What was the impetus to create One to One?
Peter Worsley: I was having conversations with people in the Lennon estate and I found out that there was this One to One concert that was the only concert John gave after leaving the Beatles before his death. The actual footage of it was in a terrible state because it had been stored in a lock up and involved in a mudslide and it was all over the place. I found out that the Lennon team had been trying to restore it and wanted to remaster the concert. I found out that the impetus for the concert was an exposé by Geraldo Rivera on the terrible conditions in the Willowbrook children's home. That made us start to think about telling a bigger story around the concert.
A few years earlier, I had produced—with the Lennon estate—a documentary about the making of the Imagine album in Tittenhurst in London. So we started talking about some of the themes and ideas around the One to One concert. We started sketching out a story and making it very focused around this specific period. And then the conversation with Alice and Mercury Records evolved, particularly once we'd got Kevin MacDonald to agree to direct. Kevin seemed a really good choice—if you look at his previous music docs, like the Bob Marley doc and the Whitney Houston doc, he's so good at telling music stories and opening them out.
Kevin and I spent a lot of time thinking about the challenge that so much has already been said about John and Yoko. And it was Kevin's genius to come up with the grammar, if you like, of how to tell this story in a very original way. We agreed from the start that it didn't need to be a straight, linear documentary.
Alice Webb: It would have been so easy just to create a film about the concert. But this film has a very specific viewpoint and the concert is a vehicle to emphasize what was going on in John and Yoko's life. The most important thing for us in conceiving this film was that it add to the canon of work around John and do justice and give due weight to Yoko's role.
So this isn't a music film, it happens to have music in it. We felt like we had all the right ingredients—Kevin, Peter, the right backing of the estate, which had to trust but couldn't be watching over the film. Once we felt like we had all those conditions, then it was about creative nerve.
PW: Alice mentions getting the confidence of the estate. A key part of that was the estate handing us material that has never been seen before, like the phone conversations that John recorded. Even Sean and Yoko had never heard those because they'd never been digitized. They were just sitting on tapes in a box somewhere and the video archivist Simon Hilton was like, “Oh, what about these tapes? We're not quite sure what's on them.” When we first heard those, we knew that we had material that was very much the intimate voice of John and Yoko.
On top of that, the estate found the home movie footage that John and Yoko filmed on very early portapack cameras, which is the footage you see at the end of the film of the journey they take to Harvard to the international feminist conference—again, that has never been digitized or seen. And that beautiful performance of Yoko singing “Age 39,” which she sings towards the end of the film. And finally, when we were struggling to get an ending to the movie, they said, “Oh, we've got this home movie footage of Sean as a baby,” and that pulled together so beautifully the theme of Yoko's looking for Kyoko. For the estate to have the confidence in Kevin as a filmmaker and us as a team to let us have access to this footage—as a producer, I have enormous humility. This is very personal footage, which the estate is giving us the honor to use.
You mention that so much has been said, it’s a challenge to cast new light on who John and Yoko were. What more did you each feel that you came to understand about these two people as you made One to One?
AW: I don't know any other film that has Yoko so faithfully depicted. I think that the partnership between them is so clear—to see them onstage together doing the concert, to see the way that they are together. Historically it's always been John… and Yoko. Every other film feels like Yoko is there in support of John. But in this film Yoko steps forward to her rightful position. She was his life's partner and this film depicts that.
It also depicts the fact that John took the things are important to her very seriously, so that we have the incredible scenes where he's at the feminist conference, where the women at the conference are voting on whether men should be allowed to be there and he's the only man there! This was a time of incredible growth for them, I'd say arguably more for John than for Yoko, who was very clear who she was. She was able to help John to work out who he was, post Beatles.
PW: I found the musical partnership between the two of them really interesting. If you watch the concert closely, it's really touching. I'm thinking, Yes, Yoko is an artist, but she's not performed in front of 20,000 people before. But she stands up and does it and I think the film helps understand Yoko as a musical performer. When you see the performance of “Don't Worry, Kyoko,” which is the song that she sings—if you just hear that cold without any context—it's quite a difficult listen. It's a real cry from the from the depth of her soul, which is: I'm coming for you. I will find you, my daughter. You understand where her musical performance comes from, and it has this kind of incredibly powerful proto punk aspect to it. And then when you hear her singing that acoustic song at the end, “Age 39,” when she's talking about aging and what that means to her, you also realize that when she's singing as she is in “Don't Worry, Kyoko,” it's a choice of hers. She has a beautiful voice. She's a real musician. And I think that's something which will surprise people when they see the film, and they begin to understand much more about her as a musical artist.
AW: Also, there's a humor in the film, whether that's in the footage they filmed as they went on some of their travels but also just in the interplay. There was Yoko doing her art installations, all the work with the flies. They were both artists.
The other major relationship in this film is John’s and Yoko’s relationship with the United States. There are a couple of points in One to One where they talk about how much they love the U.S. Why do you think that was?
PW: The first thing to remember is the specific reason they came to America was to look for Kyoko. Nobody realizes that. And the tragedy was that they didn't find her. John never saw Kyoko again before his death.
I do think they had the ability to find themselves as a couple in New York in a way that was probably very difficult to do in England.
AW: I think they also felt a sense of possibility in New York with everything that was going on politically. John is really clear that they have a—to use a terrible modern word—platform, and they are desperate to use it for positive change. And obviously, the film pivots when it becomes clear to John that the kind of the people that he thought were prosecuting an agenda similar to his of optimistic change weren't in fact, which is why he then doubles down on that sense that it is actually all about love. It's the much harder challenge of looking at yourself and being a better human being. The scales fall from their eyes, which is why Willowbrook had such a resonance with them, both in terms of their own personal search, but also it was a very visible demonstration of them turning away from the political violence that was being advocated by others.
You include so much American television from the early 1970s, right down to commercial breaks. Can you speak to the experience of watching that material?
PW: In the previous film we did about John in Tittenhurst in England, in the same way, they had a beautiful house and at the bottom of the bed was a television. And John would stay all day in bed watching television. But in England, he had two channels, BBC and ITV. So to arrive in New York and have had 30 channels or something would have been an incredible change to his ability to absorb information. I do think it was transformational for him, in terms of sucking in information in that way.
One of the things I still enjoy about watching the film is there are little connections you can make by how all these little snippets of commercials are dropped in. They talk differently to you when you see the film the second or third time. I think that's one of the very interesting things that Kevin has done, layering the film. And people do flick through channels like this. I do think it's a way to understand the experience John and Yoko were having, being stimulated and also appalled by the world they were seeing around them.
AW: The ambition of the film was that this was the only lens through which you could see what's going on in this country. I think that was an incredibly brave ambition and I think it's paid off in spades. But it was a high-wire act.
Let’s talk about the apartment you recreated for the film.
PW: When we started the film, we found that their actual apartment had just been sold and we went and visited it. The whole apartment was in the process of being demolished. Had we started the film three months earlier, we could have filmed everything in their apartment, because then it was still pretty much as it had been 50 years earlier. But by the time we arrived, it was a building site. We did manage to get the apartment floorplan. And then the production design team did an amazing job of reconstruction using photographs and film from the time.
We looked at the inventory of records that John and Yoko had. All of the books that you see we either identified from photographs or from their inventory. Everything on the wall, the pieces of artwork… we knew that there would be Lennon obsessives watching the film so the amplifier is a very specific model that we identified through an audio expert. We then managed to find an identical copy, which was owned by someone in Poland, and we went and got hold of it. The guitars, obviously, had to be identical models; we managed to find those. All of the clothes.
I remember being told off by one of the people in the Lennon estate because the glasses that we had didn't have the right correction level and that John had much shorter eyesight. They gave us access to lyrics and set lists and doodles that we then copied. We bought the exact model of typewriter that John and Yoko had in the day. The quilt was a black and white quilt, which the Lennon family still have, but it is in a poor state. They wouldn't let us use it, but they gave us exact dimensions, and we wove a new quilt to be an exact match. And John and Yoko had a Snoopy pillowcase. I think that's a lovely detail, that's what John and Yoko were sleeping on. When the Lennon archivist came to visit the set, it was a very emotional experience. It was like an incredible museum piece that we were filming in.
AW: Now you understand the obsessive nature of the producers of this film (laughter).
What would you what would you like audiences to take from One to One?
AW: To understand more of who Yoko is. To see their relationship as a real partnership. To see John's journey of personal betterment. There's that line where he says, “By 1973 I might be a whole man.” I might be, you know—this idea that betterment isn't done, you don't get there, you keep going with it.
I’d love people to be enthralled by the format of the film. And I think that will happen naturally. You have to lean forward to watch this film. You could watch it a dozen times and see something new in it. That's really refreshing in a world of filmmaking where everything can get served up to you. I love the fact that this film requires you to engage your brain, and we're unapologetic about that. Engage your heart too, but your brain as well.
PW: Obviously there are contemporary political resonances, moments that send a bit of a shiver down your spine. You see the parallels between an election campaign in 1972 and an election campaign coming up in 2024. You hear Shirley Chisholm after meeting Governor Wallace, who’s been shot, and she talks about the fact that we have to find ways to come together. I think it speaks as strongly today as it ever has.