Peter Jackson Interview: The Beatles Get Back

Peter Jackson talks The Beatles: Get Back, combing through 55 hours of documentary footage, and his personal connection to the band.

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Peter Jackson is the director of The Beatles: Get Back, an upcoming documentary series coming to Disney+. With hours and hours of unearthed footage at his fingertips, Jackson has reconstructed a pivotal moment in The Beatles’ career, the making of the 1970 album Let It Be. Working alongside Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono Lennon, and Olivia Harrison, the director has put together three feature-length episodes chronicling the twilight of the band’s career.

Screen Rant sat down with Peter Jackson to talk about The Beatles: Get Back, what didn’t make it into the episodes, and how Jackson became a lifelong fan of the band.

Screen Rant: You’re known for these epic films from Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and The Hobbit. Do you approach documentary filmmaking differently than you would those giant blockbusters?

Peter Jackson: Yeah, sure, because you’re talking about a process where you write a screenplay of a script, shoot it, and then release it versus, especially in the documentaries I’ve worked on, They Shall Not Grow Old and The Beatles… I didn’t shoot that – it was either shot 100 years ago in World War One, or Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot [The Beatles] 50 years ago, and I don’t know what was shot, I have to look at it. There’s no script.

When you look at like 150 hours of audio, and you watch 60 hours of film there’s no script – you don’t know what this is. So you’re watching it without a clue of what you’re actually going to make. Which is not how you do a normal film. In a normal film you’ve got the scripting, so it’s a very different process. But it’s actually exciting because it’s nice to do it all – yes, you write the script, you shoot the film, but to not know actually makes it more thrilling in a way, and then you make it the Beatles, which I’ve been a fan for 40 years. Boy, I’m, I’m in heaven.

You were still very young when The Beatles were at this stage of their career. I was wondering what was that personal memory or personal association with the band that drew you to undertake this massive effort?

Peter Jackson: It’s interesting, while I watched this footage – you know, Michael shot it for 22 days during January 1969 and because we’ve been editing it for four years, I often sit there thinking what was I doing at this exact moment, on this day? I was nine years old, a New Zealand schoolboy, and I can’t remember what I was doing during ’69.

But I was alive. Which is always nice to know – when they’re playing “Get Back,” I was actually alive and I was in the world as a nine-year-old. My real first fandom of The Beatles started not when I was nine, but when I was about 12 and I had some pocket money and I was going to buy a model airplane that I always wanted. I’d saved up. So I went into the city, heading towards the model store and I walked past the record shop. And there was a display in the window for the Red and the Blue album and it just caught my interest. And I obviously must have known The Beatles because I was alive all the way through and I walked in the shop, I looked at things and I recognized some of the songs and I went and I spent my pocket money on the Red and Blue album, not the model airplane. Which I still haven’t got to this day.

So, I took those home and my mum and dad didn’t have Beatles albums. They were the first albums I bought, the first [Beatles] albums that came to our house and I just used to play them on our gramophone. And then I started to buy the other Beatles albums. I started to really get into it from that point on.

I think one of the coolest things about for me watching this footage – and I got the same feeling when I watched They Shall Not Grow Old – was seeing The Beatles in high definition and watching them just perform together in the studio and getting this glimpse into an aspect of their lives that wasn’t very public at the time. What was that feeling for you, seeing all this footage for the first time and finding out that this relationship that they had at the time, which was supposedly conflictual was actually much more harmonious than a lot of people thought?

Peter Jackson: Well, it was a dream come true and I literally mean that because over the years of being a Beatles fan – I’m assuming a lot of Beatles fans do this – I wonder if they ever invented a time machine. If I had one day I could go back, what would I do? And I knew I knew what my choice would be. I’d pick a day during the 60s, I’d go to Abbey Road, and I’d sit in the corner of the studio and watch The Beatles working. That would be what I do. But of course, you assume that a time machine is never actually going to be invented. And this footage arrives and my first thought is “This is my time machine.”

I actually literally did think that, it was quite profound. And I had choices. I didn’t quite know what I was going to do with the footage. But you know, one of the obvious things to do is you go interview Ringo and Paul today and interview Michael Lindsay-Hogg and then you show the film and stuff, and it’s like a [typical] documentary. And I thought, “No because that’s not a time machine.” I just thought we should all just head back into 1969 and sit there and watch these guys. Don’t get in the way. Just watch them. And also, the great thing with the Get Back sessions is that it all goes terribly wrong. Now, if the Get Back sessions were perfect [and] nothing goes wrong, then it’d be much more boring.

But the fact that they set out to do an ambitious thing which is kind of crazy and it slowly falls apart, George leaves, and they’ve got to figure out what to do. That’s fantastic because you don’t know what’s going to happen next and they don’t know what’s going to happen next. You’re actually on the journey with them like a fly on the wall. But what the real truth of it is, there’s no better way to see somebody’s real personality, to actually see what the real friendships are than when things go wrong, when there’s a crisis the real truth of people comes out because they’ve got to deal with it. These are friends that are dealing with some pretty serious stuff, with George leaving and everything else. The actual events aren’t necessarily always happy. But at the heart of it, you see that they managed to prevail through this through the strength of their love and friendship for each other.

And you combed through so much footage. I think somewhere around 55 hours I read.

Peter Jackson: When Michael was shooting he had 16-millimeter cameras and all the sound was being recorded on Niagara tape machines. So Michael got the sound recorders to just keep rolling most of the day [and] they just keep talking to tapes. There’s 22 days and for each day there are about seven or eight hours of audio, and it’s really what the story is. And because 16-millimeter film was a lot more expensive than a tape, he’s much more selective for when the cameras are turned on and off. So the story is in the audio that sets in. And then if you’re lucky, you’ve got the cameras rolling and if not, you just got to figure out what were you going to do because you’re gonna have to use the audio and find some pictures to put on it. So it’s a jigsaw puzzle. Each of these 22 days, you’ve got about seven or eight hours of audio and three or four hours of film.

Was there any footage or audio you found that just didn’t make the cut of the documentary, but that you thought was particularly noteworthy?

Peter Jackson: Well, there’s all this material and we cut it down from sixty [hours]. I mean, as a Beatles fan, I loved watching every second of it. Every time I saw something, and it might not even be important to the story -because I’m telling a story at the same time – If it’s just a cool Beatles moment, we don’t really need this in the movie but holy God it’s great. You know, I had a choice. I was worried it would go back in the vault and I was worried it would never get seen for 50 years. And I watch it but a lot of other fans are gonna want to see this. So every time I saw something, I just put it in.

So, the film’s pretty much made by a storyteller who’s telling the story of these 22 days and a Beatles fan who’s just sticking in the cool stuff as well. It’s kind of what this thing is really. There’s stuff that’s not in there that’s great. Before the rooftop, they do a great performance of “One After 909” on the roof. And the day before they do a fantastic, killer studio recording of “One After 909,” which I love. But I didn’t want to have “One After 909” there and then the next day they do it again, because, as a filmmaker, I thought people are going to get bored. I regret not being able to put it in but it’s the right decision.

You know, we’ve got the full 12-minute “Dig It” and we cut that. We’ve edited this 12 minute “Dig It” and we just thought it’s going to slow the film down too much. So we trimmed it down to about five or six minutes. So yeah, there’s all sorts of things that as a Beatles fan it’s cool, but it’s sort of – I also have a little bit of responsibility for keeping the pace going for a normal viewer as well.

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