A new Beatles song called “Now and Then,” billed as the final song from the legendary band, will be released on Thursday, November 2nd. The following day, a music video for the song,” helmed by Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson, will premiere.
Jackson previously directed the 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back, which chronicled the making of the band’s 1970 album, Let It Be. In a lengthy statement, he detailed how his follow-up Beatles project came to be:
“When Apple asked me to make the music video, I was very reluctant – I thought my next few months would be a hell of a lot more fun if that tricky task was somebody else’s problem, and I could be like any other Beatles fan, enjoying the night-before-Christmas anticipation as the release of a new Beatles song and music video approached – in 1995, l loved the childlike excitement I felt as the release of ‘Free As A Bird’ was inching closer.
I could have that experience once again – all I had to do was say no to The Beatles.
To be honest, just thinking about the responsibility of having to make a music video worthy of the last song The Beatles will ever release produced a collection of anxieties almost too overwhelming to deal with. My lifelong love of The Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down. This created intense insecurity in me because I’d never made a music video before, and was not able to imagine how I could even begin to create one for a band that broke up over 50 years ago, had never actually performed the song, and had half of its members no longer with us.
It was going to be far easier to do a runner.
I just needed a little time to figure out a good reason for turning The Beatles down – so I never actually agreed to make the music video for ‘Now And Then’ (in fact I still haven’t to this day).
I told Apple how the lack of suitable footage worried me. We’d need to use a lot of rare and unseen film, but there’s very little … Nothing at all seemed to exist showing Paul [McCartney], George [Harrison] and Ringo [Starr] working on ‘Now And Then’ in 1995 … There’s not much footage of John in the mid-seventies when he wrote the demo … I grizzled about the lack of unseen Beatles footage from the ’60s … And they didn’t even shoot any footage showing Paul and Ringo working on the song last year.
A Beatles music video must have great Beatles footage at its core. There’s no way actors or CGI Beatles should be used. Every shot of The Beatles needed to be genuine. By now I really had no idea how anyone could make a ‘Now And Then’ music video if they didn’t have decent footage to work with, and this was far from being a lame excuse. My fear and insecurity now had solid reasons why they should prevail and allow me to say no without looking too much like a chicken.
I knew The Beatles don’t take no for an answer if their minds are set on something – but they didn’t even wait for me to say no. I found myself swept along as they quickly addressed my concerns. Paul and Ringo shot footage of themselves performing and sent that to me. Apple unearthed over 14 hours of long forgotten film shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then,’ and gave all that to me. Sean [Ono Lennon] and Olivia [Harrison] found some great unseen home movie footage and sent that. To cap things off, a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of The Beatles and never seen before, was kindly supplied by Pete Best.
Watching this footage completely changed the situation – I could see how a music video could be made. Actually, I found it far easier if I thought of it as making a short movie, so that’s what I did… My lack of confidence with music videos didn’t matter anymore if I wasn’t making one.
Even so, I still had no solid vision for what this short film should be – so I turned to the song for guidance.
After we had separated John’s voice on the demo tape over a year ago, Giles had produced an early mix of ‘Now And Then.’ This had been sent to me back in 2022. I loved it. Since then I must have listened to ‘Now And Then’ over 50 times, purely for pleasure.
Now I started listening to it intently for different reasons. I was hoping that ideas or inspiration for the short film would somehow float up from the music. And that began to happen. As I kept listening, it felt like the song was creating ideas and images that started forming in my head – without any conscious effort from me.
I teamed up with Jabez Olssen, my Get Back editor, to try and figure ways the new film footage could be used to support these wispy ideas. It was a very organic process, and we slowly started build little fragments, sliding pictures and music around in different ways until things began to click in.
We wanted the short film to bring a few tears to the eye, but generating emotion using only archive footage is a tricky thing. Fortunately, the simple power of this beautiful song did a lot of the work for us, and we finished the first 30 or 40 secs of the film fairly quickly.
Having done that, we jumped straight to the ending and tried to craft something that could adequately sum up the enormity of The Beatles’ legacy – in the last few seconds of their final recording. This proved to be impossible. Their contribution to the world is too immense, and their wondrous gift of music has become part of our DNA and now defies description.
I realised we needed the imagination of every viewer to do what we couldn’t, and have each viewer create their own personal moment of farewell to The Beatles – but we had to gently steer everyone to that place. I had some vague ideas, but didn’t really know how to achieve this.
Fortunately, Dhani Harrison happened to be visiting NZ at this time. I discussed the ending with him, and described one vague idea I’d been toying with. His eyes immediately filled with tears – so that is the way we went.
Jabez and I now began thinking about the middle section. We could actually watch the beginning and end now, and quickly realised our initial plan of having similar emotional power continue through this middle section would be completely wrong. That was not who The Beatles were. At their core they were irreverent and funny, and the middle section should capture that spirit. We needed to laugh at The Beatles, and laugh with them. They were always sending themselves up – and the more seriously other people took them, the more they would clown around.
Luckily we found a collection of unseen outtakes in the vault, where The Beatles are relaxed, funny and rather candid. These become the spine of our middle section, and we wove the humour into some footage shot in 2023. The result is pretty nutty and provided the video with much needed balance between the sad and the funny.
It was finally finished after WētāFX completed a few simple, but tricky VFX shots.
To be honest, while we hope we’ve given The Beatles a suitable final farewell, that’s something you’ll need to decide for yourselves when it’s finally released – only a few days from now.
Having got to the end, I’m very happy I’m not waiting for the release of somebody else’s ‘Now And Then’ music video. I have genuine pride in what we made, and I’ll cherish that for years to come. A huge thanks to Apple Corps and the Fabs for giving me all the support I needed – and not allowing me to wriggle away.”
As previously reported, “Now and Then” originally began its journey as a home demo of John Lennon’s, which was then worked on by the other three Beatles in the mid-90s, during the same period that they made their only other post-breakup songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love.” At the time, though, a loud hum in Lennon’s original recording rendered the demo essentially unusable, and though an effort was made to flesh the song out, it was ultimately abandoned.
However, in 2021, while working on Get Back, Jackson and his team utilized WingNut Films’ MAL audio AI technology to separate and isolate tracks that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise — including “Now and Then.” From there, McCartney set out to finally finish “Now and Then” alongside George Martin’s son, Giles Martin, combining the original demo with the old material recorded with Harrison and Starr in the ‘90s, new material recorded in 2022 (including a new drum part from Starr), and audio samples from the original recordings of “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “Because.” And thus, a new Beatles song was born.
“Now and Then” will see release on Thursday, November 2nd, with Jackson’s video following on Friday, November 3rd at 10:00 a.m. ET.
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