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Washington Post
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Documenting a difficult year in the life of a Beatle and his wife
It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure's life. 'One to One: John & Yoko' demonstrates that it's worth the effort. Co-directors Kevin Macdonald ('The Last King of Scotland') and Sam Rice-Edwards have done an impressively deep archival dive to give us this portrait of John Lennon in 1972, the year the ex-Beatle arrived in New York City to stay and embarked on a period of radical politics and art. It was an era of upheaval in American society and a time when Lennon tried to leverage his celebrity to effect change, in ways that made him look simultaneously sincere, committed and naive.
Forbes
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
How Documentary ‘One To One: John And Yoko' Mirrors America In 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."
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
John Lennon and Yoko Ono Documentary Trailer Contains Footage of MSG Benefit Concert: Watch
The post John Lennon and Yoko Ono Documentary Trailer Contains Footage of MSG Benefit Concert: Watch appeared first on Consequence. Following The Beatles' breakup in 1970, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to Greenwich Village to escape tabloid attention. That's the time period explored in the trailer for the new documentary, One to One: John and Yoko. Watch it below. 'I fell in love with an independent, creative genius. I started waking up,' Lennon says about Ono after footage of the couple enjoying New York City is shown. 'I really feel at home here.' Later, the musician discusses his legendary 1972 'One to One' benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, saying he made it free to 'change the apathy that youth have' by singing and speaking to them. 'I would do anything to get them alive again,' Lennon adds. 'Viva la revolución.' Coming from The Last King of Scotland director Kevin MacDonald, One to One: John and Yoko contains never-before-seen material and newly restored footage from the concert. It also features newly remixed music from their son, Sean Ono Lennon, who served as executive producer on the film. Here's the official logline: 'On August 30, 1972, in New York City, John Lennon played his only full-length show after leaving The Beatles, the 'One to One' benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, a rollicking, dazzling performance from him and Yoko Ono… By 1971 the couple was newly arrived in the United States — living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and watching a huge amount of American television. The film uses a riotous mélange of American TV to conjure the era through what the two would have been seeing on the screen: the Vietnam War, The Price is Right, Nixon, Coca-Cola ads, Cronkite, The Waltons. As they experience a year of love and transformation in the US, John and Yoko begin to change their approach to protest — ultimately leading to the 'One to One' concert, which was inspired by a Geraldo Rivera exposé they watched on TV.' One to One: John and Yoko opens in IMAX on April 11th, with a wide release one week later. John Lennon and Yoko Ono Documentary Trailer Contains Footage of MSG Benefit Concert: Watch Eddie Fu Popular Posts Tool Apparently Booed for Disappointing Set at Their Own Festival Dead Kennedys Legend Jello Biafra Joins Cavalera Onstage for "Nazi Trumps F**k Off": Watch Lady Gaga on Meeting Trent Reznor: "I Black Out Every Time I'm in His Presence" Gene Hackman and Wife's Causes of Death Revealed Monty Python and the Holy Grail Returning to Theaters for 50th Anniversary Gene Simmons Charging $12,500 To Be His Personal Assistant and Roadie for One Day Subscribe to Consequence's email digest and get the latest breaking news in music, film, and television, tour updates, access to exclusive giveaways, and more straight to your inbox.
South China Morning Post
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Meet Forest Whitaker's ambitious daughter, True Whitaker: an aspiring actress and screenwriter with sights on Hollywood, she joined her Andor-star dad in drama Godfather of Harlem
Disney+ has just dropped a trailer for the second series of Star Wars: Andor, which will see the return of Diego Luna in the titular role of Cassian Andor, surrounded by the likes of Stellan Skarsgård , Genevieve O'Reilly, Denise Gough and Forest Whitaker, as Saw Gerrera. While Andor series two won't arrive until April, Whitaker, as one of Hollywood's most celebrated actors and directors, will always attract attention – and fans hope his reappearance in Andor will finally reveal what's up with his character's breathing mask. Meanwhile, his daughter hopes to follow in his footsteps. Meet True Whitaker. True Whitaker loved a 'scary' Forest Whitaker book adaptation Keisha Nash Whitaker and Forest Whitaker with children True Whitaker, Autumn Whitaker and Sonnet Whitaker in 2006. Advertisement True, 26, was born in 1998 to Forest and the late actress Keisha Nash Whitaker. According to the New York Post, True, the couple's second child, grew up in Los Angeles alongside her older sister Sonnet, older brother Ocean Alexander (whom Forest had in a previous relationship) and Autumn (whom Keisha had in an earlier relationship). From a young age True was immersed in her father's work, watching – and hearing – him take on a variety of roles on the big screen. Especially memorable was his voicing of gentle beast Ira in the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's enchanting book Where the Wild Things Are. 'The grunts and stuff I've done at home with my kids. When they were younger, I'd do it a lot when I'd read them the book,' Whitaker told Parade in 2009. 'It's sort of been handed down in my family because it was read to me when I was a kid. I read it to all my kids, and now they read it on their own. They loved the scary parts.' She also witnessed her dad struggle off camera Forest Whitaker as dictator Idi Amin in 2006 film, The Last King of Scotland. Photo: Handout Growing up in the Whitaker household also meant that True experienced moments other children probably wouldn't. One such moment was witnessing her father prepare for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland. It follows the brutal tyrant through the eyes of his personal doctor in the 1970s. CBS reported that Whitaker spent an immense amount of time preparing for the role, immersing himself in research and perfecting the character's accent. One day, while rehearsing, he accidentally slipped out of the accent, causing him to worry he might lose it permanently. To avoid this, he stayed in character even when he wasn't on set. At home, that meant speaking in a voice markedly different to his usual tone. 'I tried to let go of it as much as I could,' the actor admitted to Black Film in 2006. 'My daughter would be like, 'Daddy, why are you talking like this?' I would say, 'Just remember, I'm just make-believing for a little while.' She understands.' She studied creative writing at NYU
The Guardian
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Novelist Eimear McBride: studying method acting taught me how to write
Making a person is no mean feat – especially in the absence of sex – and for a character-obsessed novelist, nailing it is everything. But when I started writing at the age of 23, all I seemed to possess was an increasingly urgent impulse in my head and an unaccountable blankness where I'd assumed the conduits of inspiration would be. The inner insistence began picking words and persistence required me to follow them up, but how to expand beyond those first fragmentary bursts? Although largely ignorant of what producing fiction might require, I didn't arrive at the page by myself. I brought Stanislavski with me. More precisely, three years' training in his acting method at the then notorious and now defunct Drama Centre London, where I'd been taught how to make a person, from the inside out. Initially, I didn't connect the worlds. Acting is action. Writing, words. Acting is necessarily collaborative, novels are not. Fiction tends to be made in private, while acting when all alone points to the psychiatrist's couch rather than the silver screen. On top of that, method actors are regularly mocked for their seemingly over-the-top efforts to inhabit their characters; Robert De Niro's 60lb weight gain to play the ageing boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull or Forest Whitaker learning Swahili for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. That said, whatever scepticism surrounds the method process, the proof remains in the performance and there's no denying it often produces emotionally intense, even revelatory experiences for the audience. Naturally enough, I wanted to take that possibility with me. I wanted to see the world through others' eyes. More, I wanted to experience their experience of life. Then share it, unmediated and from their perspective rather than from the difference, or distance, of mine. As an actor, voice and body had been the vehicle for this. As a writer, language would have to do the heavy lifting instead. But repurposing that same intimate, closed-circuit perspective has become the method's real legacy for me. Because, setting aside tales of self-indulgent actors insisting on being called their characters' names off set or getting roughed up to better simulate a physical state, the ambition to access another's unguarded humanity remains at the heart of it. Although Drama Centre taught me many things, the most important 'how to' of this technique was introduced right at the start and drummed in until the very end. Even now I hear it being said: 'Leave your instinct to judge at the door.' Which makes sense because characters, like people, are not constructed from moral positions. A character needs to be left alone to pursue their own ends. To hover above, directing attention to their flaws, is to make a mere puppet with no real life of its own. It cannot be filled with its own thoughts and repressed emotions or driven by irrational fears and self-sabotaging judgments. As with actors who delve no deeper than caricature, novelists who gloss over complexity for the sake of instruction make people no one else has ever known. Of course, not judging others is unnatural to us. People who do bad things are bad people. Except if they are us, or those we love. Then we punish, forgive or justify with finer gradations of thought, feeling, memory and belief. So this must also be the catalyst for understanding those unlike us, or whose behaviour is alien to our own. It's called 'substitution' and, I think, is most readily explained in the quote from the Roman playwright Terence: 'I am a human being, and I think nothing human is alien to me.' This means not only knowing who we are but who else, given a change of circumstances, might be found to be dwelling within. Rather than focus on points of difference, substitution attempts to identify similar or shared impulses, even if they spring from different roots. This intimate knowledge facilitates a richer understanding of what has led the character to become who they are and make the choices they have. Once found, it can be used as an imaginative springboard from which to extrapolate out into their entirely different actions and outcomes, while remaining embedded in truth. For example, I am neither Eily nor Stephen from my new novel The City Changes Its Face and my previous one, The Lesser Bohemians, yet the struggle against brokenness is something I understand. What it is to fail, to try, to need forgiveness, to want to be loved. It doesn't matter if that understanding derives from other sources because once a shared truth is spliced – or substituted – into the fictional story, its logic will remain intact. Same goes for the girl from my debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, who refuses passivity even when the outcomes of her decisions prove carnivorous. Anyone who has ever had to survive their own bad choices, made on the back of unhelpful circumstances, can find examples to work from within. Or my woman from Strange Hotel who wants to let no one – even the reader – in, but who life happens to anyway. Identifying my own attempts at control, and subsequent helplessness at its loss, created enough imaginative energy that she could grow out in wildly differing directions from me yet remain credible in her own right. More challengingly, of course, this also applies to characters who have harmed and subjugated others, for example Stephen's mother, or the uncle in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. I have never done what they did, but to write them I had to find the places of compulsion within myself. Make note of its insatiable selfishness and how easily it can run out of control. So, even in the terrible things those characters had done, there was something not alien to me. Essentially, substitution is about employing a kind of radical empathy. Without empathy, art is nothing more than a flapping mouthpiece for whichever aesthetic, ideology or political point has been placed above the duty to truth. Little wonder then that the method has become so unfashionable of late; in direct opposition to the many locked boxes of contemporary society, which claim we cannot know each other, even in imagination, the method suggests otherwise. That when we allow empathy to lead us down uncomfortable roads and accept that self-knowledge does not always set the heart aglow, we can come to recognise and know one another, deeply, through all the imperfect humanity we share. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion But it requires a beady eye, a steely nerve, the hide of a rhinoceros – and a working knowledge of Ionesco's play Rhinoceros probably won't do any harm. Because the obligation to make works of honesty is one all artists are bound to fulfil. For me, using an adaptation of the method has proved invaluable. Others get there in other ways. Ultimately each artist creates their own process. But the method taught me how to see in the dark, then to recognise the components of all kinds of other people in there. The City Changes Its Face is published by Faber on 13 February. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
