Listens to documentary Morgan Neville and actor Paul Mescal dives down Paul McCartney rabbit hole at Telluride brunch was one of my festival height points. Both are McCartney experts at this time, as Iscar Returns to rehearsals in London to play Paul in the first of Sam Mende’s four Beatles films, and Neville has spent the last three years to prepare ”Man on the go“His Post-Beatle’s portrait of McCartney when he created his solo albums and collected the band wings. When I grew up in the 70s New York I loved McCartney album Cherry and Frame But was never a Wings fan. Now I see how many of his captivating songs that have seeped into the culture: I add a bunch to my playlists.
“Man on the run” reveals an artist who must invent himself without the Beatles and with his great allies and love, Linda McCartney. But he never became love with John Lennon.
This is a question and answer with Neville by the documentary filmmaker David Wilson who took place after filmSee Second Show on September 1st. (Complete revealing: My daughter works for Nevilles Tremolo Productions.)
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
David Wilson: You have mainly worked in music films, even if you make a movie about music every time you come from it from another place. What role did music play in your life that grew up?
Morgan Neville: Very. We had a jukebox in my house. Many Beatles 45ths. My dad was a music obsessive. He saw the Beatles ’64 in Indianapolis. I started playing music. I formed my first band when I was 12 years old. My wife and I played in a band together. I just love music. And I also love the stories of music. And I have made many music films, but for me they explore all another thing that I try to find out.
It is a consistent line in your movies. With all these different subjects there is a great idea you are struggling with. Is it something you think about going in? Or does it come out when you do it?
It’s both for this one. When I first started thinking about it, I started reading the first interview that Paul gave, which was Q&A where he revealed that the Beatles were no more. And you see the woman who hands over that questions and answers to the press. And the last question: “What are you going to do next?” And he said, “My plan, my only plan, is to grow up.” And I thought, “That’s the question I want to start with. What does it mean when you have been a Beatle since you were 17 years old, you have been a quarter of this device that has gone to outer space and back. And how are you a person in the wake of it?”
I have made many biographical films. The films are always a form of therapy for me and safe for the subject. And with Paul we could talk about it and try to get him to a certain main space. But the questions that Paul asked at that time were questions that I always wondered: “How do you wrestle with your own inheritance? How do you remain in the show industry? How do you manage to be a parent and father?” All these different issues that I struggle with all the time. So everything that reasoned. So even though it is Paul McCartney, who is a genius for me, it was this guy who is just an artist who tried to find his way and try to listen to his gut as much as he can. So “Mary had a small lamb”, which is the back of “Mull of Kintyre”, they are both crazy ideas. You show up and one does not, but it is the same impulse, and I completely respect that fear.
McCartney also talks about a pursuit of “Personal Peace.”
Yes, and that quote at the end where Stella (McCartney) says and looks back at it, it was the happiest years in our lives? And I just sent my last child to college 10 days ago. I get emotional even thinking about it. I don’t think anyone has ever understood what Linda meant for Paul in every way. And that’s what my wife means to me: Having someone who can be your Wingman in every imaginable way, who has your back, is the biggest thing. That’s what you need to survive.
Had you met Paul before this project?
I met him once for a shoot at another documentary year ago. And then I met him again when we talked about the movie, and he was: “Okay, that sounds good.” The first interview, we did in London in his office. He had a soundman in the Bates studio in the basement. He said, “My guy will set some microphones.” So I show up, and there are two microphones in this little place of love in his office. I sit close. Okay, you have to forget that it’s Paul McCartney and just go for it. And Paul is good at helping you forget that he is Paul McCartney, because he has been Paul McCartney for a long time. For someone like him, who has been public for so long, who has talked so much, not to make the jukebox with the biggest hits, of things he says about albums or songs and to try to really break it, be good.
I made a lot of sounds InterviewsBut I wanted conversations with him. So we started talking about ideas. We talked about painting, we talked about all the different types of things, because I wanted to make him think and talk in the present. It helped. He acknowledged in the conversations he would be removed. We ended up having seven sessions with interviews for more than a year.
Beatles are famous difficult interviews, right? Was it a moment with him, as you were in these sessions, where you thought, “Oh, this is something new. I get a side of Paul that was not there.”
I like to believe that. When he was excited about things, we did an interview in his house, and he would run over to the piano and start playing, show me things. And then he would continue to get high with the wrong Kuti. It was good to get him in a certain main space. He had not talked about Linda in any deep way in decades. I just showed the movie two weeks ago. He had a little family screening with his family and all grandchildren and invited my wife and son. All grandchildren sit in front of me. Stella’s son said, “I’ve never heard my grandmother’s voice before,” and it struck me. And then I heard another granddaughter say: “Grandpa went to jail?”
Was it a moment where you thought you would go all the way up to Linda’s death?
I always felt like that decade and Bookends of McCartney, one and two: to leave the Beatles and John’s passing, and run away from the Beatles and what he had done during that decade. And I definitely thought about Linda’s death and we played with it, but it felt just strange in a way that Linda lived on for another 17 years earlier this time. And when I showed the Paul movie, he said, “I’m so happy that you left Linda at the end of the movie like that.”
It’s something I gather from talking to Paul again just a couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of the movie where he said, “I thought myself as the bastard, when people blame me for all this.” He internalized it, and that period of “let it be” and then the band was so painful. And the “Get Back” project actually opened something in him and said it wasn’t that bad. Everyone said that everything was awful, but in fact it was much more nuanced. It was love, there were tension. And that process of self -permission was the reason why this movie happened: if it wasn’t so bad, maybe I would think about this second period that I have also shot out of my head in many ways. And it’s fantastic that still 50 years later, it is still going on.
The parallel love story here is obviously him and John. Do you think the “Get Back” experience opened his ability to talk about him and John?
When you looked at “come back”, which I consumed as soon as it came out, you see how much real love he still has, to the point where John is in his life every day. And I don’t exaggerate. I have no doubt that he thinks of John every day, if not many times a day. So it’s not something that is distant for him. It’s something he sticks to.
When you dig through an archive and try to find something useful, and then this clip rises to the surface, what were these clips for you?
God, there are so many. Paul has a fantastic archive. He married a photographer, so it was comfortable, everyone Linda’s negative throughout the decade, which is just incredible. There are so many things in this movie that have never seen. And there are so many little things from how people talked about Paul in the press at that time. I love the little clip of the reporter who goes back to the Cavern Club to interview the young punk girl about the Beatles. The best is the home films. Who documents so much? Now we may be doing with phones, but you see Paul filming with a 16 camera. And Lindas takes pictures of Paul who takes a movie from her.
There are so many amazing pictures in this movie of the actual construction of songs, where you are in the studio, and you see them work through something. Was it something you specifically looked for? How much did you want it behind the scenes?
I nerd out on it. And hear the studio talk. You can hear him orchestrate this in his head in real time, which is what makes him Paul McCartney. And we have fragments of so many different songs here. I loved the Beatles, but Wings was the band that put out album when I was little, and that was what I bought. And I loved wings. There is so much interesting, good work through the decade that people do not think about that much. He set 10 records in ten years. One of the happiest things was after I showed my son the movie two weeks ago, I saw that he silently adds a whole lot of Wings songs to his playlist on Spotify.
One of the joy was every three minutes there was here after the hit song which has been part of the fabric in our world. Although we did not identify in the same way we did with the Beatles.
We put the little excerpt of “Wonderful Christmas Christian” there, for in the middle of everything else, it was a small single that he threw out at the end of the year 1979 which was a footnote, but a song that for better or worse we hear every year. It is both contextualization and rewaiting of many of the songs we feel, a deep dive, that goes through some of these discs. And Frame is one of my favorite albums. It is fantastic how frightened that album was again you see Savage Rolling Stone Review by Jon Landau, who continued to handle Bruce Springsteen. And now Frame is one of the 500 best albums of all time, according to Rolling Stone. So it’s the long game: Let’s not pay attention to what people want this week this year. Let’s just create music that works for us.
How can people say their friends to see this?
Amazon/MGM bought the movie and it will not come out until February. Six months from now, you will hopefully hear everything about it. We will make a theater edition, and then it will eventually flow. It will.
