”The Beatles: Get Back” with Peter Jackson

Top Docs: Award-Winning Documentary Filmmakers

Legendary Director Peter Jackson joins Mike to discuss the Emmy-nominated “The Beatles: Get Back”. Peter discusses why after a career that has spanned “Heavenly Creatures,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Hobbit,” and “King Kong,” he turned to documentary filmmaking with "They Shall Not Grow Old." And how the techniques that he employed in turning the trenches of the First World War to life came to be useful when faced with the 60 hours of 16mm film shot by Michael Lindsay Hogg in 1969 during the Beatles’ rehearsal for and recording of “Let it Be.”

Peter tells Mike about the challenges posed by the 130 hours of sound recordings, and how his team wrote custom software to isolate and clarify sound–and how this became the spine of the film. He virtually brings us into the New Zealand editing bay with Jabez Olssen where his team (again) built new processes to make the rushes amenable to editing. He explains to Mike why the now-famous scene of Paul creating “Get Back” was–for the sake of historical accuracy–not overly edited, and how the rooftop concert was edited in one productive week before showing it to the surviving Beatles. And he sums up his years of daily exposure to the inner workings of the Beatles by saying that they were 4 nice boys with incredible talent who managed to find each other.

“The Beatles: Get Back” is now streaming on Disney+.

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