Let It Be - The Beatles

In 2021, the director Peter Jackson’s sprawling and vibrant Beatles docuseries, “The Beatles: Get Back,” streamed on Disney+ to nearly universal acclaim. The three-part epic, which ran nearly eight hours, captured the drama and frenzy as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr recorded, over the pressure-filled month of January 1969, what would become the last album that the Beatles released, “Let It Be.”

As fans were well aware, Jackson’s series was culled from nearly 60 hours of behind-the-scenes footage originally shot by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for “Let It Be,” his little-seen, though often dismissed, 1970 documentary about those recording sessions.

After its initial theatrical run, Lindsay-Hogg’s film largely disappeared for more than a half-century with the exception of low-quality VHS versions and bootlegs. Fans tend to remember it as an intriguing historical document capturing the late-stage creative flights of a seismic musical force, but also as a divorce proceeding of sorts, with stark moments of internal discord as the band hurtled toward a nasty split.

By that view, “Get Back,” with its abundant moments of jokey banter and on-set clowning, was seen by some as an overdue corrective to “Let It Be.”

Little surprise but Lindsay-Hogg, 83, has a very different view. The acclaimed director had a hand in inventing the music video, with his promotional films for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, and went on to win plaudits for the 1980s British mini-series “Brideshead Revisited.” He has fought for a half-century for “Let It Be” to get a second look and, in his mind, a fair shake.

On May 8, he will get his wish, when “Let It Be,” meticulously restored by Jackson’s production team, begins streaming on Disney+ in collaboration with Apple Corps, the company that oversees the Beatles creative and business interests. Lindsay-Hogg spoke to The New York Times about the culmination of a long crusade. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.


You have been working for decades to revive “Let It Be.” What finally changed?

Peter was the catalyst. He and I met in December 2018, before he really started on “Get Back,” and he said, “Tell me the story of ‘Let It Be’ — you know, what’s happened since you made it, because I’ve seen it pretty recently and I think that movie should come out.” So a year or two went by, and he told me that he had a very good relationship with Paul and Ringo and also with Sean Lennon and Olivia Harrison, George’s widow, as well as with Jonathan Clyde, who produced “Get Back” for Apple. So he started to advocate for “Let It Be” to come out. He and Clyde got a budget for the restoration work, and slowly it moved through Apple.


Is “Let It Be” just a short version of “Get Back”?

Peter very much didn’t want “Get Back” to look like he just pulled it from “Let It Be,” so if he wanted to show a scene that was in my film, he would show it from different angles and reconstruct it differently. There are scenes in “Let It Be” that aren’t in “Get Back.” They’re very different, although obviously they have many great similarities.


A lot of people remember “Let It Be” as a bad-vibes movie, probably in part because of that famous scene in which George and Paul bicker about George’s guitar part on “Two of Us.” Was that exchange another sign of the beginning of the end?

No one had ever seen the Beatles have a fight, but that wasn’t really a fight. Up to that point, no one had filmed, except in bits and pieces, the Beatles rehearsing. So that was new territory. That exchange between Paul and George, they never commented on, because it was the same kind of conversation that any artistic collaborators would have. As a director in the theater and in movies, I know that kind of conversation happens five times a week.


When “Get Back” came out, a lot of fans saw it as happy corrective to “Let It Be.” Is that accurate?

I would say most people who saw Peter’s picture as a corrective to mine haven’t seen mine, because no one was able to see it for 50 years. So unless they were children when they saw it in theaters, the only way most people would have seen it was on VHS or bootlegs, which changed the original aspect ratio and had dark and gloomy pictures and bad sound. That is part of the reason the movie was put in the closet for a long time.


How much does the digital restoration change the look and sound of “Let It Be”?

When Peter first showed me some restored images of the film, one was of a couple of the Beatles from the back, and their hair in the original looked very clumped. Then he said, “Now let me show you what we’ve been working on.” It was the same shot, but you could see the individual strands of hair. The new version is a 21st century version of a 20th century movie. It is certainly brighter and livelier than what ended up on videotape. It looks now like it was intended to look in 1969 or 1970, although at my request, Peter did give it a more filmic look than “Get Back,” which had a slightly more modern and digital look.


The four Beatles skipped the 1970 premiere of “Let It Be.” Was that in protest?

As we now know, the Beatles were in the process of breaking up when the film was getting ready to go. People were feeling perhaps rancorous toward each other; they weren’t getting on. They announced their breakup in April 1970, and “Let It Be” was released in May. “Let It Be” was collateral damage. People didn’t see it for what it was, and went looking for what it wasn’t.


As recently as 2021, Ringo said there was “no joy” in the film. Did the members of the band actually seem unhappy with it at the time?

Well, after we watched the rough cut in July, the day before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, John and Yoko [Ono], Paul and Linda McCartney, Peter Brown from Apple and me and my girlfriend went out for dinner at Provans in London. The film, I think, was regarded very much as a promising work in progress. There was no snarky business going on. We sat and had a good time like friends do. We talked about our childhoods, had a couple of bottles of wine. When we showed them the final cut in late November, we all went out for dinner again, to a place with a discothèque. We all had a nightcap and a chat, and Paul said he thought the movie was good. Ringo was jiving out on the dance floor. He’s a good dancer.


After 54 years, do you think fans will have a different perception of the film?

If you see it with no preconceptions, the picture works very well, and it’s clear that you’re looking at four men who have known each other since they were teenagers — well, three of them anyway — who love each other as brothers might. But they weren’t any more the Fab Four, the mop tops. A couple of them are pushing 30. They had stopped touring, which is a very big change for a rock ’n’ roll group. What you see in the movie is that the affection is eternal between the four of them. But they were living very separate lives now.


During filming, did you get the sense that they were on the verge of breaking up?

No, not at all. We started shooting with four Beatles. We ended it with four Beatles. It was not like the San Andreas Fault. I thought they might go off and do their own thing, follow their heart and release separate albums, but then get together, because the Beatles were a very powerful artistic force, and also social force. I didn’t think the Beatles were going to break up till they broke up.


Even critics of “Let It Be” would have a hard time arguing that their final live set on the roof of Apple Corps wasn’t a joyous moment.

How lucky can you get that the last line in the movie is from John, up on the roof. The set has been broken up by the police — which is good, because that’s as many songs as they had rehearsed anyway — then John says, “And I hope we passed the audition.” Because if anyone did pass the audition, in that entire decade, it was the Beatles.

I first saw “Let It Be” when I was a kid, in the summer of 1970, just weeks after it was released. My family was coming off one of those “Vacation” road trips. During the miles of driving, we listened to Top 40 radio, which meant that several times a day I got to hear “The Long and Winding Road,” which I thought was the most beautiful song I’d ever heard. (To this day, I adore the Phil Spector heavenly-choir orchestral-layer-cake version and have never understood Paul McCartney’s aversion to it.) I knew that the first thing I was going to do when we got back was go to see “Let It Be” — and, in fact, it was the first Beatles thing I was old enough to connect to as it was happening.

The Beatles, in their early years, looked alike (same hair and suits, same lemon-shaped smiles), and even after they’d entered the psychedelic zone with “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper” they dressed and coiffed themselves with a splashy coordinated harmony. They were unified. And that made a kind of supreme sense, since they were the larger-than-life pop avatars of love. They sang about love and made a mantra of it; love was the centrifugal force that held their music together. But “Let It Be,” starting with that plaintive shrug of a title (which seemed to be telling a planet’s worth of fans that the dream was over), had a very different vibe.

Shot in 16mm-transferred-to-35mm, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s inside-the-recording-studio documentary was short and sweet (only 81 minutes long), but it was also dark, grainy, and desultory. The film caught the Beatles in several moments of tension (notably a tiff between Paul and George), but even when they were grooving together they appeared separate. They no longer looked alike (they seemed to be going to four different hippie hairdressers — or, in the case of John Lennon, none at all). The songs were rough and jagged. The Beatles weren’t shaggy lads anymore, they were men. And in their disparate grownup identities, they seemed to embody something about how the entire culture was fragmenting at the seams.

“Let It Be” ripped the mask of mythology off the Beatles. Arriving just a month after the group’s official breakup, the movie seemed to be telling a grand story of dissolution. In “A Hard Day’s Night,” the four of them had been like gods at play. And yes, they recorded the seamless and sublime “Abbey Road” after the raw and unfinished “Let It Be.” Yet in “Let It Be,” the faces of the Beatles now loomed up on screen as if they were ex-gods starring in the first rock ‘n’ roll reality show.

That, however, was then. When Peter Jackson plunged back into the 57 hours of footage that Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot for “Let It Be” and assembled it into “The Beatles: Get Back” (2021), his extraordinary eight-hour documentary, Jackson’s expanded epic revealed that the fabled January 1969 recording sessions were not the downer of legend. There were many moments that were funny, spirited, communal. That said, what of the original “Let It Be”? After the revelation of “Get Back,” would it still look like the morning-after hangover of the Beatles’ saga?

The film has been out of circulation since the 1980s. It is now being re-released by Disney+ in a version restored by Jackson’s team, using the same technological wizardry that made “Get Back” look and sound like a present-tense epiphany. The restoration allows “Let It Be” to be sharper, brighter, more alive, without betraying the original film. The early scenes shot in Twickenham Studios still give off that tinge of gloom. But only a tinge.

For me, though, the revelation of seeing “Let It Be” today, when everything about the Beatles is now ancient history, is that as you experience the movie anew (or for the very first time), it’s not the myth of the Beatles that falls away. It’s the myth of “Let It Be.” I now think it’s one of the most joyful rock documentaries ever made.

What’s changed? It’s not merely the Jackson upgrade. It’s that the Beatles, viewed with half a century’s hindsight, no longer look so separate. Their identities remain separate — by this point, they were locked into their own lives as complicated adults — but what we now see, knowing all that in our bones, is the lingering, between-the-lines emotional profundity of the connection between them. We now feel how the music, every gloriously ragged note of it, arises out of their love for each other.

The movie has moments that entrance you, that make you swoon, that lift you into rock heaven. Like John dancing a waltz with Yoko to the lilting electric melancholy of “I Me Mine” (Yoko, throughout, looks so serenely supportive and engaged that the idea that she was an intrusive presence now seems nuts). Or the blissful fervor with which the Beatles lay into old chestnuts like “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (they still relish their past). Or the way “Two of Us” evolves from a wobbly ditty into a transcendent ode to brotherly love. Or the double dose of crackling confessional romantic vibrance, from John and Paul, of “Dig a Pony” and “I’ve Got a Feeling.” Or Paul, more soulfully handsome than anyone in rock, doing his indelible gazing-into-the-camera rendition of the title track. Or the way the final rooftop concert, and the London bobbies’ attempt to shut it down, plays as a compressed 15-minute parody of the entire counterculture ’60s — the hippies vs. the squares, except that in the Beatles’ version there are no bad guys. The message of “Let It Be” is that even if you are separate, you can come together.