What drew you to make One to One?
Kevin MacDonald: I was contacted by Peter Worsley, the producer, through a mutual friend. Peter had been trying to make a film about Lennon and this period of the One to One concert for a number of years and had finally managed to get all the permissions lined up and to get Mercury Records on board and enthusiastic about it. I had been, and continue to be, a big Lennon fan. And so—although I was scared by the question of what is there new to say about John Lennon at this late period—I thought I would love to find a way to make a film that was different about this period in his life and American history.
You're a big Lennon fan. Why?
KD: I got into the Beatles very young, when I was ten or eleven. I must have heard them on the radio. I asked my parents for a Beatles record for my birthday and they got me The Red Album and The Blue Album. I listened to them obsessively and became a fan. And when Lennon was shot in 1980, it was the first star I felt a personal connection with who died in that way. I actually felt it.
Like a lot of people, I was taken by the examination of Lennon that went on in the press, as being this incredibly thoughtful person who was unafraid of trying to be truthful to himself, which sometimes made him feel really unappealing and other times made him feel incredibly modern and self-analytical in a way that celebrities really weren't then. His level of honesty and authenticity was way ahead of its time. In the period that we're covering—1971 to 1973—no other rock star is doing things like embracing feminism. Every rock star was a macho pig. In the heyday of Led Zeppelin, here is John going to the first international feminist conference! I thought, “Wow, that's the sign of somebody who's really questing to understand himself.”
How did you decide to structure One to One in the way that you did?
KD: Very early on I decided I wasn’t going to try and chase old men on their deathbeds to get their last John Lennon anecdote—which they've probably told before. I thought: I’m not going to try to be in any way definitive. Wouldn't it be interesting to just see who is the John, who is the Yoko, who appears out of the archive material? This period around the concert is the period when John and Yoko are most on camera—they either had their own cameras or they had other people filming. I thought: There's enough here that we could just let them speak for themselves, allow the audience to eavesdrop on them and allow that to be part of the fun of the film. I think that's much more interesting than a traditional biopic, where the filmmakers are trying to present a very coherent version of things. As we all know, life is chaotic and contradictory.
I started to hear a lot of interviews with John where he talked about spending a lot of time watching TV when he arrived in New York. He was fascinated by it. I remember going to America myself in my early teens, and coming from Britain—where we had two or three TV channels—the embarrassment of vulgar riches on American TV was an incredible thing to behold. I think John felt the same way. We had a lot of fun thinking: Okay, so John was obsessed with TV. He's sitting there in his basically single room apartment, watching it. We went on this great trawl of watching news footage and commercials and all the stuff you see in the film to conjure a sense of the time and the place and the concerns.
What was it like, going through all that television footage from the 1970s?
KD: The main sense was, “My god, very little has changed.” Race was a huge issue. The environment was a huge issue. The nature of American politics—conspiracy theories, assassinations—all the same things are there. In some ways that's reassuring, because you think: We've been here before. But it’s also depressing. We haven't dealt with race, we haven't dealt with the environment, we haven't dealt with pacifism. We haven't moved on.
In One to One, we see how much John and Yoko really wanted to see those things dealt and how dedicated to that they were as artists.
KD: Absolutely. This is the period when they're most outspokenly politically, when they believe that they can use their celebrity to change things. And through the course of the film, you see them moving away from that idea into more of a feeling that all a person can do is grow their own garden. And therefore the One to One concert becomes something that they can do to, in a small way, make the world a better place [by raising funds for Willowbrook]. It feels to me that journey is familiar to a lot of people—you try and foment revolution and change the world in huge ways, but in the end, you just do good things for the people you can actually help. The film is about disillusionment with direct-action politics and an embracing of the more personal.
You placed an incredible focus on reproducing the apartment just as it would have been when John and Yoko were living in it. Why was that important?
KD: One answer is simply that those kind of reconstructions are done in documentaries quite frequently and they're usually done badly. So if you're going to do it, do it really well. And I was lucky enough to work with my wife, who's an Oscar-nominated set decorator, who did the set decoration. The other answer is—it's hard to articulate—but that somehow, you have the sense of their presence. To be in the place where they are watching the TV makes it all feel more real.
How was it partnering with Mercury Records to do this film?
KD: I thought when I suggested, “Well, I'm going to make a non-narrative film, and it's going to have a reconstruction of this apartment, and there's going to be no information other than what John and Yoko give us, and there’s going to be all of these clips of TV,” that they would run a mile or say, “No, do something more accessible.” But they were great. They were incredibly supportive. We spent a lot of money building and shooting on that set. They were happy to trust my take on it. I also feel genuinely very lucky to have had the opportunity to use all of this amazing material from the Lennon family. That was a real privilege.
What surprised you as you were bringing together all this disparate material?
KD: A multitude of things. Very early on, I was talking to Simon Hilton, who is the archivist for the Lennon estate, and I asked, “Why did Lennon go to America?” And he said, “Well, they were partly escaping the bad feeling towards Yoko and they also went looking for Yoko's daughter.” I said, “What?!” I didn't know she had a daughter. And I talked to a lot of other people who didn't know that. It's not a secret, it's just nobody knows that or knows that they went to America and spent years looking for her. But when I looked through the footage, I started to see: Oh yes, Yoko’s talking about that. She's talking about being a mother. Why does she do the One to One concert? To support children who have been abandoned. Yoko has often been portrayed as a cold person who put art above all, but I find it terribly moving in the film when she talks about her daughter. Certainly, one of the ways to look at the film as a thematic progression is that it is about children. It's about John and his inner child and how he never really escaped what happened to him as a child. It's about the children of Willowbrook. It's about Yoko’s daughter. And ultimately, it's about Sean coming along, in a way as a symbol of rebirth.
There were lots of other surprising things. Six months into the project, I was sent a bunch of recordings of phone calls that John and Yoko made exactly in my period, which had never been heard before. You get this blast of authenticity and a real sense of who they are when the cameras are off—and obviously there’s the chilling phone call where somebody says to John, “You're not frightened that this might lead to an assassination?” And John says, “Don't worry, I don't aim to get shot. I'm an artist. I'm not a politician.”
As you go back to One to One now that it's complete, what most stays with you?
KD: The story of Kyoko and how that emotionally impacted Yoko and how it underlies what she and John are doing. Linked to that, I really love the performance Yoko gives at the end of the film, of the song “Age 39.” She's singing, in a very vulnerable way, about how she's a 39-year-old woman. She's talking about the loss of her daughter, about how she has contemplated suicide. And I love the way that the film does this flip at the end and the final perspective on everything is actually Yoko's, and it's a feminist perspective. That touches me every time I see it.
I also fell in love with Allen Ginsberg, who appears in quite a bit of the footage. There’s the moment at the end where he's at the Democratic Convention sitting on the floor when the convention rejects a motion to promote homosexual rights. And he also delivers that great poem about toilet paper. Funnily enough, we contacted the Ginsburg estate, and they had not heard of that poem. So we've also uncovered a previously unknown Ginsburg poem.
What do you hope people will take from the film?
KD: In one way, it's the ultimate open-ended film. You have to take it all in and have your own response to it. There are the shards of these people's lives as they appear in archival footage and the shards of that period as they maybe saw it on television. It's not a neat jigsaw puzzle, but it is something you can immerse yourself in.
I hope people come away feeling that they understand better who these two people were—that they were trying to make the world a better place and that that was done from a place of real integrity but also from a place that didn't take itself totally seriously. They had a sense of humor about themselves and the modesty to accept when they couldn't change things.
After the Beatles broke up, during the early years John and Yoko were together, John wrote the songs that fifty years on remain our anthems for peace: ”Imagine,” “Give Peace a Chance,” “Instant Karma.” They have a simple message of peace, but they came out of somebody who clearly battled the difficulties in his life, who’s clearly also, in some way, drawn to violence. That's why he's drawn, originally, to Jerry Rubin. But then he sort of wakes up again. He goes, “Why am I doing this stuff with Jerry Rubin? He's gonna take all these kids to Miami to the Republican convention and get them beaten up. I have to remember that actually peace is the great message that I have.”
The message of peace can seem very banal, you know. You can see it as so simple that it's meaningless. But when you understand that John is coming to that message after a lifetime of hard knocks—his mother dying, abandoned by his father, working-class upbringing, very public split with the Beatles, very public split with his first wife—you understand he’s gotten to that very simple message after a lot of self-analysis and thought.