Nearly 60 years after the most devastating breakup in music history, Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville is shedding new light on what kept the Beatles from reuniting.
“Every single interview any of them gave in that entire decade, they were asked, ‘When are the Beatles going to get back together?’” Neville, 58, told Obsessed: The Podcast host Matt Wilstein in a new interview about his latest documentary, Man on the Run. “They could not escape it.”
Despite the band’s refusal to answer those questions at the time, Neville now believes they had something in the works.
“I actually think, if John had lived, they would’ve gotten back together,” the director added. “Eventually, somehow, somewhere.”
Neville has spent his 30-year career piecing together the lives of pop culture’s biggest names: Johnny Cash, Anthony Bourdain, and Steve Martin, to name a few. Now, he’s set his sights on one of the music industry’s biggest living legends: Paul McCartney.
In his new documentary, Man on the Run, Neville details McCartney’s turbulent decade following the split of his boyhood band.
“In the early days, they were feuding, and I think they were all just trying to get away from each other in some ways,” Neville said of the reunion talks.
According to the filmmaker, McCartney had talked with John Lennon about playing on his 1975 album Venus and Mars, so the pair’s feud had “considerably thawed by then.”
To the acclaimed documentarian, it was an issue of time rather than of disdain. Lennon’s untimely murder just 10 years after the breakup put a tragically permanent end to any tentative plans the bandmates may have had in place.
“John had told people that he was looking forward to playing things with Paul, and had definitely thought about it,” Neville said. “Part of why John went back in the studio to do Double Fantasy was having heard Paul’s McCartney II and ‘Coming Up’ and that song and being spurred on by it.”
Neville bookends his film with the band’s breakup and Lennon’s death in 1980, which coincided with the release of McCartney’s second solo album.
“It’s why I ended the film where I ended it and why I called the film Man on the Run, which is Paul trying to escape the shadow of the Beatles throughout that whole decade, which is impossible," Neville told Wilstein.
After Lennon’s death, Neville said there was “no running anymore.”
“If you look at what happens, Paul never records with Wings again. They break up. He starts recording as Paul McCartney for the rest of his entire career,” Neville added. “Suddenly, he’s like, ‘OK, I can be a Beatle, and I can be a Wing, and I can be Paul, and I can embrace all of my history. I don’t have to kind of cordon off part of it.’”
In the same interview, Neville recalled how it felt to watch the documentary beside McCartney and his family, how he inadvertently attended a Stooges reunion rehearsal, and how Steve Martin paid him the best compliment he’s ever received.
“When I started, documentaries were the spinach of filmmaking—good for you, but didn’t necessarily taste good," Neville said. “And I’ve seen such a transformation with documentary since then.”
“To me, it’s the best job there is. It’s the only job I’ve ever really wanted to do,” he concluded.
His McCartney documentary, Man on the Run, is available to watch in theatres globally for one day only on Feb. 19. It will be available to stream on Amazon Prime starting Friday, Feb. 27.
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