When John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved from London to New York in the wake of the Beatles‘ 1970 demise, they could easily have chosen a life of secluded opulence after years of laboring under the crushing weight of their outsized celebrity. Instead, they secured an unassuming one-bedroom apartment on Bank Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, immersed themselves in the thriving counterculture, and lent their voices to the raging anti-war movement in opposition to the American government’s evermore deadly presence in Vietnam.
They sat for conversations on Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas’ talk shows, bringing Yippie founder Jerry Rubin, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, and consumer advocate Ralph Nader along with them. They helped get White Panther activist and MC5 manager John Sinclair out of a Michigan jail on a marijuana charge. They tried, and failed, to convince Bob Dylan to join them for a tour centered around securing the release of other non-violent criminals from prison. They watched a lot of TV and read even more books. They even tapped their own home phone line, because they figured when the FBI inevitably surveilled or attempted to deport them, they’d at least have a record of their conversations for posterity.
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Then, on Aug. 30, 1972, they did something they’d never again do before Lennon’s 1980 murder–perform a full-length concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden. After watching an exposé on the Willowbrook State School by TV journalist Geraldo Rivera, Lennon and Ono were appalled by not only the conditions of the Staten Island, N.Y., facility but the larger impact on both the intellectually disabled children living there and their families. The cause was particularly meaningful to Ono, whose own daughter Kyoko disappeared in 1971 in the custody of her father, Tony Cox, and spent decades living under a false name in a Christian religious cult (mother and daughter were not reunited until 1998).
This fascinating period in Lennon and Ono’s lives–just before the former decamped to Los Angeles for his disastrous 18-month “Lost Weekend” and three years before the birth of their only child, Sean–is chronicled in the new film ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO, which opens April 11 in IMAX and will roll out to standard theaters and HBO/MAX afterward.
SPIN spoke with director Kevin Macdonald about recreating the couple’s home from scratch, working with Sean Lennon on a complete remix of the concert audio, challenging conventional narratives about Lennon and Ono, and why their influence remains so weighty after all these years.
How did this project come into your orbit? Were you familiar with folks from the Apple world or the John and Yoko estate?
No, it was quite random. I got a call one day from a producer I know who was at that time involved in the film and ended up not being involved in the film. He said, I’ve put your name forward for this film. Are you interested? I met with Peter Worsley, who is the main producer, and chatted a bit about it. To be honest, I was of two minds. There have been so many Beatles films. I was actually offered to do a film for Apple about 10 years ago, but I said no for the same reason, which is that there’s too many things about the Beatles. I thought, now we’re 10 years on and we’ve had the Peter Jackson film [Get Back], which is obviously amazing. What can you do that’s different and what is worth making a film about?
Then, I saw the footage of the concert. I was taken to see Simon Hilton, who is an archivist and producer for the Lennon family estate. I was 13 when John died, which is an age when music is very significant to you. I was one of those teenagers who just fell in love with him. I thought his message was the coolest and I wanted to dress and sing like him. Watching this footage of him in his combat jacket and seeing these songs with such sincerity and power, I thought, of course I should do this. It was my teenage dream. I had an idea very quickly of what the film could be because I’d find quotes from John around that time about how he understood America through watching television. I thought, that’s the way to make something different. I’m very driven to take the form somewhere else.
Sean is now responsible for the estate and this is one of the first big projects he’s done since taking over. I was very lucky that he was incredibly open to the idea. I had a Zoom where I pitched it to him, and he said, that sounds like something my mom would love. He told me to talk to Simon about what I needed and that they’d give us everything from that period. All these home movies showed up on Portapak, which was a black-and-white, very early form of home video. About six months into the edit, I got a phone call from Simon saying, we’ve found this box of audio tapes. Nobody knows what they’re from, but it says ‘1972 Bank Street.’ In a weird way, these became kind of the backbone of the film. It gives you a personal way into the context of the end of the Beatles and what was going on politically at the time.
For myself and [editor] Sam [Rice-Edwards], we wanted to make an experimental film that’s also emotional and engaging. We tried to achieve that through humanizing Yoko. Everyone feels like they know what they think about Yoko, but when you start actually looking with an open mind… my god, this woman had just had her child basically kidnapped from her by her ex-husband. How did that feel? How did that affect her? How did that affect what they wrote and why they did the concert? You think about her in more human terms, and a different kind of narrative opens up. This is probably the only period you could make a film like this about John’s career because afterward, he didn’t do concerts or professionally record the making of his albums. Sean might suddenly reveal hundreds of hours of home movies of him in the Dakota, but this film is of a period when John and Yoko were out and about. They were engaging politically in a huge way and they were documenting their own lives through these recordings.
In the early 1970s, the Beatles were freshly broken up and the narrative that Yoko was responsible was still very popular. Retrospectively, these Madison Square Garden concerts were not particularly well-loved.
It wasn’t well-loved, and I think there’s multiple reasons for that. The album that it came out of [Sometime in New York City] was not one of John’s best, I don’t think. He obviously was really wounded by how badly it was received. It was the first thing he’d done where suddenly, he didn’t automatically get an A-plus. People were very critical of it and the concert itself. The reason the concert has been so little seen is because it was incredibly badly recorded and shot. There are clips on YouTube from the original VHS release from 1986, which is the only other time it has been available. It’s embarrassing. It’s awful. It’s amateurish-sounding. I think the family therefore had felt, we don’t really want this out there. They actually did a digital transfer of the footage 10-15 years ago, but it took until now, with the progression of technology, to be able to clean up the mix.
The story I heard is that everyone was basically stoned and/or drunk and nobody was really paying attention. There was so much bleed from one mic to another. I made the decision to focus on John and Yoko and not worry about the rest of the band. I feel a bit bad that they’re not featured more, but we made this movie about John and Yoko and what was going on inside their heads. That’s why there’s a lot of close-ups of them and it doesn’t cut around too much. All of this has helped transform it. It was dismissed as a concert where he was bad, it was bad, it was political songs nobody cared about. Actually, it just needed a little technical love.
That version of ‘Come Together’ is unlike anything John ever did onstage after the Beatles.
I think you’re right. When I watch the film, the feeling I come away with almost more than anything else is, why the fuck did he not do this more? He’s so good live and he’s such a great performer. Simultaneously, he was incredibly anxious and he’s documented that the reason he didn’t is because he got terrible stage fright. But at these shows, he seemed so relaxed. He’s improvising, throwing in words, and pulling this band together. He’s the beating heart of it, musically, and they hadn’t really rehearsed very much. It was all done in quite an ad hoc way.
It’s fascinating to watch John and Yoko interact with different elements of the counterculture and see how every group wanted a little piece of them. They were figuring out how to be political.
They’ve arrived in New York and they’ve decided that they’re jettisoning their celebrity lifestyle—the estate, the Rolls Royce. They’re going to live in this little, one-room apartment. There were people coming and going all the time, but they were generally left to themselves and people didn’t invade their privacy. They wanted to try and figure out, how can we use our celebrity to actually help the world? They didn’t know how to do that, but they were trying. They wondered, should we help that cause or should we do it in this way? There’s moments of endearing naivety and over-ambition, but more than anything else, I get this sense of open-heartedness. That’s the defining characteristic of what comes across about them, but we all know that was going to change shortly after the time period this covers because they split up and John went to California and had a tumultuous time. Then, they come back together, they have a baby and then he’s basically going to stay in his apartment forever. We use the word ‘transitional’ in the beginning, and I think this is a period where they’re going from being one kind of person to another kind of person.
Interspersed with this, you get these amusing slices of their daily life, like [Ono’s assistant] Dan Richter on the phone ordering hundreds of flies for an art exhibition. All these bizarre inquiries and conversations are so illuminating.
The intimacy of that is just really striking. If you’re a big Beatles nut, you may not learn a lot of new facts from this film, but you’re totally going to feel like, god, now I know what they were like at that time, how they spoke and how they thought about the world. As far as we can tell, and John says this at one point, they recorded these calls because he believed they were being monitored by the FBI. So, why not record them ourselves? This was the phone in their bedroom, which was the only phone in the apartment. There are a lot of calls about deliveries, the flies and the fake exhibition Yoko was trying to do at MOMA. They apparently struggled the entire time they were there to get a second line put in. So, you hear a lot of people complaining that they’ve been trying to get through for three hours because that one phone was being used by everybody in the place.
We also get to see Alan Weberman — the journalist who went through Bob Dylan’s garbage. He’s almost like he’s a proto-Internet troll, 30 years early.
He is, but unlike in the early days of the Internet, people are engaging with him. Lennon and Dylan both engaged with him and took him seriously as a spokesperson for the counterculture. It’s extraordinary to me that they give him the time and that Yoko is explaining things to him and trying to emotionally manipulate him into leaving Dylan alone. Who are the ones actually dealing with this crazy guy? It’s John and it’s Yoko directly, which is remarkable. They’re talking to him. They’re phoning him up. They’re trying to persuade him to retract his insults of Dylan so that Dylan will join their tour. There was a great piece in the New York Times about Weberman going to see [the Bob Dylan biopic] A Complete Unknown in the theater recently, and he’s still got the same opinion. He still thinks Dylan’s a sellout and that this movie is proof of it.
The film shows how John was battling the U.S. government to stay in the country for years. Against the backdrop of the activism he and Yoko were engaged in at the time, you see him reacting very sincerely about how much they were bothering him.
Not only bothering him, but they were basically blackmailing him and threatening him. He doesn’t wind up going on the tour he was planning. What’s interesting is that the government thinks he’s still that much of a threat. In the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon won every state but one, and he won the youth vote. I don’t think John was going to have much success countering that, but they were still terrified of him. The key to the narrative of the film in a way is this moment where they get John Sinclair out of prison. Suddenly, they realize, oh my god, we can actually get people out of jail. We can really do something here.
This may be inside baseball from the documentary maker’s point of view but, often when you’re trying to make a film about a person or period, you’re presented with fascinating bits and pieces from an archive. You have to try and make it into a conventional narrative that seems deliberate and as though everything is neat, which isn’t what reality is like. One of the things that I really enjoyed with this was the feeling that I could put in everything that was interesting. It doesn’t have to all join up exactly. Each time you see it, you’ll make different connections. It’s a different way of representing the past as opposed to through documentary, which I found really exciting.
One key to that is recreating John and Yoko’s apartment. What were your source materials to even determine what was in there at that time?
This wasn’t a very high-budget documentary. I think there was $450,000 in the budget for the actual shooting, and I said, well, we’re not going to shoot anything. We’ll just build and shoot the apartment. They moved in in October of ’71 and moved to the Dakota in March or April of ’73, but there are not that many photographs from the Bank Street house — maybe a dozen. We got the best quality of those that we could and looked at them with microscopic, forensic detail. It was like, what’s that amp? We sourced it from somewhere in Poland or on eBay. Let’s find the turntable that’s somewhere in Scotland. And let’s find that poster that’s actually a map that was published in 1970. My wife is a set decorator who’s now retired — this was her last job. She said it was the hardest thing she’d ever done because it wasn’t like a normal movie where you could just use what feels right. For this, it had to be the right things. We were lucky to get from the estate a list of all the books and records John and Yoko had at this time. We had the bedspread woven and made to match what they had. We tried to be as accurate as we possibly could.
You mentioned Sean’s contributions. I admire that he has taken such an active role in overseeing John and Yoko’s archives, which he very easily could have shunned.
I had two or three Zoom calls with him and met him once. He came to London when we’d locked the cut and he watched it. He was very hands-off, which is obviously a great thing if you’re a filmmaker. He embraced the innovative style in a way that a lot of people wouldn’t have and that really appealed to him—doing something that’s not literal. He’s an artist in his own right who might rather be on tour or in a studio making his own music, but he has this huge sense of responsibility to his parents’ legacy, and he wants to do right by them. They were cultural icons. How do you manage that and still retain your own creativity and your own sense of self? I think he has done an amazing job. I’ve worked with many other family members of estates, and most are not as grounded and focused as he is. He’s not a suit and he’s not an accountant, but he takes it seriously. It’s really admirable.
What did you learn about John and Yoko in this process?
The main thing was getting emotionally inside their heads. In a way, at the heart of the film is this idea of childhood and damaged children. You’ve got Yoko, who is desperate to find her missing daughter. You’ve got John talking about the chip on his shoulder because of his difficult relationship with his parents and the pain of childhood, which is why they responded so strongly to the TV news story about the disabled children living at Willowbrook. At the end of the film, you jump forward and you see lovely Super 8 baby footage of Sean with his mom and dad. We’re seeing them as human beings who had damaging childhoods and terrible personal experiences. Yoko talks about the miscarriages she had when she was in Britain with John and she attributes it to the misery of the Beatles’ breakup. In addition to that, to see John live, sounding fucking great, totally engaged artistically and politically, is amazing. If you’re a Beatles fan or a Lennon fan, you haven’t seen that. He’s a virtuoso musician with an incredibly expressive and emotional voice. That’s one of the reasons I’m so pleased we’re getting a theatrical release and, particularly, that it will be shown in IMAX for a week exclusively to begin with.
I loved the clips of them on talk shows like Dick Cavett’s, where they were given hours of time to talk about whatever was on their mind or introduce other interesting people in their orbit. It’s almost quaint that this is how they chose to use their celebrity status.
You see them doing their homework in public. You see them working out what they think and admitting when they get things wrong. They misspeak. They change their minds. I don’t think you see that now. Everything is so manufactured and manicured, particularly from celebrities, that you just don’t get that sense of direct humanity. When I’ve shown the film to younger people who don’t know anything about this period or even necessarily know a lot about the Beatles, they’re so struck that these huge celebrities are marching in the streets. They’re living the life they proclaim they believe in. What was going on politically in 1972 seems to be an echo of what’s happening now. Populist politicians, race, attempted assassinations, conflict on college campuses—it’s all the same stories, just in a different order. To me, that’s fascinating. I hope it won’t just be the old Beatles fans who go see this film. There’s a younger audience who could find new kinds of heroes in John and Yoko.
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