PETER JACKSON AND EDGAR WRIGHT
Peter have each Jackson made and a passion-project Edgar Wright documentary: The Beatles: Get Back and The Sparks Brothers. In a world-exclusive Zoom call, the filmmakers chat to each other about doing justice to their musical heroes
Two of Empire’s favourite directors have swapped baby drivers and hobbits for music documentaries about Sparks and The Beatles. We get them together to talk music and turning it up to 11.
PETER JACKSON’S ONLY been on the Zoom with Edgar Wright for a minute-and-a-half, but he has something to say. “I get junketed out,” he announces, in that deadpan Kiwi accent. “Especially doing Empire interviews. A few minutes into it, you just want to scream and run out the door.”
Only the twinkle in his eyes gives away the joke. Not that there’s anywhere to run to — Jackson is doing this from a sofa in his living room in New Zealand (Wright is currently in a London hotel room). And it’s clear, over the course of the next two-and-a-half hours as the two filmmakers trade questions, answers and revelations, that there’s nowhere else they’d rather be than here, chatting about music and movies. Specifically, their new documentaries about The Beatles and Sparks, respectively, which they have spent the last few years of their lives making.
Jackson’s film is The Beatles: Get Back, a six-hour, three-part snapshot — rooftop gig and all — of the famous, frenetic and, so it’s long been believed, fraught three-week period when John-paul-george-ringo recorded Let It Be, the last album released by The Beatles while they were a going concern. Wright’s is The Sparks Brothers, a soup-to-nuts crash course cramming in everything you wanted to know about esoteric Californian art-rockers Ron and Russell Mael. The two docs are an exercise in contrasts. One is an example of ‘you are there’ storytelling, with Jackson drawing on 60 hours of footage shot by director Michael Lindsay-hogg for his currently unavailable 1970 documentary Let It Be. The other is a whirlwind trip through time, compressing entire decades into a couple of hours. One is about the most famous and influential band of all time; the other about the best band you’ve never heard of. Or, at least, that one member of this little Zoom party hadn’t heard of…
So, it made sense to get you together. You’ve both made the shift into music documentaries, of course. Both even feature Paul Mccartney.
Peter Jackson: I should just start saying that, as far as music goes, I’m a complete moron. So, when I started watching Edgar’s film for the first time, I thought for a little while that it was a made-up documentary about a made-up band, done in a really straight way. It took me a little while to be convinced that Sparks was actually a real band. I’ve seen it a couple of times now and what I like about it is that it’s just a really good story. It’s about two guys who actually do their own thing, and even though maybe being a little bit more famous would have been nice, they’ve still kept their integrity.
Edgar Wright: Yeah. Jason Schwartzman says that funny thing at the start of the movie,
“I don’t want to know anything more about them.” The word ‘cult’ is an interesting one, because it would be accurate to describe Sparks as a cult band. They’re not widely known.
Jackson: I know what you’re saying with ‘cult’, but I think they’re actually a bit better than that. They’re very, very clever. To me a cult is something that succeeds on a very narrow level, but it’s enough so that people in that narrow bandwidth can enjoy it. I think they deserve a little more than that.
Wright: Well, I think the thing that the documentary shows is that, on a different level, it wasn’t necessarily that they were being innovative groundbreakers, but it was more out of necessity, as a way to survive. They had to figure out a way to survive without an advance from a record label, so in the late ’80s they start to record at home. Russell, the lead singer, was also the engineer. He was his own Glyn Johns [The Beatles’ engineer].
Jackson: How did you find all those people to talk to? Did you just contact people cold, and say, “Are you a Sparks fan?”
Wright: The first category was people they had worked with. That alone is a really prestigious list — Tony Visconti, Giorgio Moroder, Todd Rundgren, and then all the band members and ex-managers. The second phase was other artists or celebrity fans, like New Order, Duran Duran, Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, Chris Difford from Squeeze, who’d been on record saying they were influenced by Sparks. And then there were people I just sort of assumed would be Sparks fans, because they have a similar sensibility, like Mike Myers, Neil Gaiman, Patton Oswalt, Fred Armisen. That was an eye-opener for Ron and Russell. Russell had no idea that Neil Gaiman was a Sparks fan to the point where, as a 12-year-old, he had worked out stories revolving around what he thought was happening on the album covers.
Jackson: And how did they feel about having a film made? They’re obviously big film buffs, but were they always on board with you doing it? Did you have some persuading to do?
Wright: When I asked them to do it, I wasn’t aware that other people had asked and they’d said no before. But they knew me and loved my films and they said yes to me. They felt that sometimes a documentary was like an obituary; it was kind of an ossification of a band. My main pitch to them was, I wanted to present them as a going concern. The stuff they’re doing now is just as good as the stuff they were doing in the ’70s. They have the opening film at the Cannes Film Festival this year [Leos Carax’s Annette, which they wrote], which is fucking great. But what’s funny about how it came to be is that I didn’t have a checklist on my wall, “I want to do a music documentary.” I hadn’t even thought about doing a documentary at all. But I would start talking to my friends, saying, “Somebody should do a Sparks documentary. They’re the greatest, most influential band that don’t have any music documentaries about them.” And then at a 2017 Sparks gig I went to with Phil Lord,
I was doing this spiel and he said, “You should do the Sparks documentary.” I was like, “Yeah! Yeah, I will!”
Jackson: The documentary is all the better because it’s made by someone who actually has a passion. That comes across, and that makes them more enjoyable to watch. I could have easily lived my life without ever hearing about Sparks, but I’m really pleased that I know about these guys.
With Get Back, Peter, you’re focusing on a moment in time. Was that why you wanted to do this?
Jackson: Well, that’s really just because of the existence of this 55 or 60 hours of footage, which sat on the shelf for years. So it wasn’t really a choice, particularly. It was an opportunity to delve into this unseen footage and see what was there. There are so many stories around the Let It Be/get Back stuff. The movie Let It Be and the stories surrounding it have all been used to represent the break-up of The Beatles, but to me it’s an incredibly productive time. In the space of 22 days, they’re recording the entire length of the album, pretty much; they’re rehearsing about two-thirds of Abbey Road, half of All Things Must Pass, a whole bunch of Mccartney’s solo songs. Some days they were running through 50 or 60 different songs. So rather than looking at it as 22 days where The Beatles broke up, it should be redefined as being probably the most productive days of their entire recording career. It’s very, very intense. Certainly, there’s nothing in the footage, the 60 hours of stuff I’ve seen, plus 130 hours of audio I’ve listened to... there isn’t a moment where The Beatles are going to break up. They’re not a band that wants to break up. Wright: I found it so hypnotic. It’s the last footage of this band. You feel, in an incredible way, that you’re a fly on the wall in the room where they’re just jamming through the last two albums.
Jackson: Well, the difficulty with making the movie in a way is that I want to tell a story. A movie has to be a story. It’s not just a bunch of footage of The Beatles. It’s telling a story, and a story that changes. It’s a story of a live concert
that never actually happens, and also the story of a concert that does happen, on the roof, as the plan changes. I’ve learned so much about this period during the film. I’ve been a Beatles fan for 40 years, and you read all these books and they all say different things. You don’t know what the truth is. So in September 1968 they go to the big stage at Twickenham and record the promo for ‘Hey Jude’ with Michael Lindsay-hogg. That was the first time they’d played to a live audience for over two years. They really liked it and that gives them the idea to do the whole of ‘Get Back’ [as it was initially known; its name was later changed to Let It Be]. Stage 1 at Twickenham is available for three weeks for them to rehearse, but it’s not a recording studio. And at the end of that rehearsal, they’re going to stage a concert, they’re going to have three days of performing 14 new songs, film them for a TV special. But it doesn’t get to first base because George Harrison quits the band. He was unhappy on multiple fronts, but he didn’t like the idea of doing this big concert. So he gets the band to agree that he’ll come back and they’ll still do the songs they’ve been rehearsing, but they’ll go into a recording studio. They go into the Savile Row studio they built for themselves and start rolling eight-track tape. Paul, in particular, is still keen to do
some sort of a live performance. He thinks the energy of the live performance, which is the whole point of the ‘Get Back’ project, will be better if they get out of the studio. The easiest way to get out of the studio is to go up on the roof. And it succeeds. Of the five songs they do on the roof, three of them end up on the LP. And they were a tight band on the roof. Man, they’re tight. You see the Hamburg Beatles clicking in after the first couple of songs. When they get in the groove, you see what a great band they were.
Wright: It’s amazing to me. There’s the policeman who doesn’t care whether it’s The Beatles, he’s dealing with a noise complaint. And I love that you go into split-screen at points. It’s everything we want to see in real time. There’s some excitement on the street, The Beatles are playing, and then you get the cop doing his job.
Jackson: We didn’t cheat. We were very strict with ourselves. When you’re seeing them on the roof playing, and you go into the reception, the cops are there in real time. We thought, “This is the one time where you can actually present the rooftop in real time, moment by moment, as it’s occurring.” Michael had six cameras on the roof with The Beatles, he had one camera on a building across the road, he had two interviewing people on the street and one behind a two-way mirror in the reception room. So the cops didn’t know they were being filmed. We’ve interviewed both of those cops.
For the documentary? Jackson:
No, we’ve got no modern-day interviews at all [in it]. We got them up on the roof and filmed them. We’ve got a lot of footage that we don’t know what it’s gonna get used for. Wright: What did the cops think about it now?
Jackson: The main cop said it was the greatest regret of his life that he never got to arrest The Beatles and drag them away. He said he wasn’t a particular Beatles fan, and didn’t care if he stopped the concert.
Can you talk about your different approaches, and injecting your authorial voices into the films?
Wright: The good thing about Sparks is that they have a sense of humour about themselves. They’re very visual, their music is very cinematic, and if I can equate my own films with what they do, it’s really sincere and passionate, but can still have fun with the form. It was a sort of gift, really. There are not many bands where you can say, “I’m going to do this film in the style of Sparks.” And as I was making it I’m thinking, “Maybe my style is quite similar to Sparks. Well, I guess I have been listening to this band since I was five.”
Jackson: I have an interesting thought process because I’m taking footage shot by Michael Lindsay-hogg for a particular project in 1969, and I’m repurposing the footage to do something in 2021. Let It Be exists as a movie. It’s a legitimate film, it’s a historical film, it’s the film Michael was able to produce in 1970 from the footage he shot. So I took the approach, I’m making a documentary about the making of, about Michael Lindsay-hogg. It’s got multiple storylines, obviously, about The Beatles, but one of the storylines is Michael Lindsay-hogg shooting all this footage. I’m making a movie that wouldn’t have been possible in 1970.
Wright: There’s a bit in the section I saw where Paul says, “We do the rooftop gig and then Michael’s got an ending.”
Jackson: Yeah! Michael says, “I have no ending for this film.” And George says, “Oh, you’ve got enough footage for six films.”
Wright: He was way ahead of the time, George Harrison.
Jackson: You mentioned earlier that it’s expanded to six hours. I would just point out that about 18 months ago it was 18 hours long. The first cut was 18 hours. I don’t think I’ve expanded it to six hours. I’ve reduced it to six hours.
Wright: I would be remiss not to bring this up. The Beatles had a three-picture deal with United Artists, right? They did A Hard Day’s Night, they did Help!. And one of the potential third projects was The Beatles doing Lord Of The Rings.
Jackson: Oh, I know. I know. I know a lot about this now. I found out a lot about it. Dennis O’dell got The Lord Of The Rings, and he realised that he wasn’t going to get The Beatles to read all three books. So he sent one book to each Beatle. I think Paul got The Fellowship Of The Ring, George got The Two Towers and John got The
Return Of The King. They read the books while they were in Rishikesh. Then Dennis arranged a meeting between John Lennon and Stanley Kubrick, because they were hoping to get Stanley Kubrick after 2001. Stanley read the books, he took the meeting — I don’t think John Lennon met with him — but Kubrick said it was impossible to film.
Wright: And casting-wise, it would have been Paul as Frodo, George as…
Jackson: George was Gandalf. Ringo was Sam. John was Gollum, apparently. I have spoken to Paul about it but he couldn’t remember the casting itself.
When you’re making a music documentary like this, is the ghost of Spinal Tap ever in your thoughts? Is Marty Dibergi on your shoulder going, “No, don’t do that”?
Jackson: The Rutles is more in my world. It’s a very, very accurate account of The Beatles.
Wright: I was sort of aware. I love music documentaries and I like a lot of the music documentary spoofs. But in my film, I wanted to fuck around with that a little bit, so starting the film with the FAQ section and doing visual puns. People say things in documentaries like, “Sparks really push the envelope,” so you have a shot of Sparks pushing an envelope between each other.
There’s an old adage in life: never meet your heroes. Or, probably, make a music documentary about your heroes. I imagine that doesn’t hold water for either of you.
Wright: I think I knew that Ron and Russell were the exception to the rule when I met them. Pulling back the curtain and finding that Ron and Russell were essentially the same people was the reason I wanted to make it.
Jackson: I’ve been very happy to, in a modest way, meet Paul and Ringo and Olivia [Harrison] and Sean Lennon, and they’ve been very supportive. But I was also very happy when
I got through the 60 hours of film to find that it was a film about four nice guys. You’re looking at 60 hours of fly-on-the-wall footage and you just never know if somebody is going to turn out to be a jerk or gently disappoint you. It was almost the opposite. They were just regular, nice guys, even more so than I expected them to be.
Finally, Peter, you haven’t yet had your junket experience for Get Back, so we’re going to be the first to ask you this. Did you ever consider at any point calling it The Lord Of The Ringos?
Peter Jackson: Well, I don’t think I’m gonna hear it on the junket, because people have got a bit more class. It’s a very Empire sort of question. I don’t expect I’ll get that from The New York Times.