Episode 1289 - Peter Jackson
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fuck, Nicks?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:Mark, M-A-R-C, Maron, M-A-R-O-N, 927-63.
Marc:That's when I was born.
Marc:What am I doing?
Marc:Just reeling off details?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm not trying to apply for something.
Marc:I don't have to prove who I am to you.
Marc:Do I?
Marc:You want to see my ID, huh?
Marc:Do ya?
Marc:Wow.
Marc:How's it going?
Marc:I know for some of you were coming down to the wire on this Christmas business and there's a lot of panic and fear in the world.
Marc:The new strain is upon us ripping through the population.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know what to tell you.
Marc:I did everything I could.
Marc:I did everything I could.
Marc:I called the people and I guess there was just no stopping it.
Marc:There could have been, but there's a dummy problem.
Marc:I don't need to rail about that.
Marc:I'm boosted.
Marc:Hope you're boosted.
Marc:Hope you're getting your family to see the light a little bit.
Marc:Peter Jackson.
Marc:Yes, he's on the show.
Marc:This show today.
Marc:Peter Jackson was on the show from New Zealand.
Marc:He's the Oscar winning director of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit King Kong.
Marc:And now the Beatles get back.
Marc:We talk a bit about his whole career.
Marc:But a lot of this talk is focused on the Beatles and get back and wrangling that project.
Marc:Good interview.
Marc:A lot of stuff.
Marc:A lot of questions answered about the process of working with the Beatles in the way that he did.
Marc:All right.
Marc:What else can I tell you?
Marc:I had a dream.
Marc:And, you know, I rarely remember them, but this one I remember I was on a big, fancy sort of like it seemed like a luxury liner giant jet.
Marc:And that was the idea.
Marc:It was this huge plane, but it didn't look like a plane.
Marc:It just looked like this huge, you know, kind of like beautifully decorated, dark, oaky situation.
Marc:A lot of nice furniture around.
Marc:Huge, though.
Marc:But in my dream, I was under the understanding that this was an aircraft.
Marc:And somehow or another, I was seated with a fairly lofty bunch of artists.
Marc:I don't remember who was there, but I remember it was not quite my crowd, but I was sort of happy to be there to be accepted amongst the high minded art crowd.
Marc:And then my ex girlfriend, Sarah, showed up.
Marc:I saw her walk in and she was with some people and she saw me.
Marc:She's like, I'm not dealing with this.
Marc:And, you know, she was going to walk away.
Marc:She was clearly just not going to engage with me, but I was trying to be charming and sort of like, can we put it behind us a bit and just be like people and talk?
Marc:Can we do that?
Marc:But sort of wasn't happening.
Marc:And then this this giant vessel takes off and I can't feel it flying.
Marc:It's making me nervous.
Marc:It seems too big to fly.
Marc:So then I go out a door.
Marc:Apparently there's a deck on this aircraft and then I find that it's a boat.
Marc:And I'm at the back of the boat outside on some sort of, what do you call them on boats?
Marc:Deck.
Marc:There's a guy there smoking.
Marc:It's a smoking deck.
Marc:And I'm like, this is a boat.
Marc:He's like, yeah.
Marc:And then like I'm looking in the water at this giant propeller under the water that's not moving.
Marc:And I'm like, how are we moving?
Marc:And then somehow or another, almost intentionally, I drop my phone into the ocean.
Marc:And I had that moment where I'm like, fuck, that's done.
Marc:Now I got to deal with reality.
Marc:I got to really be in the present.
Marc:Like I had this feeling like there goes my phone.
Marc:And then there was a minute like, well, what if somebody finds it?
Marc:And it's like, dude, it's at the bottom of the ocean.
Marc:No one's going to find it till years and years from now.
Marc:Perhaps if the ship sinks right then, they'll find it when they excavate.
Marc:But either way, I'm like, man, now I've got to lock in.
Marc:What the hell am I going to do?
Marc:And then I had this realization in the dream that there's nothing that I have to do.
Marc:The phone's not going to make my life that much different other than people can't get in touch with me.
Marc:Then I started to wonder, like, did I bring my computer?
Marc:Because I could do the find your phone thing.
Marc:And then I realized, like, what the hell is that going to give you?
Marc:Just want to see if it works for the bottom of the ocean?
Marc:And that was the extent of it.
Marc:I'll take any input.
Marc:I usually kind of break down my own dreams, but I'm putting it out there.
Marc:I'm putting it out there.
Marc:Wasn't a plane, turns out.
Marc:Giant boat.
Marc:I guess I could tell you about the comedy store the other night.
Marc:It seems that...
Marc:I've got to re-groove, get the hour that I built heading into New York back up on its feet.
Marc:But I keep doing these short sets at the store, which is fine.
Marc:The other night, I had a set in the main room and then a set in the original room.
Marc:and it was just one of these nights where the main one was great, a bunch of sweet people, and somehow or another that makes me kind of edgy.
Marc:When all the comics walk into the dressing room after they're set and say, like, God, what a great crowd, I'm like, oh, fuck.
Marc:It's an odd response, but it's true.
Marc:And I don't know why I think that.
Marc:I guess I don't want to know that.
Marc:I just want to know they're attentive people.
Marc:I'm not sure what I'm looking for.
Marc:But my impulse inside of me when someone says it's a great crowd is like, no, fuck it up.
Marc:I'll ruin it.
Marc:We'll see.
Marc:We'll see.
Marc:It's always like a bad omen somehow in my brain when comics say great crowd.
Marc:It was good though.
Marc:I did all right.
Marc:My shit's a little dark right now, but that's the way it goes.
Marc:Dark times.
Marc:So then I go down the hall of the original room and that audience was awful.
Marc:Like awful.
Marc:But I was kind of, I've been doing so much comedy.
Marc:If this is like an actual breakthrough in a way where you realize that no matter how long you've been doing this or how good you've gotten at it,
Marc:That on some level, it's going to come down to the material, number one.
Marc:And also, it's going to come down to the audience.
Marc:It just is.
Marc:I'm not one of these people that's sort of like, there are no bad audiences.
Marc:There's definitely bad audiences.
Marc:No doubt.
Marc:And I got up there with all the confidence of having just killed in the big room, and I got nothing.
Marc:Like, I did my first few things, and I was like, nothing.
Marc:Like, just sort of like, nah.
Marc:And it was a pretty full room.
Marc:And just kind of like, nah.
Marc:Maybe a polite guffaw from a couple of people.
Marc:And I just, it was, I know what that's like.
Marc:It all comes back to you in that minute where you're like, oh my god.
Marc:I've just grounded myself in fucking failure.
Marc:I'm just like, this is what this is going to be.
Marc:I've done this a long time.
Marc:I know exactly what's happening.
Marc:They're not going to give me fucking anything.
Marc:Why?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Sometimes audiences don't come together.
Marc:They just don't materialize as a group.
Marc:But the truth is it got going and I did find the people that were laughing in the room and it was enough.
Marc:And it was interesting to just cleanse myself, baptize myself in the waters of tankage and just the vacuum of the classic tank.
Marc:And there's no sort of more present feeling than sitting up on a stage having just told a joke that usually gets laughs to nothing.
Marc:And just sort of like, wow.
Marc:And you feel your heart kind of cringe and crinkle around the edges.
Marc:And...
Marc:The great thing was I realized like, yeah, this happens, man.
Marc:Enjoy it.
Marc:Lean into the tankage.
Marc:This is part of the job.
Marc:And at the end of the show, I pointed out a guy in the middle of the room who sat there, who for some reason my gaze was upon, because he was sort of in the center of the audience, in the center of my vision.
Marc:He was just sitting there, middle-aged guy, and his wife, had his arms crossed, and just looking at me, gave me nothing.
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:Nothing.
Marc:I didn't feel like he was doing it on purpose or he's trying to fuck with me.
Marc:I don't even think that he knew that I could see him.
Marc:But I did tell him at the end of my set.
Marc:I said, you, sir, you in the middle of the room are the worst audience member I've ever had in my entire career.
Marc:Right up there.
Marc:Just fucking awful.
Marc:You.
Marc:Everybody laughed at that.
Marc:But in that moment, I was kind of serious.
Marc:But the question is, was he really?
Marc:Do you ever know what they're thinking about?
Marc:No.
Marc:Could it have had something not to do with me?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Did it feel good to say that to him?
Marc:Him being a representative of a pretty fucking lame audience?
Marc:It did.
Marc:Was it worth it?
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Peter Jackson, man.
Marc:Now, you guys know how I felt about this Beatles thing.
Marc:I'll say it again.
Marc:I say I feel like I've known them all my life.
Marc:They were exactly like I thought they would be.
Marc:And this was just the first time I got to hang out with them.
Marc:I really...
Marc:It was immersed.
Marc:It changed my entire sort of bearings, I think, in part of my deep self.
Marc:Pretty deep.
Marc:And I enjoyed it.
Marc:I should mention that The Beatles Get Back is now streaming on Disney+.
Marc:And this was sort of like, you know, turn him on and he goes kind of thing.
Marc:We were on Zoom.
Marc:But I do want to tell you that there was a notification sound happening during the thing.
Marc:And it was driving me nuts.
Marc:Like I was I tried to turn it off on my phone, on my computer, on my other computer.
Marc:I could not figure out which one of my machines was making noise until until the interview ended.
Marc:And I realized it was coming from Peter.
Marc:It was him.
Marc:And we just didn't want to bother him with trying to make the adjustment because he was on a roll.
Marc:But it was a pleasure to talk to him.
Marc:It was interesting to hear some of the process of being with the Beatles as long as he was on film and why he made some of the choices he did.
Marc:So this is me talking to Peter Jackson.
Peter Jackson
Marc:What a nice framing you've got there.
Marc:Are you in your castle?
Marc:I'm in just a house on the coast in New Zealand.
Marc:Just right out your window makes me want to live there.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:It's all green and nice, yeah.
Guest:And there's boats.
Guest:You probably can't see this harbour with yachts and boats.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's all very, very peaceful and nice.
Marc:Did you grow up by there?
Guest:I grew up about 20 miles away, yeah, just up the coast.
Marc:So you're no stranger to boats.
Guest:I hate boats.
Marc:You do?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:You grew up on an island.
Guest:I used to be in the Boy Scouts, and then our Boy Scout, you know,
Guest:in this little town i was in they decided to they voted somebody voted i didn't vote today but they wanted to become a sea scout unit so they so they became sea scouts and i was sort of dragged along had one one day where i was in a boat and i threw up all over the boat and i was just in front of all the other scouts and then i never i never went back it was that was the end of my scouting no more boats
Guest:I get terribly seasick.
Guest:But the water's nice if you see it from a distance.
Guest:It's really nice.
Marc:But you have no problem with planes.
Guest:I don't really like planes too much either.
Guest:I'm a nervous flyer.
Guest:But I like old planes.
Guest:But do you fly yourself?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Oh, God, no.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:You just... I've always wanted to fly.
Guest:I've always had a romantic notion, and I've got some World War I airplanes, and I've had this romantic notion of being able to fly in these first-world planes, but...
Guest:I just think that if an emergency happens, which I think is what you have to make your decisions based on, you know, what happens if something goes wrong and the engine stops or something.
Guest:And I think I just panic.
Guest:I don't understand engines.
Guest:I don't understand oil pressure.
Guest:I don't know any of that stuff.
Guest:So I think when the emergency happens, I'd freeze panic and go straight into the ground.
Guest:So I've never really, I just don't have a natural affinity with that sort of thing.
Guest:So I fly in planes, but I don't actually, I don't fly them.
Marc:But you like the machines.
Marc:You have some sort of you have a passion for the planes themselves.
Guest:I have a passion for history in the First World War in particular, I guess.
Guest:I mean, I mean, other parts of history.
Guest:And for some reason I grew up.
Guest:Well, when I was young, I saw a movie called The Blue Max.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Was it Max von Sydow or somebody?
Guest:No, George Pappard.
Guest:George Pappard, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Ursula Andress, of course, which when you're 12 years old, she's a goddess.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so between Ursula Andress and the planes, it made a huge impression on me.
Guest:And I did end up building some First World War planes.
Guest:And I've got a little collection of those.
Guest:So, yeah.
Marc:So what, do you just have a guy, when you want to go look at him, you got a friend who'd go fly him around for you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I've got a little kind of a team who look after them.
Guest:I've got some engineers, because they all have to pass inspections and things.
Guest:And then when they fly into the air shows, we've got a little group of volunteer pilots that fly them.
Guest:But actually, the plane that George Papad flies in the Blue Max, I...
Guest:About 10 years ago, I found that in a barn in the States, you know, it was in a, it was in a very bad condition.
Guest:So, and I've restored it.
Guest:So I've actually got the, the, the exact plane that he flew in that movie.
Marc:So that's exciting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh yeah, it is.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Do you like model planes as well?
Guest:Well, I mean, it began with models.
Guest:It began with the little 172nd Ravel and Eric's models, and then it sort of expanded into full-size planes, yeah.
Marc:Do you know the comic Jonathan Winters?
Marc:He was a kind of an improvisational wizard.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Guest:Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I know him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I interviewed him when he was near death and I went to his house in Santa Barbara and we were after we talked, he goes, let me show you the planes.
Marc:And he walks me down the hallway to his bedroom and he's got this four poster bed.
Marc:But on the ceiling, he had about 100 model planes hanging.
Marc:It was like it was like it's like he was like seven years old.
Marc:He just he was so proud of him.
Guest:He loved him.
Guest:And the planes that he'd built, he'd built and painted them.
Marc:I don't know if I got that far.
Marc:I just know that they were hanging there and he and he loved them.
Marc:And it's very weird what people remember when you talk about nostalgia, which is sort of, you know, what we're going to be talking about in a way is that.
Marc:You know, I walked him down that hallway, that old guy who'd had a life in show business, and there was a hallway just filled with pictures with him and everybody you could think of from the history of show business all along this wall, and he stops and he points at a picture, and it's of a little kid.
Marc:It's a black and white picture that was very grainy, a little kid and a dog, and he just said, I miss that dog.
Marc:Out of all the pictures of his entire life, the thing that he held onto were these planes and that little dog.
Marc:It was so touching.
Marc:you know, what we hold on to.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was probably a childhood dog.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But after, you know, after the walking down that, that hall of everybody, it was just so such a beautiful moment that things that make an impact on us when we're young.
Marc:And I guess that's sort of what's driven a lot of your, you know, what drove the beginning of your film career too, was a sort of nostalgia for something you saw when you were a kid.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, my partner, Fran, uh,
Guest:reminds me whenever i need a little tilling off or something she's quick quick to remind me that i'm that i'm still 10 that i have no i have no interest or hobbies that i didn't have at the age of 10 10 or 12. well i have fran which i guess doesn't because i didn't know her when i was 16. well that's not a that's not a hobby that's a person no but all my all my everything i'm interested in
Guest:All my passions are the same ones that I had when I was 10 or 12.
Guest:I haven't actually developed at all as a human being since then.
Marc:Well, is that something that bothers you or you're okay with it, I imagine?
Guest:I'm very, very happy.
Guest:I love being 12.
Guest:No, it's great.
Guest:No, no, I mean, seriously, I can...
Guest:In the lockdown that we had in New Zealand last year, we were locked down for like seven weeks and we couldn't work.
Guest:And I thought, well, what am I going to do in the house?
Guest:And so I remembered when I was 16 or 17, I tried to build Ray Harryhausen's stop motion models.
Guest:And I kind of, you know, back then I tried and I wasn't very happy.
Guest:And then I got busy and I got school and work and everything else took over.
Guest:So I thought, well, I mean, here I am, 2020.
Guest:I could spend my seven weeks trying to build them again.
Guest:So I'll show you.
Guest:I've got them here, actually.
Guest:So I built a couple of skeletons.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like the Voyager Simbad.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So they've all got armatures in them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, look at that with the shields.
Guest:My lockdown project.
Guest:So I went back to finishing off a project that I abandoned when I was about 16.
Marc:Are you going to use them?
Marc:Are you going to shoot them?
Guest:Well, yeah, because I also, when I was 16, I shot a film of me as Sinbad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Super right.
Guest:So I had a shirt and pants and a wooden sword, and I was fighting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:A visible thing, because I was always intending to animate the skeleton and superimpose it in.
Guest:But at that point in time, it was all far too hard.
Guest:So I've still got that film of the 16-year-old me.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Fighting an invisible skeleton.
Guest:So the idea is to...
Guest:Probably over Christmas, when I've got some time, I'll animate those into my old film, which is so easy to do with green screen and all that sort of stuff now.
Guest:I'll finally finish off a movie that I began when I was 16, so it'll be good.
Marc:Wow, that's the longest production schedule ever right there.
Marc:Yeah, probably.
Guest:I mean, I just have no interest in...
Guest:I mean, everything I love really is from that period of time, you know.
Guest:First World War, planes, Ray Harryhausen, monsters, movies, Super 8 films and making movies.
Guest:It's just, you know, Beatles, Beatles too.
Guest:Is that about the time?
Marc:I mean, how old are you?
Marc:Are you my age?
Marc:How old are you?
Guest:I'm 60.
Guest:I'm just doing 60.
Marc:I'm 58.
Marc:So we caught the Beatles.
Marc:We were very young.
Marc:I remember my experience in watching that thing is very interesting.
Marc:And I imagine everybody's having some sort of experience.
Marc:But my parents had Let It Be, had the album.
Marc:And the Beatles' second album and Let It Be were the two albums that were in the house when I was five or six.
Marc:And, you know, I remember there's something I talked about it on the show the other day that if you love the Beatles, you don't even think about it.
Marc:It's just in your genetic structure.
Marc:It's in your soul.
Marc:Your relationship with the Beatles is something you can't really even understand if you have it.
Marc:But if you have it, you have it.
Marc:It's an odd thing.
Marc:And my experience in watching the movie, and it's so weird because two weeks before I started watching your show or the movie, the documentary, I saw the Rolling Stones live.
Marc:So I had these two interesting experiences with these heroes of mine.
Marc:One of them I can still see, but the feeling of sadness and humanization of these idols of mine happened in both cases.
Marc:With the Stones, it's sort of like, people are like, were they amazing?
Marc:I'm like, no, they're old and they're still doing what they do, and it's nice, but it's sad, and they're painfully human.
Marc:Whereas with your thing, you know, you watch that thing.
Marc:It's like there is a sadness to it.
Marc:But the thing I couldn't get past was that like it was almost like I've already known them my whole life.
Marc:And there was part of me that wasn't surprised at all by anything that was happening.
Marc:It was sort of like, yep, this is exactly how it should be.
Marc:This is what it was.
Marc:Finally, I get to hang out with them.
Guest:I know, yeah, I felt the same way.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah, I was listening to a podcast the other day, some Beatle fan thing.
Guest:And they'd seen Get Back, and one of the guys made a comment which made me laugh because he was the same sort of thing.
Guest:I felt that I'd gone back and spent time with them and all that.
Guest:And he said, God, I have to get used now that I'm living in a world where a 27-year-old McCartney and a 79-year-old McCartney exists in the same world.
Yeah.
Guest:Which is kind of, it does play games with your head in that way, really.
Marc:Well, it's weird.
Marc:For me, like, I find it hard.
Marc:Like, I tend to develop some sort of, I guess it's probably my own fear of mortality, because I've interviewed Paul, and I've interviewed Keith Richards at different times, but...
Marc:I start to get, you know, not so much with Keith, but I but weirdly, I'm a John guy.
Marc:I mean, when I went to interview Paul, which which is a big deal, he's a Beatle.
Marc:But in my mind, I'm like, I'm still a John guy.
Marc:I'm still I'm happy I'm going to interview Paul.
Marc:But like, he's not my guy.
Marc:And what was it like?
Marc:How much interaction did you have with him for the process?
Guest:Oh, well, I mean, I could have as much as I needed.
Guest:I mean, I didn't need a huge amount, apart from just asking him questions, like there's that little sequence where he appears to get back out of thin air.
Guest:He just strums his bait.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:song comes so i saw that clip and i sent and i sent it to him and i and i said is this what i think i think it is i said you know did you have any idea about the song beforehand did you have a have a a snippet of the song song in your head to a to a come in and he saw the clip because he couldn't remember the exact moment so he looked at the clip that i sent him and he said no no that's that's that's me making making it up pulling it out of the air
Guest:Yeah, so he could recognize what he was doing.
Guest:So, I mean, he was always available for those sorts of things.
Guest:So I knew that I had my fix straight.
Guest:But why are you a John guy?
Guest:What's the reason for that?
Marc:Well, I mean, I think, you know...
Marc:As I grow up with it and I think about it, because when I was in high school, I remember I spent hours drawing a picture of his face.
Marc:I think it was from the Sergeant Pepper period.
Marc:And I won an award for it.
Marc:I mean, I spent hours and hours on this John face.
Marc:And...
Marc:I think because I relate to his sensitivity and to his emotional volatility.
Marc:I think I relate to it without really knowing it.
Marc:I think that whatever we're attracted to when we're younger in terms of Beatles, they probably represent some of us.
Marc:I liked his wit.
Marc:I think I knew innately he was an angry guy and probably a sad guy.
Marc:And I just, I have to backload that because I assume that's what it is.
Marc:I mean, Paul's great and I understand Paul's great, but he always seemed so, you know, I just... He always seemed like the showbiz beatle.
Marc:Yeah, but also like, you know, the type of music he liked was kind of like, you know, marching band stuff.
Marc:But the one thing I loved about watching the documentary is like, they love rock and roll, those guys.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I mean, they, you know, and they're only like, you know, you got to figure you're only 10, 11 years away
Marc:from the beginning of rock and roll in earnest.
Marc:So, you know, them sitting around playing Wilbur Harrison or whoever, uh, Bruce White's shoes or whatever it is.
Marc:I mean, you know, that's only like 10 years ago.
Marc:Those are songs that they, you know, that's how they, they got their, they learned their chops and they just love it.
Guest:I mean, they had a strange experience of loving rock and roll.
Guest:And then before they became famous, their, their rock and roll heroes, all, all kind of, um,
Guest:They all kind of imploded.
Guest:You know, Elvis went into the army.
Guest:Little Richard had issues.
Guest:Chuck Berry had issues.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Buddy Holly was killed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So by the time they were playing in Hamburg and in the cabin club, their rock and roll heroes had kind of gone.
Guest:Oh, that's brutal.
Guest:I never thought of that.
Guest:They had a strange experience.
Guest:And I heard an interview that...
Guest:was done with John after they met Elvis, because they went to LA in 64, 65, and they had their famous night with Elvis.
Guest:And I found an interview with John the day after, and the guy said,
Guest:said to John, so what did you and Elvis talk about?
Guest:And John says, well, I just told him that I preferred his records before the army, and can he please do some more of those?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that was John's chat with Elvis.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wild.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So now, just walk me through what compelled you to do this?
Marc:I mean...
Marc:You know, where did that where did it come from?
Marc:Did you I mean, because I remember like it was weird when I watched the first when I was going to talk to the first time I'd only seen what the press set out that one hour thing that you like the hour long trailer.
Marc:And I realized I had seen that footage of John and Yoko dancing because I had seen the original documentary when I was in high school.
Marc:So what made you decide to do this?
Guest:Well, I mean, look, I've been a Beatles fan since I was about 12.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I just like living my life as an adult, as I said, but I'm just still following my passions as a kid.
Guest:So I don't have any interest in doing sort of growing up stuff, really.
Guest:But I never really dreamt that I'd be doing anything with the Beatles because you sort of think at this point in time, you know, what is there to do?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was weird because I was working on this World War I film, They Should Not Grow Old.
Guest:I saw that.
Guest:And normally I'm New Zealand based, but that made me take several trips to London to go into the archives and look for film and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was also, I mean, I'm just piecing it together.
Guest:I can't quite remember how or why, but I was also doing interviews, I guess, at the time where I was expressing an interest in the technology, VR and AR, you know, with the glasses and you put them on and you see things, which I'm still interested in, but it hasn't kind of taken off yet.
Guest:But anyway, the guys at Apple, Apple Corps, the Beatles at Apple,
Guest:Not the other Apple.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They must have seen that.
Guest:They must have heard an interview because I'd never met them before.
Guest:And they must have heard that I was in London for some reason.
Guest:I don't know how.
Guest:So anyway, I get an invitation to or I get a request.
Guest:Could I pop into Apple?
Guest:and meet with Jeff Jones and Jonathan Clyde because they, at that point, they had a Beatles exhibition, a live sort of exhibition that they were thinking about doing.
Guest:From what I could understand, and it never got very far, I mean, it's not going to happen, but from what I could understand, it was like you walk into, you know, an exhibition hall and you see original costumes and guitars.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:And you see a replica of the Kevin Club and you, you know, it was sort of like a walkthrough thing.
Guest:And so they were interested in using VR or AR,
Guest:so that, you know, on the doorway, you'd be given some glasses and you'd go through and you'd see beetles doing things.
Guest:So they just wanted to pick my brains about where the technology was at.
Guest:So it was just really a meet and a chat.
Guest:So anyway, I show up at Apple and it's, you know, I mean, it's very small.
Guest:The company is very, very small as I was down here.
Guest:So, you know, it felt sort of, it felt nice.
Guest:It's like a sort of homely place where there's Beatles, there's Beatles posters everywhere.
Guest:And I was thinking, don't act like a fan.
Guest:Don't act like a fan.
Guest:You're here to talk about AR and VR.
Guest:So for God's sake, just be, just be a pro.
Guest:So anyway, I sat in the room and I chatted with them about the ARVR thing, sort of gave them a brief description of what you could do with it.
Guest:And then I had one question, one fan question that I had for years and years and years that I wanted to ask.
Guest:And so I just sort of, I just slipped it in and said, oh, by the way, if you're needing some footage of the Beatles that no one's ever seen before...
Guest:Whatever happened to the outtakes, let it be.
Guest:But I had no idea how much survived, if it had all been junked.
Guest:I just didn't know.
Guest:So they said, oh, no, we've got it all.
Guest:We've got 60 hours of film.
Guest:We've got about 140 hours of audio.
Guest:And then they said, oh, it's strange that you should mention this because we had a meeting the other day and we're thinking about perhaps we should do a film that uses the outtakes.
Guest:And they were just finishing up eight days a week at that time.
Guest:And I was sort of in the last year or so of...
Guest:They shall not grow old.
Guest:And so I did the one thing that I've never ever done in my life.
Guest:I stuck up my hand and I said, if you're looking for a filmmaker, if you haven't got somebody attached yet, just please think of me.
Guest:And so that was really weird.
Guest:They disappeared into another room.
Guest:And they came back, and they said, if you want to do it, do it.
Guest:You can.
Guest:It's all yours.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:So I kind of walked into the meetings to sort of give them some thoughts about AR and VR, and I walked out with Get Back.
Guest:But even then, I didn't want to commit to it because I knew the reputation of the project, of the misery and the squabbles and, you know, all the books that I read, that they couldn't stand each other's company and, you know, all the really bad stuff.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:At that point, I said, well, how can I look at this stuff?
Guest:And they said, well, we've got it on a server.
Guest:You know, it was all very, the security was all very, I mean, they weren't going to give it to me to take home.
Guest:And so at that point, I extended my trip in London.
Guest:I was supposed to be working on They Shall Not Grow Old, but I took a leave of absence for a week.
Guest:Extended my trip, and when I went into Apple every single day,
Guest:And they had an office for me.
Guest:And so I'd arrive at eight in the morning and I'd sit there till six.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And they'd go fetch me burgers and stuff for lunch.
Marc:What was the first feeling, man?
Marc:I mean, like when you first turned it on.
Guest:It was dread.
Guest:It was dread because I totally bought into the reputation of
Guest:the Let It Be period.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I kept thinking, what the hell am I going to see?
Guest:Because I kept thinking if Let It Be, which I had seen and was pretty familiar with, if Let It Be was what they allowed Michael Lindsay Holt to show, what the hell did they not want him to show?
Guest:What horrors am I going to see?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because you don't want – because people you admire –
Guest:I mean, I could call them heroes, but when I was younger, they were heroes.
Guest:But as I got older, they were just people whose skill and talent I admired.
Guest:Their story was great.
Guest:I didn't want to see the real people because I was terribly worried that whenever you meet your heroes, they're not what you hoped they'd be.
Guest:Look, I was excited because this film had never been seen by anybody for 50 years.
Guest:So, I mean, I was immensely curious, but I was also dreading it.
Guest:And I said to the guys, look, if this film is as bad as what it's supposed to be in terms of the mood and the atmosphere and everything else, I'm probably not going to do it.
Guest:I said, I can't believe I'm saying this because doing a Beatles film is a lifelong dream of mine, but I really don't want to do...
Guest:a Beatles film was full of argument and misery and depressed Beatles.
Guest:I really, that's not the film I wanted to do.
Marc:How long did it take you before you realized that wasn't the case?
Guest:Well, it was a slow unveiling because I didn't have any script.
Guest:I mean, there's no actual script and there's no paperwork.
Guest:They had the film organized day by day.
Guest:So it starts on the first day, second of, you know, and it was 60 hours of film.
Guest:At that point, the audio, I wasn't hearing that.
Guest:It was just the film with the audio, with the film.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It was 60 hours to go through.
Guest:And so it was a slow process where each day I'd sit there for seven or eight hours and watch for seven or eight hours, get through day one.
Guest:I'd come in the next day.
Guest:I'd be on day two.
Guest:The next day, day three, has got the argument or the thing with Paul and George.
Guest:So I watched that.
Guest:And I thought, well, this isn't actually as bad.
Guest:You know, the I'll play anything you want or I won't play at all.
Guest:You just tell me what you want me to do.
Guest:You know, I watched the whole thing.
Guest:And in our movie, it's about we've extended it to about eight or nine minutes.
Guest:But the actual thing is about an hour and a half long.
Guest:That sequence.
Guest:I just watched it.
Guest:I thought, OK, well, this is building up to that little exchange that I've seen.
Guest:And this is not feeling too bad.
Guest:And then the famous words happen and then it carries on.
Guest:And I'm saying, well, that's actually kind of not as bad as I thought it was.
Guest:But I was still waiting for the stuff that Michael wasn't allowed to, you know, the stuff where they're swearing at each other or they're shouting or they're throwing things or God knows what.
Guest:And it just never happened.
Guest:And it got funnier and funnier.
Guest:It just got funny.
Guest:And I was laughing.
Guest:And so I got through about, I think I got through up to about when George left the band in that first week.
Guest:And so I didn't get into Savile Row.
Guest:I got the first seven days.
Guest:And I said to them, look, I have to fly home.
Guest:But I'm really keen to do it.
Guest:And you're going to have to send it to me.
Guest:You're going to have to break all your security protocols.
Guest:You're going to have to trust me and you're going to have to send me the whole thing because I've only seen, you know, the first seven hours.
Guest:I need to keep on watching it.
Guest:But it looks great.
Guest:And I knew that from what I read in the books that the Savile Rose stuff was going to get better.
Guest:So I thought, well, this is actually pretty funny.
Guest:And if Savile Rose better, it's great.
Guest:So they sent it to me.
Guest:I had it on an iPad and I watched it and –
Guest:And it took me a few weeks to get through it all.
Guest:And then I watched it again twice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because, you know, you watch it once and you don't pick up all the little clues about stuff that's going to happen later on.
Guest:So I had to go back and watch it again.
Guest:And then, you know, I slowly just...
Guest:I slowly built up this picture in my head of what I assumed was more like the truth of that month.
Guest:And that coincided about that moment in time when I'd seen it a couple of times.
Guest:Paul comes down to New Zealand to do a concert.
Guest:December 2017 it was.
Guest:So they arranged for me to go meet Paul.
Guest:So he was the first Beatle that I met for the project.
Guest:And
Guest:I go to the meeting before his show and he looks at me and I say, well, Paul, I've seen all the outtakes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I mean, he hadn't seen them.
Guest:He had a memory of whatever his memory of, which is pretty grim.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Emotional.
Marc:It's emotional memory.
Marc:Different.
Guest:Well, it's a memory of May 1970.
Guest:It's a memory of the breaking up and let it be coming out.
Guest:And it's not a memory of January 69.
Guest:So as I discovered with quite a few of the people.
Guest:But so I said to Paul, look, I've seen the whole lot.
Guest:I've seen every single frame of film.
Guest:And he looked nervous.
Guest:He really looked.
Guest:He had a really sort of almost childlike, frightened look on his face.
Guest:And I just said to him, look, whatever you think it is, and I know what you think it is, the same as what I thought it is, it's not bad.
Guest:It's actually really, really great.
Guest:It's really funny.
Guest:There's friendship and everything else.
Guest:And I had my iPad, which I had the footage on, so I showed him some bits, and he was so relieved.
Guest:He was so happy.
Guest:I mean, he was so happy.
Guest:I mean, this was not to do with a movie or anything at this point.
Guest:He was just so happy to hear that the film that was shot didn't show fighting, squabbling, swearing at each other, arguments, which I guess in his head over the period of time he'd built that picture in his head.
Guest:Because I think everybody had taken the movie, let it be at its release in May 1970.
Guest:The headlines are saying the Beatles are breaking up.
Guest:And they've taken that as a core and they've extrapolated that, you know, time has passed.
Guest:It's gotten worse over time.
Guest:The outtakes must be really, really bad.
Guest:The whole thing is sort of built from that May 1970 moment in time when the film came out after they'd broken up.
Guest:And it has no relation with the January 69 filming at all.
Marc:Well, I think like what's amazing, what's amazing to me in watching it is like, I don't know why I didn't bring any of that baggage to it.
Marc:Like I didn't, I didn't really put it in my head.
Marc:I didn't frame it historically.
Marc:I just sort of entered it.
Marc:I knew that they were going to break up soon.
Marc:So I didn't, I didn't go in with any of the dread that you had.
Marc:I just, like I took it at face value and I thought all the friendships were intact and I thought maybe they were, you know, probably I, I wonder if they ever really yelled and screamed because they're pretty British people.
Marc:All of them.
Guest:Well, on the 150 hours of audio, because the real story is actually in the Nagra tapes and the audio.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, which you get, which they rolled audio almost all day long.
Guest:And I've certainly, you know, I mean, I don't know what happened, you know, in the evenings or weekends or anything else, but certainly during those 22 days,
Guest:listening to the audio, which is pretty much starting in the beginning of the day and going through to the end.
Guest:And they had an A, B machine.
Guest:So if one had to change the tape to see how the other one was going, there was not one moment where a beetle had an angry word to another beetle.
Guest:Not one moment where one of them swore at each other.
Guest:I mean, they swear a lot, but they swear in a sort of funny, scouse way.
Guest:They don't actually swear in an aggressive way.
Guest:But
Guest:But they but there's no there's no shouting.
Marc:Yeah, I didn't feel it at all.
Marc:I mean, I I felt I felt sad.
Marc:I think I felt sad, you know, because I knew that, as you probably knew, you know, John was struggling with his addiction problems and, you know, George was unhappy creatively.
Marc:But I didn't bring any of that to I kind of noticed that.
Marc:during it and i i didn't realize that john was in the throes of the addiction that he was in until after i watched it and and paul and it was paul and even yoko like from the get-go like i was able to sort of not pay attention to her at all uh which i think a lot of them did and it seemed like that this idea that she was hanging over this band she almost like became furniture i mean it was a very
Guest:She does, for sure.
Guest:But you see, up until now, up until this film has come out, what you've seen of Yoko has been either little tiny 10-second film clips where there's a band and there's her, and you immediately go, oh, my God, oh, my God, she's sitting right there, or still photos.
Guest:And for 50 years, it's been little clips or still photos.
Guest:And you're right.
Guest:It's only when you see the enormity of the length, which is eight hours and two cups, that it's just like you just realise, well, so what?
Guest:She's quiet.
Guest:She doesn't interfere.
Guest:She doesn't tell Paul how to play his bass.
Guest:It's just what the hell is the issue?
Guest:But it's a very different story to the 50 years of these photos that you see in books.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you thought this was going to be it, you know.
Marc:And also there's moments with her and Linda that were kind of genuine and, you know, just, you know, wives of the band kind of moments.
Marc:And it didn't stifle any of the creativity.
Marc:Now, okay, so when you see all this footage and you start going through it, tell me why...
Marc:What did you do to it, Peter?
Marc:What was the magic you did to it that made me feel like I was hanging out there?
Marc:The emotional interface was so immediate.
Marc:Is there some way that you treated the film?
Marc:I know there's the magic of the Beatles, but it's a lot to sit through eight hours of guys doing bits and pieces of songs.
Marc:Even if it is the Beatles.
Marc:But there was points where I picked up my guitar on my couch and I'd go get something to eat.
Marc:And I'm just sort of like, well, they're just doing that now.
Marc:What did you do?
Marc:How did you how did you visualize?
Marc:I can hear how you were starting to put the story together.
Marc:But how did you visualize the effect of the film itself?
Guest:Well, I think the effect of the film itself is related, is tied to the story.
Guest:I mean, you can restore the film, but you've still got to have the story.
Guest:Because I think the sense that you're with them and you're sort of going on this journey with them is also story related.
Guest:But in terms of the technical stuff, well, we'd done this First World War movie where we'd restored this old 100-year-old story.
Guest:which was pretty hard because black and white, scratchy.
Marc:And you did this at your Magic Lab?
Guest:Park Road Post, which is about a mile down the road here in Wellington.
Guest:Very small team, but a really, really talented team.
Guest:Very, very clever.
Guest:And we're sort of just down the other end of the world, so we don't care what anyone else does.
Guest:We just develop our own code, our own software, and our own team, and we just...
Guest:And we go for it.
Guest:So anyway, we'd done the World War I film.
Guest:And what had happened after, as we were going through towards the end of the First World War film, I had my first three movies, which I made when I was younger.
Guest:The horror movies?
Guest:Splatter movies were all shot on a 16 mil.
Guest:They've never come out in any sort of a restored form.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, they got released in...
Guest:On VHS, basically, in the 1980s, early 90s.
Guest:So I said to the guys, I said, God, I love, while we're on a roll here, I'd love to get my old 16 mil films.
Marc:Well, like Meet the Feebles?
Guest:And Bad Taste and Brain Dead, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I said, I'll get the original neg for the 16mm stuff.
Guest:It's not the World War I. It's color.
Guest:It's a 16mm neg.
Guest:And it'd be great if you guys could start to work on that.
Guest:So we'd just begun that when the Beatles thing arrived.
Guest:So we'd already switched our sort of pipeline from the World War I 35mm sort of nitrate
Guest:thing to 16 mil color based on my old horror movies and I was shooting on pretty much the same sort of film that the Beatles shot on so it's a case of just you know the concept was removing the grain and trying to make it look as sharp as I can it was actually a deliberate one you know people sort of
Guest:you know, have opinions about it and stuff.
Guest:And there's film grain enthusiasts that hate the idea that all the film grain is gone and everything else.
Guest:But I had a very definite goal in mind because what I wanted, you know, as I was looking at the film before we got started, because Apple kept saying to me, what's the story?
Guest:What's the story you're going to tell?
Guest:And I was saying, well, hang on, let me see it first.
Guest:Let me see it and have a think.
Guest:But, you know, I always as a kid fantasized, you know, as I was a young Beatles fan,
Guest:I fantasize that surely, as a 16-year-old, 12-year-old, 16-year-old Beale fan, I assume that by the time I got to be an old bastard like I am now, a time machine will have been invented, and maybe we all get to pick a day to go back.
Guest:And I thought, well, the day I'm going to pick, I don't know exactly what day, but I'm going to go back to Abbey Road, and I'm going to sit in the corner of the studio and spend a day watching the Beales at work.
Guest:That was my, if we could all pick a time machine trip.
Guest:Just one that would that would have been mine.
Guest:You know, I'd have to figure out what album exactly to do it on.
Guest:So I just looked at the stuff and I thought, God, this is this is this is like a time machine, but it's not like a time machine when it's when it's grainy and scratchy because it's like, you know, there's a there's a film.
Guest:There's a film of film.
Marc:It's sort of like that.
Marc:Then the film becomes something unto itself, not what's on the film.
Guest:Well, it becomes that, look, we found a 50-year-old film of the Beatles, and look, it's old and it's got grain, but it's them and isn't that cool.
Guest:So I thought, if I really want to pull off this time machine thing, I've got to remove as much...
Guest:between us and them yeah and that that involves removing all any scratches any imperfections any hairs in the gate in the grain try to make it look as crisp and clean as i can and if i can do that then hopefully we'll feel like we're we're we're in the room with them and and that was also the reason why i i made a decision early on not to do any modern day interviews not to interview ringo or paul
Guest:or Glenn Johns or anyone else because that immediately is the 50-year gap again.
Guest:I just wanted to get in the time machine, take any interested parties along with me, any Disney Plus subscribers, I guess, at this point in time, and we all go and watch them at work.
Guest:And so I wanted to – look, it's all weird headspace stuff, but that was the thought behind doing all the – to restore it to the level that we did.
Marc:Well, and also I think that the decision not to engage with any of the survivors, I mean, you would you would run into the liability of the emotional liability of that 50 year gap again.
Marc:That like obviously most of these guys have have have, you know, reframed that memory, you know, based on events that happened afterwards.
Marc:So like why why why screw with the purity of what you already had?
Marc:And there's there's there's so much space there.
Guest:Well, you see, that then went on to the narrative, to the storyline, because, of course, taking on this project, there's no script.
Guest:Normally, when I make a movie, you go and you cut the movie.
Guest:You finally get into the cutting room to cut it.
Guest:And at that point, you've written the script.
Guest:Every scene has got a number.
Guest:There's a story.
Guest:There's a three-action.
Guest:You've shot it, you know, each day, you know, every frame of film that you've shot, you know, the best takes.
Guest:And so the cutting is like a pretty sort of, you know, it's fun.
Guest:It's my favorite part of it, but it's, there's, there's no mysterious thing to it.
Guest:It's like, you know, there's surprises, but it is, you're following your script and then you're following what you, what you shot.
Guest:And then it's, but here I, here I had some, you know, 130 hours of audio really in the, in the, in the camera just, uh,
Guest:switches on and off during it.
Guest:So there was like 130 hours, no script.
Guest:And the thing that I realized, as soon as I saw it, I realized that all the books that I'd read were very unreliable.
Guest:So it wasn't like I could turn to some expert beetle guy who's written the book and use that as my guide.
Guest:Because I realized just how...
Guest:how wrong the books have been.
Guest:I mean, some of the books say they couldn't bear to be in each other's company.
Guest:John was off his head all the time.
Guest:They were phoning it in.
Guest:They were coming in with finished songs, and the others were just acting as – I mean, every negative spin that you could imagine has been put on –
Guest:So I couldn't rely on books.
Guest:So I had to... Jabez Olsen, who I cut it with, just the two of us, we sat in a room for, well, it was months, really, and we listened to the 130, 40 hours, and we listened to it again.
Guest:And we had to build up our own storyline from what they were saying.
Guest:So we were eavesdropping on 50-year-old conversations that they had no idea were going to be heard by us in 50 years' time.
Guest:And we were trying to figure out what's the truth.
Guest:What is actually happening?
Guest:Why are they there?
Guest:What are they doing?
Guest:What's going wrong?
Guest:Why does George leave?
Guest:Why did they go to separate?
Guest:You know, why, why, why, why, why?
Guest:And the answers were all coming from things that they were saying.
Guest:So it wasn't until we went through the audio like twice that we pieced together what we thought was the actual, you know, more or less a much more accurate response.
Guest:And then we decided we'll just tell the story day by day.
Marc:So for you, like an example of that would be George leaves and you track it back to them not listening to their songs, his songs in a serious way.
Guest:Well, George leaving is interesting because we, you know, there's a day where he has his little...
Guest:a sort of titchy exchange with Paul.
Guest:That's day three.
Guest:I mean, I don't know the dates.
Guest:I just say day one, two, three, four, five.
Guest:So that's day three.
Guest:George didn't leave till day seven.
Guest:So like I spoke to Ringo and I said, why did George leave?
Guest:And he said, well, you've seen it in the film.
Guest:In the letter B movie, he, you know, he and Paul had George and Paul had these angry words and he got up and left.
Guest:And I, I said to Ringo, no, no, that, that happened on day three Ringo.
Guest:And he didn't leave till day seven.
Guest:And Ringo said, no, no, no, no.
Guest:He had those.
Guest:And I just thought, I'm not going to, I'm not going to argue with Ringo because he's actually, I mean, I mean, again, it's just, just his memory had,
Guest:had muddled up the movie with the facts.
Guest:And that's fine.
Guest:It's a long, long time ago.
Guest:So anyway, George has a little exchange on day three.
Guest:Day four, he's, you know, George is reasonably happy.
Guest:Day five, he's very, very happy because they do I, Me, Mine and they have some fun.
Guest:Day six, he's having a great day.
Guest:They're doing Commonwealth.
Guest:They're clowning around and doing Bathroom Window, and George is having a good time.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So, James and I are looking at this stuff and say, well, he's going to leave tomorrow.
Guest:He's watching all the day six stuff.
Guest:He's going to leave tomorrow.
Guest:Why is he, you know, where are the clues?
Guest:There's no arguments.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, we get on to day seven, and day seven starts with Dick James, the publisher, the Northern Songs guy, being there for a meeting.
Yeah.
Guest:George comes in a bit late and thanks him for the glasses that he gave him over Christmas.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then they get working on two songs.
Guest:They start with Get Back and they go into two of us.
Guest:And we did a really forensic examination because we could tell from the Nagras where their –
Guest:if our time was a cut, we could tell if the tape machines had been turned off because of the coding on the tapes and stuff.
Guest:I mean, the actual film that was shot just turns on and off all the time.
Guest:But the sound, you can actually track the actual time of the day that the tapes run.
Guest:And I had our guys examine it.
Guest:And I said, OK, so we're starting with their recruit.
Guest:They spent about three hours
Guest:after Dick James leaves.
Guest:And then they break for lunch, and George says, I'm leaving now.
Guest:And I said, is there any break?
Guest:Is there anything where they could have had an argument where the tapes didn't roll?
Guest:And they said, no, no, this sound is continuous.
Guest:There's no stoppages in the audio.
Guest:And so Jabez and I looked at it over and over again.
Guest:I mean, the audio's there, and there's a fair bit of film shot.
Guest:And it just looked like, well, to us, it looked like George was in a very depressed state.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right at the beginning of the day.
Guest:He arrived.
Guest:And from what we can understand, and we didn't want to actually get into this in the movie, he was having some domestic issues at home.
Guest:Oh, right.
Marc:With Patty.
Guest:I think Patty had just walked out on him.
Marc:Wasn't that involving Eric Clapton too?
Guest:That was a little bit later.
Guest:I think that was another year.
Guest:I think this was some other thing.
Guest:But, you know, that's not what I'm – I mean, I've never been interested in the middle of private life.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I certainly didn't want to make a movie that – because there's obviously none of that's on film, and I wanted to just stick with what –
Guest:We had films, so we don't cover it and get back.
Guest:But from what I've understood, he was having some pretty serious domestic trouble.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then you add on to that, you know, you can add on to that as much of the of the disrespect from the other two.
Guest:And they're not interested in the songs, which is not really true because they I mean, all things must pass.
Guest:They do like 60, 67 takes of it.
Guest:We show one take.
Guest:Oh, so they really tried.
Guest:They spend at least the best part of two entire days working on it.
Marc:You can definitely feel the love.
Marc:When I watched Above Us Only Sky, the Imagine documentary,
Marc:There was a moment that goes unspoken between John and George where you're like, they were so deeply connected in a way that I can't even fathom or understand musically and emotionally.
Marc:And you felt that.
Marc:I felt that through the entire thing that they all knew each other pretty well and they all had their roles, I guess.
Marc:But emotionally, they were very fluid and very connected.
Marc:And I never felt once that...
Marc:you know, there was, you know, real hostility on behalf of any of them towards the others.
Guest:No, so we studied George that in the morning and we studied him so carefully and we looked at the film we had.
Guest:There was no trigger.
Guest:There's no moment where they, you know, Paul says he's a little bit
Guest:Blunt, we talked about something about how to play the bass, how to play the guitar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think it's get back.
Guest:I mean, but it's not rude or anything.
Guest:It's just a little bit.
Guest:And George, George doesn't take it very, very well.
Guest:He thinks he says, oh, you need Eric Clapton for that.
Guest:That was just insecure, though.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:You see, because everybody's a human, and I think everyone looks for black or white, and it's never black or white.
Guest:It's always shades of grey.
Guest:So I think you've got George being a bit insecure, and you've certainly got him maybe feeling that he's only ever going to get two songs on an album, no matter how great his songs are, and he's now writing a lot.
Guest:So you've got sort of things behind the scenes.
Guest:You've got a sense that they're not respecting his songs, perhaps, to some degree.
Guest:And then if you've got stuff at home, if you've got a domestic crisis...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You just, you're going to sit there thinking I could, I could, I can, I could sit here all day with these guys and, you know, doing, get back doing, doing, doing their, their songs.
Guest:Cause they're not going to do, do all things that must pass.
Guest:Or I could just leave and leave and go sort out, sort out my home home life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I've got some issues I need, I need to sort out.
Guest:So I,
Guest:I mean, you know, I just kind of think that George sits there that morning looking exactly like he does in the film.
Guest:I mean, those shots that we did where Paul and John are clowning around and they're in each other's faces and George is just sitting there separate looking pretty depressed.
Guest:That is the real footage from that day.
Guest:I mean, you know, because we couldn't cheat...
Guest:shots from one day to the next because their clothes are changing the time.
Guest:So, you know, that morning George was sitting there exactly as you see him, separate from the others.
Guest:He just feels, and it just so happens that they're working on two songs.
Guest:John and Paul are working on two songs right up in that, you know, close.
Guest:Get Back and Two of Us are songs that don't really, you know, they're not really interested in George's input at this point.
Guest:So he looks like he's on
Guest:He's sort of on the outer, but I think he's also feeling that himself.
Guest:He's sort of adding to it as well.
Guest:So it's the most George-like thing when he leaves.
Guest:I think I'm leaving the band now.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I love the way he says, I think I'm leaving the band now.
Marc:Was he your favorite Beatle?
Guest:No, I didn't really have a favourite beat, although I like George.
Guest:Well, I mean, I like them all after the footage, but I understand George a lot more now that I've seen his footage.
Guest:George reminds me of a Kiwi, a New Zealand male, a very...
Guest:Very pragmatic, no romantic sort of flights of fancy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, when John and Paul are saying, oh, we'll get the, will I go to, into the amphitheater, we'll get the QE2 and we'll take all the fans.
Guest:George decides it's a bloody stupid idea.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who's going to pay for it?
Guest:You know, George is always the guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And,
Guest:And in a film set or any – you know, that guy is a really important guy you've got to have.
Guest:The one that stops all the visionary kind of talk and just cuts it and says, that's never going to happen.
Guest:That's going to be far too expensive.
Guest:Those people are very, very important people to have.
Guest:And so you've got the sort of John and Paul doing the –
Guest:you know, the sort of the visionary kind of stuff, the spacing out on all the amazing things it could be.
Guest:And George is just a pragmatic one.
Guest:Who's going to pay for that?
Guest:That's never going to happen.
Guest:You know, which makes him seem grumpy, but he's not grumpy.
Guest:He's just, you know, he's just saying what needs to be said.
Guest:So I actually love George.
Guest:I love George a lot more now, now that I understand him, because he was always the quiet Beatle lead guitarist.
Guest:But now I sort of, and I can see he's very insecure too.
Guest:It's interesting.
Guest:When his own songs are up for rehearsal, he's very, very nervous and insecure.
Guest:But if it's Get Back or Dig a Pony, he's got all sorts of ideas.
Guest:He's incredibly confident.
Guest:He can improve the songs and he suggests things.
Guest:And John Paul are really happy to get his own notes.
Guest:But when it's his own song,
Guest:And he's very, very insecure and nervous.
Guest:You know, you just have to feel for him.
Guest:He's just he's just a human.
Marc:They're not even 30 years old.
Marc:I mean, of course he's insecure.
Marc:Let me ask you a question about these about the credits.
Marc:Like, you know, you had all these fragments of songs that seemed to be that needed to be attributed.
Marc:What was that?
Marc:Why was that?
Guest:I mean, that was me.
Guest:It wasn't anybody telling me to do it.
Guest:I just thought that, I mean, if it was me watching it, because I'm not a huge musical guy.
Guest:I mean, I like the Beatles.
Guest:I don't really know much else about anybody else.
Guest:I'm a musical band guy.
Guest:I'm a musical moron, basically.
Guest:So I just thought if I'm watching this and I hear a fragment of a song that I don't recognize, I'd be thinking, is that an unknown Letty McCartney song?
Guest:Or is it a Chuck Berry song?
Guest:Or is it a Little Richard song?
Guest:What's that?
Guest:I just know that I'd be immediately wondering.
Guest:So I didn't want anyone to do the same as that.
Guest:I just wanted to answer.
Guest:So if you hear a fragment of a song and it's quite good and the Beatles only do a line or two, if you've got the name, then you can go by the...
Marc:the chuck berry album or right right and hear the whole thing so it was just really a sort of sort of informational thing it wasn't a legal thing okay it was just done and how excited were you when uh when like i it was very it was beautiful i mean you must have been excited too where you know they mentioned you know you're working with little richard and seeing billy preston early on and you know yeah that billy preston's gonna show we know we know what's gonna happen yeah how great was that yeah i know it's incredible
Marc:I know.
Marc:And he changed everything.
Marc:He changed everything, Billy.
Guest:Billy is fantastic.
Guest:I mean, again, I didn't really have an appreciation of Billy separate to the Beatles.
Guest:I knew, you know, I mean, I knew his work on the because I heard the songs for 40 years and I read the books, but I didn't.
Guest:But I haven't seen Billy in any other.
Guest:in any other way i haven't you know got any of his albums or anything so i yeah so i knew that he was you know and i knew that he was always credited as is really you know uplifting their spirits and stuff i knew that from the books i read but um it wasn't until i saw it on film that i just thought holy shit yeah
Guest:They, they, and it's not that, cause I, I, I don't like a lot of the books say that he, he came in so that, and, and, and they began to, to behave themselves.
Guest:Or, you know, a lot of the books sort of say that it was, but when, when Billy arrived, they stopped sniping at each other.
Guest:And they had to, because there was a fifth person in the room, but that's, that's just not true.
Guest:Cause they were, they were getting on fine before Billy came in.
Guest:But what Billy gave them is a, is this rush, rush of excitement.
Guest:He just gave them their songs.
Guest:Just lift them.
Guest:They go from being what they've been rehearsing and they're suddenly Billy's playing and it's their songs getting improved by his playing.
Guest:And so John and Paul are just so thrilled.
Guest:And it's just this rush of excitement.
Guest:And Billy's such a good, he's an incredible guy.
Guest:I mean, I don't really understand...
Marc:um any any music but he just seems to sit there and nail it yeah nail it and it filled out the songs like they they he said that i don't remember who said it was was it john or paul said that they wanted piano in all the songs they wanted it there and i had no idea how much bass john played it took me a while to realize that that fender six string that was a fender six string bass that he plays a lot of bass on that record
Guest:They played bass if Paul was on the blues and the grand piano.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But you see, I was very careful in the film.
Guest:Like I said to Jabez, OK, well, when Billy arrives and they say hi and then they say sit there and he sits there and he's playing.
Guest:I said, we've got to make sure that the first time in the movie that we see him play has got to be the actual first time he plays.
Guest:You know, because I didn't want to, I was very aware that I could, you know, because he comes at lunchtime.
Guest:So there's about four or five hours of him playing.
Guest:I said, I don't want to, you know, I don't want him to sit there.
Guest:And then we suddenly cut to a take he does at 4.30 in the afternoon.
Guest:You know, I said, we've got to make sure that the first time we see him play is the real first time he plays.
Guest:I was pretty careful.
Guest:at being responsible for it.
Guest:Because I said, it's important from a historical perspective that we're not playing games here.
Guest:And he sits there and he starts playing and their faces light up and they get so excited, so excited.
Guest:And he's got no music.
Guest:He's got no guide.
Guest:I mean, they don't give him a practice run.
Guest:They don't play it to him first.
Guest:They just play the song and he just makes it up as he goes for the first time.
Marc:You know, what's interesting is by the time, you know, we go through all this stuff and all of this, you know, the story of heading towards the roof is that what I found shocking, you know, after that, I'm having the experience that you were having, you know, watching the Beatles and feeling the chemistry and having everything that you believed about this period, you know, kind of, you know, proven false and having a great warm feeling, but nostalgic.
Marc:And then when they get to the roof,
Marc:And you see the onlookers and you see people on other roofs and you see the cops and you have this weird moment.
Marc:You're like, wait, doesn't everyone love the Beatles?
Marc:How can these people?
Marc:It was a very weird thing.
Marc:Then you start to realize, like, well, rock stars got in trouble all the time.
Marc:And and then you start to realize, like, you know, how far they had drifted from their their their beginnings as, you know, the the pop group, the Beatles.
Marc:But just the the reception around just on people's faces.
Marc:You know, I would have been going crazy, but most
Guest:people are like what is it it's a couple of things because you've got to realize and and you just don't you don't think about this unless you actually stop and think about it you got to realize that those people on the street when they hear the music they're hearing get back for the first time in their lives right they're i mean they've never ever heard it before that it's it's you know they're hearing all those beatle songs they're hearing for the very first time so it's not like they're hearing i want to hold your hand or right
Guest:or Sgt.
Guest:Pepper, they're not hearing the oldies and goldies.
Guest:They're hearing these songs that they've never heard before, but they are the Beatles.
Guest:So they're not able to sort of groove with the actual songs themselves because it's the first time that they've heard them.
Marc:But even the people on the roof, you know, you would think like they would have just been amazed, you know, but I guess it was, it's a different time.
Guest:I think that
Guest:I think they're amazed in a very British way.
Guest:I mean, they do gather.
Guest:They do flock, and they do sort of stand there with very straight faces.
Guest:But you've got to imagine inside, they're really excited.
Guest:But because they're British, they're not going to – Right.
Guest:And the other thing I was going to say is that –
Guest:The Savile Row Police Station, because the police station that these guys come from is about 100 yards up the road or 75 yards up the road.
Guest:That was a police station where Sergeant Pilcher was a base, and he was the drug-obsessed rock star planting drugs guy who had already busted John the year before.
Guest:I think he'd done it.
Guest:a couple of others, and he was going to bust George a month or two later.
Guest:This guy was leading some British police drug pop star task force.
Guest:He was based in the same police station as these two cops come from.
Guest:It was a several row police station was his base.
Guest:And so there's a lot of whatever these cops have been hearing back there about the rock stars and the drugs and their, you know,
Guest:they're bringing a really bad influence to modern youth.
Guest:I'm sure that in the cafe in the police station, Pilcher and his other drug squad guys would have been blabbing all that stuff.
Guest:So these guys are coming down, you know, with not necessarily the best impression of a pop group in the world.
Guest:So the guy got busted.
Guest:Pilcher, who arrested all these rock stars in 68, 69, he spent about two and a half years
Guest:years in jail he got he got nailed nailed for it for what uh well for perverting the course of course for planting justice george swears that he planted the drugs in his house john swears that he planted that he planted drugs drugs on his house so yeah yeah so like when you know as a filmmaker now like you know given these two documentary projects
Marc:You know where you you took these these like fairly dense and and and epic bits of the past and and thoroughly were able to extract something very humanizing out of them.
Marc:How do you see that affecting your filmmaking going forward?
Marc:Because when I think about you, even going back to the Splatter, the horror movies, and then on through the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movies, it seems like there's two films.
Marc:There's the Heavenly Creatures, which was really kind of a mix, but it was a human story, and the Lovely Bones as well.
Marc:There was fantasy elements, but it seems like you'd rather create worlds.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, I just don't have a plan.
Guest:I don't know how to answer that.
Guest:I mean, I grew up.
Guest:I mean, the reason why you make horror movies when you're a young filmmaker is because you haven't got any money.
Guest:I mean, the first film I made, Bad Taste, I financed myself.
Guest:It cost me 17 grand, and I shot it over four years on the weekends.
Guest:But you make horror movies with a lot of splatter and blood because you don't need very good actors.
Guest:You don't need a very good script.
Guest:You don't need very good production design.
Guest:And you can get a maximum impact by going to the butcher and getting some brains and livers and kidneys and some fake blood.
Guest:And so I think young filmmakers tend to – and I also love horror.
Guest:Don't get me wrong.
Guest:I mean, I –
Guest:I grew up on Hammer Horror Movies and The Evil Dead and all that stuff.
Guest:So I was completely into it.
Guest:But certainly horror movies are a great way to bust into the film industry because you can get big effect for little production value.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But then you get into the phase where –
Guest:You're writing something that's a bit more sophisticated.
Guest:You're now realizing, well, God, the script has to be good, which means we're going to need to cast it really well because we're now going to have to have actors who can really deliver.
Guest:So everything just gets, you know, the stakes go up.
Guest:I mean, Heavenly Creatures was done because I met my partner, Fran Walsh, who's
Guest:who's my co-conspirator and all this, she and I met around the feebles time.
Guest:Well, actually, I showed a bad taste.
Guest:I got some advice from the first kind of bad taste, so 1987.
Guest:So anyway, so we were together, and we wrote Braindead together, and we did that.
Guest:And then she was very interested in this New Zealand murder case, the Parker Hume murder, where these two girls murder one of their mothers.
Guest:I hadn't really heard of it, but she...
Guest:She was really, really, really interested in it and had been for a long time.
Guest:So she pitched me the story, which I never heard of.
Guest:We went down to Christchurch where it happened, just Fran and I, and we met a lot of the people who were involved.
Guest:Obviously, the majority of them have passed away since we went to a lot of the locations.
Guest:And she sort of helped immerse me in the true story.
Guest:And we interviewed a lot of people.
Guest:who were involved and, um, and we just thought, well, that was to be a great, a great film.
Guest:So that was just, you know, that was how that happened.
Guest:And then, and then, and then Bob Zemeckis wanted us to do a, a, um, episode of tales from the crypt, his little, uh,
Guest:He was doing a series of movies.
Guest:He did a TV series, but he was doing a series of movies.
Guest:This is 1995 or something.
Guest:And they were going to be labeled Tales from the Crypt, you know, films.
Guest:That was the branding.
Guest:And so he contacted, I think he's seen Heavenly Creatures or Braindead or something.
Guest:So we got our first Hollywood experience with Bob.
Guest:Zemeckis getting in touch and saying, do you guys interested in doing a Tales from the Crypt film for me?
Guest:And so we just thought, wow, it's Bob, who we loved, who did a very good film called I Want to Hold Your Hand, by the way.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And obviously all the other ones did done.
Guest:And so we were excited.
Guest:I mean, it wasn't something we had in our minds.
Guest:So we walked around for a bit.
Guest:We came up with a storyline about this psychic investigator guy who –
Guest:He's a guy who looks fake and says he can see ghosts and it looks like he's a con man, but he really can.
Guest:Anyway, it was a whole little story.
Guest:We went to LA, we pitched that to Bob, and he says, great, we should do it.
Guest:And then he said, but I don't think it fits the Tales from the Crypt.
Guest:sort of brand, particularly.
Guest:I don't see it as a Tales from a Crypt movie, but let's do it as a standalone film.
Guest:So that one was done, and then it went on to rings and stuff.
Marc:So that's how it just works.
Marc:That's how it works.
Guest:You just dribble.
Guest:You trip and stagger from one film to the next.
Guest:There's no grand plan, really.
Guest:I mean, right now, now they haven't done...
Guest:They shall not grow old straight into the Beatles.
Guest:I've got no idea what I'm doing next.
Guest:I mean, I want to go back and restore.
Guest:And because we started to restore my old films in the Beatles showed up and that's been on hold now for four years.
Guest:So the immediate work for the new year is to try to finish off restoring my old films, finish off shooting my eight millimeter skeleton fight.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:that I did when I was 16.
Guest:So those ones I do know about, and from there on, we'll just see what happens.
Marc:Well, I really appreciate you talking to me today, and I love all the stuff, and I love the Beatles stuff, and I really wish you success in making those skeletons walk and dance.
Guest:Yeah, I'm a bit concerned.
Guest:The idea of animating, I mean, I built them, which was fun to learn how to build them.
Guest:And now I've got to learn how to animate, which does concern me.
Guest:But at least it's just me and a camera and them.
Guest:So all the mistakes I make can be just kept quiet.
Guest:And I don't have to show it to anybody.
Marc:I want someone to do a doc of you doing that.
Marc:Well, take care of yourself, Peter.
Marc:Great talking to you.
Guest:Thanks, Mark.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:What a ride.
Marc:I hope he finishes his stop action work.
Marc:What's interesting is what he wants to do over the holidays with the skeletons.
Marc:It's odd.
Marc:I talked to Guillermo del Toro on Thursday, and he, too, is looking forward to spending some time with some models.
Marc:I think a Lon Chaney model that he needs to paint over the holidays.
Marc:There's a little similarity, a little bit, a little bit.
Marc:You can watch the Beatles get back on Disney+.
Marc:Let's rock out, man.
Marc:Let's rock out, man.
Marc:Rock, man.
music music music
Thank you.
Guest:Boomer lives.
Guest:Monkey and La Fonda.
Guest:Cat angels everywhere.