out. I just did the best I could do. Everything comes in waves: One minute people think you're great, the next minute they don't, and then the next minute you're great again. It's like, "When am I great? When am I not?" [Downey laughs] When I turn 60, I'm going to have to take a real good look at my life because at that point, I would like to make some drastic changes and do different things. But I'm going to be charging on until then. I mean, who would have thunked 14 years ago that my life would be as good as it is right now? That's why it's also just so gratifying for me to hear people say, "God, Robert's doing really well"--that you're not pissing it all away, because that's so frustrating.