With the restored version of the 1970 Beatles documentary Let It Be scheduled to premiere May 8 on Disney+, a new featurette about the movie has debuted on Walt Disney Studios’ YouTube channel. The video features snippets of a conversation between Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and filmmaker Peter Jackson. Jackson, of course, created the 2021 docuseries The Beatles: Get Back with unused footage shot by Lindsay-Hogg for his flick.
In the clip, Jackson asks Lindsay-Hogg what he thinks of the restored film, and he responds, “It really looks beautiful. And I think it’s wonderful Let It Be may have a new life in the sunshine.”
Let It Be offers what many consider a negative look at the Fab Four. It captures the tensions between the band members as they worked on the songs that would eventually appear on The Beatles’ final studio album. That being said, the film does culminate with joyous footage of the Fab Four’s famous final concert on the roof of the headquarters of the band’s Apple Corps company in London.
“Let It Be is an entirely different part of the Beatles story,” Lindsay-Hogg maintains in the featurette. “The Beatles that we’d grown up with were not The Beatles in Let It Be. They were changing.”
Jackson and Lindsay-Hogg Share Details About the Let It Be Film
Jackson shares some background about the January 1969 sessions that were filmed for the movie.
“In that one month, they not just wrote and recorded the songs that appeared on the Let It Be album,” he notes. “They were composing the majority of the Abbey Road songs, plus they were working on solo songs.”
Lindsay-Hogg then explains, “Yeah, one of the fascinating things about Let It Be, it was originally gonna be a concert movie with The Beatles, but then after about 10 days, we’re not doing a concert anymore. We’re doing a documentary.”
The Let It Be director also discusses a technique he used to try to capture the band members in candid moments during the sessions.
“You’ll notice the shot of Paul [McCartney] is looking down on him, ’cause I put a camera up in the gantry,” Lindsay-Hogg points out. “It was, I thought, the appropriate choice to try to get them to reveal themselves insofar as they ever wanted to.”
Jackson then comments, “And you deserve enormous credit for having the insight to do that.”
Incidentally, Let It Be’s restoration was done by a post-production facility owned by Jackson’s Wing Nut Films production company.
