INTERVIEW: ‘One to One: John & Yoko’ focuses on a pivotal time in both artists’ lives
Photo: One to One: John & Yoko tells the story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono living in Greenwich Village in the early-1970s. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures / Provided with permission.
The new documentary One to One: John & Yoko is not a full examination of the lives and relationship of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There have been plenty of films and TV specials looking at the two as artists, partners and cultural figures. Instead, this new film, which is now playing on IMAX screens, focuses on the early-1970s and the couple’s time living in the West Village of Manhattan as they prepared for a monumental concert, called the One to One benefit, held at Madison Square Garden.
The doc, directed by Kevin MacDonald and co-directed by Sam Rice-Edwards, comes with Sean Ono Lennon as an executive producer. The archival footage of Sean’s parents in Greenwich Village is something to behold, ditto for the One to One benefit, which was the first time Lennon played a full concert since leaving the Beatles, according to press notes.
“I think the whole journey of the film started with the footage of the concert,” Rice-Edwards said in a recent Zoom interview. “It was known that this footage and audio were sitting there, and they didn’t really know what to do with it. And the producer, Peter Worsley, had basically, along with Mercury Studios, been looking for the right director to turn it into a story, into a film, and they found Kevin. And Kevin was really excited about the idea, and then he kind of got me involved. And obviously it was an offer you can’t turn down, so I jumped on board.”
The first days of production found MacDonald and Rice-Edwards sitting around and spitballing ideas on how to make One to One different from the other Lennon, Ono and Beatles cinematic fare that has come out in recent years. They eventually settled on the uniqueness of the concert footage as the piece that set this project apart.
“We had this concert footage, and slowly some ideas formed,” said Rice-Edwards, known for his work as the editor of Last Song From Kabul and Meet Me in the Bathroom. “And Kevin was very, very clear that there’s a lot of Beatles material out there, a lot about John Lennon, and we really couldn’t just make another standard John Lennon film. It had to be original and fresh, and so one day, he sort of came in and had this idea, ‘Well, why don’t we present the world as what they see, and present it through their television?’ We knew they sat around watching a lot of television. That’s — as you hear in the film, in their own words — how they felt like they could take the pulse of now, the worlds that they were seeing that humanity presented on television. So he had this idea, and when he first kind of said it to me, I was a little bit worried about it because I was thinking, ‘Is that going to work, or is it just going to feel like a jumble of footage and not really piece together into a film?’ But I also knew that that was a good feeling to be worried. We were getting off the beaten track into making something a bit more interesting.”
The defined nature of the documentary also sets it apart. The film spans the 18 months that Ono and Lennon lived on Bank Street in the Village. Their flat’s door opened onto the street, and they lived and made music as artists did (and still do) in this colony of cultural figures.
“And they did all these things, including the concert in that time, and I think the reason we went for such a pared-back idea in terms of time with their lives is that we wanted to be able to just spend time with John and Yoko in the film in a way that people hadn’t done before,” Rice-Edwards said. “And we felt that we could let the audience have that experience, to spend time with John and Yoko the way they are at home, when they are being themselves, not the way they are a public-facing persona. We have that in the film as well, but we have who they are, just when they’re being themselves. And we felt that if we could give the viewer the experience of just doing that, being with them, then they would get to know them in a way that would be much more precious than charting their whole life with information. … Ultimately we felt that wouldn’t be a very interesting and emotional film if we did that, so that’s part of the reason we went for such a certain time.”
The Beatles and their story often sucks the air out of a documentary that focuses on one member of the band. For Rice-Edwards and the creative team, it came naturally to not focus on the legendary career of the Beatles, and instead zoom in on Ono and Lennon, having their shared narrative deservedly receive the attention. “We had a screening with Sean Lennon, and he said that it was the most honest portrayal of his mom,” said the co-director and editor. “And that really meant a lot.”
One to One: John & Yoko is making its United States premiere on mega IMAX screens. Rice-Edwards and MacDonald didn’t know that development was in their future, but the co-director said the concert footage in the film is perfect for such a large format.
“When we’re showing the pieces of music, we’re not cutting around very fast the way you do in maybe a classic concert edit,” he said. “What would be really powerful is to have a lot of closeups and spend long shots so you can really connect emotionally to John or Yoko’s singing. That, along with the remastered music, has the effect of being there at the concert in some moments. … I feel that was part of the reason that the powers that be felt this film could work really well in IMAX.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
One to One: John & Yoko, directed by Kevin MacDonald and co-directed by Sam Rice-Edwards, is currently playing on IMAX. Click here for more information.
