‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy’… the revelatory cinematic ballad of John and Yoko
A new documentary film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono reveals how central the Japanese artist was to Lennon’s development as an artist and man.
If you think everything that could be said has been said about John Lennon, think again.
Lennon’s 1972 Madison Square Garden concert with his wife, Yoko Ono – his only full-length live show post-The Beatles – is the focus of a new film, One to One: John & Yoko.
Due to the passage of time and new technologies, we are all able to enjoy what was a monumental concert event.
The film is directed by Kevin Macdonald, a Scot known for the music documentaries Marley and Whitney, his Oscar-winning political doc One Day in September (a riveting account of the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics), as well as feature films including The Last King of Scotland and The Mauritanian. We spoke at last year’s Venice Film Festival where One to One: John & Yoko world premiered.
“The impulse to make the film comes from the fact there’s this amazing performance by Lennon, which hasn’t been seen,” explains Macdonald. “But at the time, the concert was not well received. This was partly because the sound quality in the auditorium was so bad (Phil Spector was in charge of sound recording) and I think John was upset about that. And it’s why he never did another one.
“My sense is that everyone was drunk or stoned when they were filming it. There were seven cameras, which should be enough, but there are moments where you’ve got three cameras looking at somebody’s back. I was interested in seeing their faces, particularly John’s face, so I stuck on the close-up, which was filmed with one camera. It’s not the most beautifully filmed concert, but there’s a rawness to it, which is great.”
A politicised filmmaker, Macdonald was keen to contextualise the concert with the couple’s life in New York, when Lennon and Ono lived for 18 months in the West Village before moving to the Dakota Building where Lennon was assassinated in 1980. The film includes unseen material from the Lennon archives, including personal phone calls (which Lennon recorded as he worried his phone was bugged by the American authorities, which proved correct) and home movies filmed by the couple.
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“In 1971 they went to America to get away from Britain, but also to find Kyoko,” notes Macdonald, referring to Ono’s daughter who had been abducted by her father. “They decided to give up their celebrity lifestyle and to live in this tiny apartment in the West Village, which was then a rough area. People describe how you could just knock on their door and walk in and sit on their bed and chat. They had a very conscious desire to reinvent what it is to be a star, what it is to be a celebrity.
“One of the things I find appealing about John is that he was still asking: how do you lead a good life? What do you do after you’ve been in the biggest band in the world? How do you conduct a love affair of equals? Having been a sort of self-confessed male chauvinist when he was younger, he was always asking these questions.”
In the film, Macdonald was keen to rectify how we view Ono.
“There was definitely a bit of racism in the way the British press treated her in the late ’60s and early ’70s, because she was very much her own woman and an artist and took no bullshit,” he says.
“She wouldn’t play the game, and the press hated that. People were like, ‘Oh, Yoko can’t sing’. But in the film, you see her sitting on the floor in their apartment singing The Luck of the Irish in beautiful harmony with John. And then in the concert you hear her doing this sort of proto punk kind of screeching and getting her angst over her daughter into the performance. She was being a punk before punk existed.”
He notes how Lennon respected Ono as a woman and as an artist.
“She didn’t take any shit from him, so they had quite a feisty relationship, but one of equals,” Macdonald says. “At that time it was quite rare to have that, particularly to have this guy who is so powerful, so famous, but who actually wanted to say, ‘look at her as much as you look at me’.
“She changed who he was as an artist and showed him a way to set aside what The Beatles were and to try to do something new artistically.”
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John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York in the ’70s
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John and Yoko at Butterfly Studios, New York, August 1972. Photo: © Bob Gruen
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John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York in the ’70s.
The film notes how Ono suffered three miscarriages and only had one child with Lennon, their son Sean, who remastered the sound of the concert for the film and now controls the Lennon Estate, having taken over from Ono, who is now 92 and reportedly in poor health.
“When I showed the film to Sean, the first thing he said to me was, ‘this is the first film that really gets my mother’,” Macdonald says.
Initially the director aimed to explain how the One to One concert, which was in aid of disabled children, came about.
“John was trying to use his celebrity in a good way, which a lot of celebrities do today. But he’s also saying, ‘I’m an ordinary person like you, and I’m trying to understand my life and my times. I can do something small to make a few people’s lives better, and that’s maybe a better way to live your life’.
“The disabled children were living in the most horrible situation and they wanted to make their lives better. They raised a million dollars at the concert and gave it to them so they could have one-to-one care, which is where the concert’s title comes from. Sean said it’s the kind of film his parents would have liked.”
The film shows how the couple’s life in the US included mixing with artists and political radicals, such as the poet Allen Ginsberg. Yet what initially piqued Macdonald’s interest was when he heard interviews with Lennon explaining how he learned about the country through watching TV and how he spent his first two years doing that.
“I thought that was interesting so we could replicate that idea,” says Macdonald, who built a replica of Lennon and Ono’s apartment with the help of his Oscar-nominated set-decorator wife, Tatiana.
“I wanted to put the audience into their shoes and feel like you’re watching TV with them,” he says.
Of course, he was guessing at what they were watching but tried to show politically and historically what was going on at that time.
“It was important for us to see Vietnam in all its horror,” Macdonald says. “It’s all very well to hear him say that the Vietnam War is terrible. But until you see that footage of the bloody conflict, you don’t realise, oh, this is like Gaza.
“And that’s the other thing that struck me as I was watching all this material – is that 50 years later we’re in the same place about race, we’re in the same place about war and protest. It feels to me like America’s in the same place.”
One to One: John & Yoko is currently in cinemas and streams on DocPlay from July 21.
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019 she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema.