The Story Of How A Lost Box Of Tapes Changed John Lennon's New Documentary

Forbes

29-04-2025

It's not often that a forgotten box of tapes that haven't been touched in years – if not decades – changes the course of one of the most high-profile documentaries of the year. But that's exactly what happened during the making of One to One: John & Yoko, the powerful new film co-directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards.
The documentary focuses on John Lennon and Yoko Ono's brief-but-transformative time living in New York's Greenwich Village from 1971 to 1973, and it's built around the couple's One to One benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden. The shows, held in August 1972, were Lennon's only full-length live solo performances after the Beatles split. They took place during a moment of intense political activism in the U.S., as well as one of personal reinvention for the musicians, all as Nixon's second administration was just starting…and then unraveling.
Thanks to newly uncovered archival audio recordings, including intimate phone conversations, the film offers a rare and unusually personal look at Lennon and Ono's private lives during one of their least understood periods.
"Simon Hilton... found this box of tapes that no one had touched in decades," One to One: John & Yoko co-director Sam Rice-Edwards explained during a recent conversation. "It was really a special moment — it was exactly what we were after."
The tapes, discovered deep within the Lennon Estate's archives in New York City, contained recordings of phone calls from when he and his wife lived in Greenwich Village for a time. They taped every conversation, and talks between Lennon and music industry professionals and journalists, as well as several between Ono and others, are used plainly in the film. Fans get to hear them just as they were decades ago. Lennon trying to set up a failed tour of America. Ono defending herself against attacks from the press.
Combined with painstakingly restored footage from the One to One concerts, these recordings allowed the filmmakers to build a documentary that feels less like a conventional rock doc and more like an immersive experience.
"We tried to make a film where you could hang around with John and Yoko in 1972 and see that time through their eyes," Rice-Edwards said. That approach turns everyday moments — answering phones, preparing art exhibitions, sitting in front of the TV — into revelatory insights about two artists that the world can't seem to get enough of. It's hard to find a new and interesting way to cover a musician who has already been the subject of countless pieces of media, and the accomplishment of that goal is one of the great successes of One to One: John & Yoko.
The result has clearly resonated with audiences. One to One: John & Yoko has already grossed more than $600,000 at the global box office, which is an impressive number for an archival-heavy documentary.
In our conversation, Rice-Edwards spoke about the archival discovery and how it completely changed the making of this movie, the challenges of piecing together decades-old material, and why he believes the "mundane" moments tell us more about John and Yoko than any polished biography ever could.
Hugh McIntyre: Sam, I watch a lot of music documentaries, and I'm always thrilled when I get to the end of one and I've learned something and experienced something different. So I want to congratulate you on that.
Rice-Edwards: That's lovely to hear. That's exactly what we set out to do really — something different in an area that's packed full of films that, while not all the same, tend to follow the beaten path and the normal narrative. We wanted to do something fresh and different. We wanted people to come out of the film and feel like they've had a fresh experience.
McIntyre: Which is especially difficult when you're covering maybe the most covered musician of all time.
Rice-Edwards: When Kevin [Macdonald, co-director]
We really focused a lot on letting people spend time with John and Yoko as they were, away from the public eye. We felt that would allow people to get to know them in a way that hadn't really been done before.
McIntyre: For Beatles fans, real John and Yoko fans, that's almost worth the price of admission alone. Getting that inside look at their daily, mundane routines. Gathering flies for the art exhibit.. just the daily humdrum of their lives.
Rice-Edwards: The thing is, in a film we really want to connect to other humans, to learn about other people. And when someone is in the public eye, they have a sort of armor or defense — a barrier to being their true self. Sometimes it shines through, but actually the mundane, as you put it, can often be super interesting when it comes to really getting to know someone. Something that seems boring or unexceptional can actually show you a lot.
We tried to make a film where you could just hang around with John and Yoko in 1972 and see that time through their eyes.
McIntyre: The standout of this film and how you were able to make it was the footage and the audio recordings that no one's ever seen or heard. They're really incredible. Tell me the story — these must have come from Yoko, I assume?
Rice-Edwards: They came from the Lennon estate. What actually happened was we were quite far into editing the film, and someone called Simon Hilton — who's part of the Lennon estate — was over at the archive in their own kind of lock-up in New York. I like to imagine him walking around and stumbling across this dusty shelf, a box no one had touched in decades. It was unlabeled.
But he found these recordings that had been made in 1972, from the exact period we were covering. No one had really listened to them before. It was a special moment — it was exactly what we were after. Getting behind the scenes and spending time with John and Yoko in their everyday lives.
McIntyre: The visual recordings or the audio?
Rice-Edwards: Those were the audio recordings. They had a phone on Bank Street — Line 1, Phone 9 — and everyone called into that phone. They had a recorder hooked up to it. These were recordings made in 1972, and while they had been recorded, they'd never really been listened to. It was kind of crazy, being maybe the fourth or fifth person ever to hear those calls. Quite amazing.
McIntyre: When you're going through both the visual and audio material, some really great stuff made it in. But there must have been so much that just didn't fit. Were there things that stood out, that maybe you wish had been included?
Rice-Edwards: That's actually quite a tricky question to answer, because it wasn't like there was one cut that we had to change to fit in the audio. The cut was constantly evolving. And a big part of the film was presenting the world through John and Yoko's television — Kevin's idea. They watched a lot of TV and believed it could show what humanity was saying about itself.
That meant there was a huge amount of archive material available, because it could be anything that was on American TV in 1972. We were constantly sifting through hours and hours, thousands of clips. Sometimes we didn't even know why something felt right, just that it did, on a gut level.
Some clips lasted three days in the cut, some a week, some a month. What you see in the finished film is really a collection that stood the test of time. A body of material that we think shows the 1972 that John and Yoko experienced.
McIntyre: These concerts were so important to Lennon — his only post-Beatles shows — and you highlight why he was doing them. Why do you think it took so long for there to be a film about these concerts, given how much interest there is in him and The Beatles?
Rice-Edwards: A couple of reasons. First, they were really badly recorded and filmed. The story is that everyone was very high at the concert, and they filmed it poorly. Plus, the initial concert film that aired on TV fifty years ago, they had pulled the negative into tiny pieces to make that, and it had all been stuck back together in crazy sequences.
There was a huge amount of work needed to piece it all back together. A lot of audio work too. We remastered and remixed the tracks. Sean Ono Lennon did that, actually.
People knew the concert existed. They knew it was Lennon's only post-Beatles concert. But the state of the material meant no one really knew what to do with it. So over time, the estate and we together put it back together, remixed it, and now it can be seen in its full glory.
McIntyre: I was about to ask if there was ever an interest in sharing it purely as a concert film, but it sounds like that's not really on the table.
Rice-Edwards: Well, actually that might happen later. There's something in the works — a pure concert version, showing the performance without our film's framing. But the film we made, I don't think it's really a concert film. It's a film that has a concert in it.
With a bit of careful work, you can make it work. There is a lot of great footage. I was kind of joking, but sometimes you'd go through it and there'd be strange camera moves, or the camera would go out of focus for ten minutes.
That actually helped us, visually. We didn't want a classic concert film. We wanted the audience to connect to John and Yoko. So we let shots run very long. We didn't cut all over the place with a frenetic edit. We wanted it to feel like you were actually at the concert. We were sort of forced into that approach, but it ended up being a good place to be forced into.
McIntyre: You've got a great long shot toward the end, when they're jamming and doing 'Give Peace a Chance.' That's a phenomenal ending moment.
Rice-Edwards: Yeah, it felt like the right ending. The end of the concert, and the moment where John turns it back onto the audience. Nixon had won in a way — John had lost the battle, but maybe he won the war. It's a strange analogy when talking about 'Give Peace a Chance,' but that's what it felt like. It was their response: "Give us a chance, there's another way." That sentiment has echoed through time.
McIntyre: As you dug through the thousands of hours of content, what did you learn about John and Yoko that your research prior didn't tell you, things you didn't know before?
Rice-Edwards: It's funny. The whole process really was about getting to know them in a deeper way. Looking back, I don't think I really knew them at the start of the project. They were sort of two-dimensional figures to me, a little thin. But over time, they became three-dimensional, complex characters.
There's a lot I could say. On Yoko's side, I came away thinking she's actually a very strong person. She'd been vilified by the British press, attacked constantly. She also had to fight her way through a very male-dominated avant-garde art scene. Her daughter had been kidnapped by her ex-husband. Despite all that, she still managed to thrive, to live an active and engaged life. That takes an enormous amount of strength.
Another thing that stood out was that they were both always searching for something — especially John. He was always looking to become a better person. From the Maharishi to primal scream therapy, then moving into more political engagement during the timeframe of our film — he was constantly searching, trying to better himself. He had a very curious, searching mind. And I think Yoko was the same.
One more thing I'd mention—they both had very difficult childhoods, for different reasons. John wasn't an orphan, but he never really knew his parents. They were cold with him. From that, I think both he and Yoko had the ability to step outside of social conditioning. They could look at society with a more childlike, wide-open viewpoint. You see that in John's music, in Yoko's artwork. They never just accepted society as it was. They were always kind of on the outside, looking in with an open mind. And I think that really connected them.
McIntyre: Do you know if Yoko has seen the film? Have you heard her thoughts?
Rice-Edwards: Well, just before the film's release, Sean took over running the Lennon estate. He's the person we dealt with directly. He came in for a screening, which was quite amazing. It's obviously so personal for him. It was an emotional experience. We've mainly dealt with him. I can't say categorically whether Yoko has seen it, but I'd like to think she has.
Sean said it was the most truthful portrait of his mother that had ever been made. That meant a lot to him. So I hope that if she has seen it — or when she sees it — she'll feel the same way.