![]() “Just to explain: We’re telling the story of 22 days. “Look at the mathematics of it,” he says. We’re happy with a six-hour version.’” (Shhh - don’t tell anybody, but the version that’s premiering on Disney Plus over three nights this Thanksgiving actually runs closer to eight.) ![]() They got back a polite “Show it to us” from the relevant parties, and “that was the most nervous time I’ve had on this whole project, waiting for their verdict … The Beatles were the ones that we were waiting for them to look at it –Ringo (Starr) and Paul (McCartney) and Olivia (Harrison) and Sean (Lennon) - and the verdict came back from them saying: ‘Six hour - great. “We had to then own up to Disney and to the Beatles, to Apple Corps, that we thought the film should be six hours long, not two and a half,” he continues. So long as it told a story, and it wasn’t just gratuitous nonsense, if it was something that was important for people interested in the history of the Beatles to see, it should be in there. They haven’t seen it (yet) in 50 years, and anything that we weren’t going to put in this film, I was painfully aware, was likely to go back in the vault for another 50 years. “And so then the moment came where we just thought, ‘How on earth did we get it any shorter than this?’ Because at that point, you’re starting to commit a crime against rock ‘n’ roll history if you start trimming any more out, because there’s stuff there that people have to see. “And we ended up with six hours, at the beginning of this year, maybe, or towards the end of last year,” Jackson says. But rather than keep whittling, they went back into the rushes and were even finding great bits they’d overlooked in making that first 18-hour cut, even as they whittled away at the bulk of it. That gave Jackson and Olssen another year to edit, which they gladly took. And then the pandemic happened.” In March 2020, Disney knew a fall theatrical run was not in the cards and decided to bump it a year. Then when I started working on it with Jabez (Olssen, his editor), we had 130 or140 hours of audio and 60-odd hours of video footage, and so we thought, ‘Let’s at least just get it down to something that we can manage.’ That’s when the 18-hour cut happened” - no, that’s not a typo - “but the plan was to keep going and make it two and a half hours. ![]() “And so when we talked about doing something with the outtakes from ‘Let It Be,’ a theatrical film was certainly the plan going in. “When I first met with Apple, they were just wrapping up ‘Eight Days a Week’ with Ron Howard,” he says, recalling the 2016 doc about the Beatles’ final tours in the mid-‘60s. And, just as “Get Back” itself is largely about the Beatles re-learning the art of negotiation, the filmmaker knew it might take some negotiating to get anyone to agree with his growing conviction that the originally agreed-upon two-and-a-half-hour running time should be just a drop in the bucket. Jackson wanted to give fans a true, extended, fly-on-the-wall look at the making of the “Let It Be” album instead of the quick buzz-by they’d gotten in director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary of that same name. (Spoiler: there’s a little bit of each Beatle in all of us, or probably should be.) Jackson joined Variety for an episode of “Doc Dreams,” presented by National Geographic, to discuss everything from the changing target lengths of his edits over the last four years of work to which Beatle he relates to most. Could the filmmaker really give full weight to all the moods and methods of the Beatles in their last year of existence as a band? The answer was yes, just as surely as Doris got her oats. Then again, conversely, there were Beatlemaniacs who, having looked at trailers for “Get Back” that emphasized newfound fun-loving moments, worried that Jackson would get caught up in a whitewash of history and eliminate the tense moments that everyone remembered from the first “Let It Be” film in favor of making it feel like a real-life “Help!” sequel. When it was announced in June that a change in plans for Jackson’s “Get Back” documentary was afoot, and it was now going to be three times as long as originally announced - a three-part streaming docuseries on Disney Plus, instead of a single theatrical feature - aficionados who’d long hoped to see outtakes from the 1970 “Let It Be” realized they were going to get their own multi-part quest film.īut would it be possible to achieve mythos out of footage that is known for containing a certain amount of mundanity, or at least inglorious bickering? No one wanted to see Frodo arguing with Aragorn about which brand of chain mail armor they should suit up in. ![]() Peter Jackson does love a good epic trilogy … and so, now, do Beatles fans. ![]()
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