\n<\/p>\n
As recently as 2021, Ringo said there was \u201cno joy\u201d in the film. Did the members of the band actually seem unhappy with it at the time?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, after we watched the rough cut in July, the day before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, John and Yoko [Ono], Paul and Linda McCartney, Peter Brown<\/a> from Apple and me and my girlfriend went out for dinner at Provans in London. The film, I think, was regarded very much as a promising work in progress. There was no snarky business going on. We sat and had a good time like friends do. We talked about our childhoods, had a couple of bottles of wine. When we showed them the final cut in late November, we all went out for dinner again, to a place with a discoth\u00e8que. We all had a nightcap and a chat, and Paul said he thought the movie was good. Ringo was jiving out on the dance floor. He\u2019s a good dancer.<\/p>\n After 54 years, do you think fans will have a different perception of the film?<\/strong><\/p>\n If you see it with no preconceptions, the picture works very well, and it\u2019s clear that you\u2019re looking at four men who have known each other since they were teenagers \u2014 well, three of them anyway \u2014 who love each other as brothers might. But they weren\u2019t any more the Fab Four, the mop tops. A couple of them are pushing 30. They had stopped touring, which is a very big change for a rock \u2019n\u2019 roll group. What you see in the movie is that the affection is eternal between the four of them. But they were living very separate lives now.<\/p>\n During filming, did you get the sense that they were on the verge of breaking up?<\/strong><\/p>\n No, not at all. We started shooting with four Beatles. We ended it with four Beatles. It was not like the San Andreas Fault. I <\/strong>thought they might go off and do their own thing, follow their heart and release separate albums, but then get together, because the Beatles were a very powerful artistic force, and also social force. I didn\u2019t think the Beatles were going to break up till they broke up.<\/p>\n Even critics of \u201cLet It Be\u201d would have a hard time arguing that their final live set on the roof of Apple Corps wasn\u2019t a joyous moment.<\/strong><\/p>\n How lucky can you get that the last line in the movie is from John, up on the roof. The set has been broken up by the police \u2014 which is good, because that\u2019s as many songs as they had rehearsed anyway \u2014 then John says, \u201cAnd I hope we passed the audition.<\/a>\u201d Because if anyone did pass the audition, in that entire decade, it was the Beatles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n