How Documentary ‘One To One: John And Yoko' Mirrors America In 2025

Forbes

07-04-2025

John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York in the 70s
"When my editor, Sam Rice-Edwards, and I were making this, we could not believe that almost every day we were looking at it and saying, 'Oh my God. This is exactly what's going on in America right now,'" recalls director Kevin Macdonald as we discuss new documentary One to One: John and Yoko.
"There was the first black woman running for President, and you had a right-wing populist who is running for President who gets shot on camera. Richard Nixon behaved with great skullduggery and used the power of the White House in an unconventional way. There are so many aspects of this, including the war in Vietnam, which is paralleled today with the war in Gaza and the divisions on the campuses of America, so it feels like we're living through the weird, warped repeat of what happened in the early 70s in America."
The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind The Last King of Scotland uses never-before-seen Lennon family footage and audio, along with the musician's only full-length show after leaving The Beatles, the One to One benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, as the framework for the film.
"I alternate on whether I think that's something the parallels with today are reassuring because it makes you realize that what is happening right now is not the end of the world because America has lived through this before, or whether it makes you think, 'Do we not learn anything? Do we keep just repeating the same mistakes?'" Macdonald muses. "I don't know, but it is remarkable. I didn't set out to make a film about today, but it feels that way."
One to One: John and Yoko, which lands in theaters on Friday, April 11, 2025, in IMAX and theaters, delivers "an immersive cinematic experience" including never-before-seen material and newly restored footage of John and Yoko's only full-length concert and has been newly remixed and produced by Sean Ono Lennon.
"That concert was released once on VHS in 1986 with terrible quality sound and picture, and the reason nothing else was ever done with it was because it was so badly recorded," Macdonald explains. "It's only now that it was able to be properly mixed because there was so much bleed-through from every track on the recording, and I think everyone was stoned when it was being recorded, so nobody did an excellent job. Only in the last couple of years, with the sound technology there is, was anyone able to make an amazing mix. This is the only full-length concert that John Lennon gave after The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. If you want to see him performing at his height, he's 32 years old, he's f**king great and so charismatic, then this is the show to see."
One to One: John and Yoko is not the first time the filmmaker has tackled the narrative of an icon, having previously directed the acclaimed Whitney Houston documentary, Whitney. However, as with that piece, Macdonald needed to find a bigger story to weave around this legendary moment in time. He didn't want this film to be a concert movie because he felt it was more than that.
"It was really about saying, 'Okay, so how do you create a film around that?' I've made a lot of music films and documentaries over the years, and I'm always interested in trying to do something different, to present the past in a different way," he muses. "This presented an opportunity to do an arts documentary, the premise of which was, 'How do you use the shards that are left behind by a life like this?' and not try and overly curate them into a neat narrative. Let's just take all these wonderful things that have not been used before, their home movies and news clips, and present them in a way that seems almost semi-random so that you get the feeling that you, yourself, the viewer, are looking through their archive. You're doing what I was doing, which is looking through the boxes of tapes, and out of that kind of kaleidoscope, you create your own feeling about what you think about them and about the times."
Kevin Macdonald, director of 'One to One: John and Yoko.'
That archive was key and threw up opportunities and realities that he hadn't anticipated, including an interview with John in which he talks about how when he first arrived in America. It struck a chord.
"He learned about the country through TV. He spent so many of those eight years in America watching television. He was an addict, and he says that at the beginning of the film," Macdonald enthuses. "I related to that. I went to America for the first time in the 70s because I had an American grandmother, and we used to go often for holidays. Coming from three TV channels in Britain with the national anthem playing at midnight, and then it goes to black, you go to America, and you have suddenly got 150 channels and all the craziness of this country represented there."
"I wanted to represent that experience as a European going to America at that time, the madness and fun of seeing the world presented in front of you in your living room. That's why I recreated the apartment. On one level, this film is about John and Yoko sitting on their bed watching TV, which doesn't sound very appealing, but other than the concert, it's the other thing in the movie."
Sean Lennon, John and Yoko's son, became integral to the creative process. He gave Macdonald access to everything he had from that period because it "sounded like something his mother would love." The director remembers the first moment he started unpacking the treasure trove.
"These drives showed up from the Lennon archive, and there were hours of this home video footage, filmed in black and white with an early form of a video called Portapak," he recalls. "There was footage from the world feminist conference, John and Yoko in their apartment singing and rehearsing, and then there was all these rushes from a documentary that was never actually made about Yoko's art exhibition that she had in upstate New York. We were fortunate that this is the only period in John and Yoko's lives that you could have done a film like this. At no other period did they allow the cameras in so much and want to be filmed."
"Halfway through the edit, I got a phone call from Simon Hilton, who works with the family and oversees all their archive, and he said, 'We found these tapes in a box that says audio recordings 1972. Do you want to have a listen? We have no idea what they are,' and it turned out to be recordings of all their phone calls. That real treasure trove gives you John and Yoko's unfiltered, intimate voices in a way that most people probably haven't heard before."
Yoko Ono and John Lennon in 'One to One: John and Yoko.'
Macdonald knew from the outset that he wanted the audience to have the same unfiltered experience "of all the great bits."
"There is that experience of when you go through a box of archive and you think, 'Oh, my God. What's this? I can't believe they're saying that.' To have that sense of chaos is amazing, but you're also piecing together what you think about these people from these seemingly disparate random bits. The voices of John Yoko come across very clearly, and I wanted the use of all these different clips to give you a sense of John and Yoko's emotional life in a way that we haven't seen before."
But it wasn't always easy.
"You really feel like you understand their relationship to Yoko's daughter, her being kidnapped, and how that affected both of them, particularly Yoko," the filmmaker concludes. "This theme of damaged children and their own difficult childhoods comes through the documentary. It's how they see these children who are being mistreated at a state-run institution in upstate New York called Willowbrook when they see that on TV, and that's what leads them to do this concert in the first place. I wanted you to have emotional access to John and Yoko that maybe you haven't had before."