His eight-hour Get Back documentary seemed like the ultimate homage to the Beatles but now director Peter Jackson takes things a step further, making a video clip for the band’s “final” song.
The hugely anticipated track Now and Then, which features all four members, including vocals recorded in a demo by John Lennon in the late 1970s and guitar by George Harrison from 1995, will be released on Friday morning (1am AEST). The video is expected to be released a day later.
Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and George Harrison in Peter Jackson’s Get Back. Credit: Apple Corps
In a statement released overnight, Jackson says the clip includes unseen footage of the band, including “a few precious seconds of the Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of the Beatles and never seen before”.
Despite his swag of awards – three Oscars, three BAFTAS, two Emmys and a Golden Globe – Jackson says the idea of making the video “produced a collection of anxieties almost too overwhelming to deal with”.
“My lifelong love of the Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down,” he says.
“This created intense insecurity in me because I’d never made a music video before, and was not able to imagine how I could even begin to create one for a band that broke up more than 50 years ago, had never actually performed the song, and had half of its members no longer with us.
“It was going to be far easier to do a runner. I just needed a little time to figure out a good reason for turning the Beatles down.”
During the making of The Beatles: Get Back, Jackson and his team used AI-assisted software to isolate Lennon’s vocal from the demo recording for songs that appeared on the Beatles’ final albums Let It Be and Abbey Road.
Available on Disney+, the 2021 doco featured material from studio recordings and other footage, including their last live performance as a group on January 30, 1969. Jackson described it as a documentary about a documentary.
In his statement, Jackson explained that he ended up having plenty of footage to work with, much of it taken in 1995 as Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr attempted to work up a version of Now and Then that was never completed.
Lennon’s son Sean and Harrison’s widow Olivia provided “some great unseen home movie footage” while Pete Best, the Beatles’ original drummer, provided the leather-suited performance footage.
Jackson looked for inspiration by listening to Now and Then over and over, hoping it “would somehow float up from the music”.
“And that began to happen,” he says. “As I kept listening, it felt like the song was creating ideas and images that started forming in my head – without any conscious effort from me.”
He describes finding “a collection of unseen outtakes in the vault, where the Beatles are relaxed, funny and rather candid”. “These become the spine of our middle section, and we wove the humour into some footage shot in 2023,” he says. “The result is pretty nutty and provided the video with much-needed balance between the sad and the funny.”
Director Peter Jackson says it would have been easier to do a runner than make a video of the Beatles song Now and Then.Credit: Getty Images
The acclaimed director says he has “genuine pride” in the end result “and I’ll cherish that for years to come”.
The 1995 sessions produced two new Beatles songs, Free As a Bird and Real Love – both reached the UK Top 10 on release, and were included on the Anthology compilation series.
But Harrison became frustrated by the difficulties of completing Now and Then, and attempts to finish that track were aborted. Until now.
In the promo video for the upcoming final track, Sean Ono Lennon sums up the thoughts of millions of Beatles fans around the world: “It’s the last song that my dad and Paul and George and Ringo will get to make together.”
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