The Beatles Films Podcast

By Ed Williamson and Matt Looker

What's The Beatles Films Podcast about?

Two film writers and Fab Four fans discuss movies and TV about, starring, and inspired by The Beatles: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Beatles Films Podcast episodes:

06.17.2024
The Beatles Anthology (DVD special features)
One more, then: here's a bonus episode covering the Beatles Anthology DVD extras. We note just how much this disc complements the Anthology series, to the extent that watching it without watching this feels incomplete. It made us rethink some...
06.10.2024
The Beatles Anthology (episodes 7 and 8)
Beatles: Endgame. We discuss how the documentary gives George Harrison and Ringo Starr the space to craft their own narratives around how they left and then returned to the band, and we go over how it treats the Beatles' breakup,...
06.03.2024
The Beatles Anthology (episodes 5 and 6)
On we go from Shea Stadium to Sgt Pepper. We see how George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Neil Aspinall remember the incident in Manila differently to Paul McCartney, and we put forward the idea that these episodes contain the Beatles'...
05.27.2024
The Beatles Anthology (episodes 3 and 4)
Into episodes 3 and 4, the bulk of the Beatlemania and touring years, and we get straight to the key issue: why has Paul McCartney suggested he be interviewed while steering a tugboat? We also get into how the Anthology...
05.20.2024
The Beatles Anthology (episodes 1 and 2)
In the first of our four episodes covering the 1995 documentary series, we start with some of our own memories of when it aired, when we were teenagers and Britpop had made The Beatles cool again in the UK. We...
05.10.2024
Let it Be (2024 restoration)
A quick bonus episode to discuss Michael Lindsay-Hogg's film, restored by Peter Jackson's team and released on Disney+ on 8 May 2024. We discussed the original film at length in our two-part episode at the end of season four, and you...
05.06.2024
The Concert for Bangladesh
George Harrison of the Beatles and Ravi Shankar organised two concerts on 1 August 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, as relief for refugees from East Pakistan after the Bangladesh Liberation War-related genocide. The gigs featured Ringo...
04.29.2024
Scot Williams interview: playing Pete Best in Backbeat, and directing Two Of Us, a play
Scot Williams is best known to Beatles fans for playing Pete Best in Backbeat, and In His Life: The John Lennon Story. Scot's been a successful actor, director and writer for 30 years, and having grown up in Liverpool the...
04.22.2024
Ringo (1978 TV movie)
Let's look at Ringo Starr's 1978 TV comedy film, written by Neal Israel and Pat Proft, both of whom would go on to make significant contributions to film comedy through the Police Academy and Naked Gun films, and loosely designed...
04.15.2024
How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin
Leslie Woodhead's 2009 film for BBC Four wasn't his first entry into Beatledom: he also shot the Cavern Club footage in 1962 that we're all so familiar with. He's also spent time making films in Russia, so he's ideally placed...
04.08.2024
The Family Way
Paul McCartney's first solo project, other than judging beauty contests, was the score for The Family Way, a 1966 comedy-drama in which a northern English community have an invasive interest in the non-consummation of Hywel Bennett and Hayley Mills' marriage....
04.01.2024
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
We both loved Robert Zemeckis's 1978 debut feature, the story of a group of New Jersey teens trying to get into the Beatles' first Ed Sullivan Show performance in February 1964. We talk about the techniques Zemeckis and his writing...
03.25.2024
Imagine: John Lennon
The 1988 documentary commissioned by Yoko Ono might have been the jumping-off point for the Lennon legacy project we know today. It shows John at his best, for the most part, and there's not much dissent from the talking heads,...
03.18.2024
Sam Mendes' four Beatles biopics: movie release and casting discussion
With the announcement that Sam Mendes is to direct four Beatles biopic films for release in 2027, one from each of the perspectives of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, it'd be remiss of us not to...
12.25.2023
Pipes of Peace video (40th anniversary Christmas special)
Merry Christmas! Here's a festive gift marking 40 years since Paul McCartney's Pipes of Peace video, which recreates the 1914 Christmas Day truce on the Western Front of World War 1. How was this video turned around fast enough to...
12.18.2023
Let it Be (part 2)
To finish off our fourth season, thrill as our takes on why George Harrison is laughing when Ringo Starr starts playing Octopus's Garden differ slightly. Later we discuss how Let it Be's pacing is affected by showing the finalised songs...
12.11.2023
Let it Be (part 1)
Now is the winter of our discontent: or is it? Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Let it Be is widely thought a miserable affair, documenting arguments and the breakup of the Beatles. But watching it afresh after Peter Jackson's Get Back in 2021,...
12.04.2023
Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle
This 2005 BBC Four documentary, narrated by Paul Morley and featuring contributions from Astrid Kirchherr, Pauline Sutcliffe, Tony Sheridan, Rod Murray and Horst Facher, looks at the life of fifth Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe before his tragic death at 21. It...
11.27.2023
Mad Men: Lady Lazarus (featuring Tomorrow Never Knows)
Mad Men's Matthew Weiner paid $250,000 to use the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows in season 5, episode 8, "Lady Lazarus". We talk about the licensing of Beatles music in film and TV, which is also referenced in the episode, where...
11.20.2023
Paul McCartney: In the World Tonight
First shown in May 1997 on VH1 and ITV, Geoff Wonfor's promotional documentary for Paul McCartney's Flaming Pie album is a bit of a puff piece, but an interesting one. For context, this is all shot when Linda McCartney is...
11.13.2023
The Compleat Beatles
Directed by rock doc specialist Patrick Montgomery, 1982's The Compleat Beatles still represents the only real attempt at a feature length documentary covering their whole career, and was a huge success in the early days of the home VHS market....
11.04.2023
Now and Then: The Last Beatles Song music video and documentary
Peter Jackson's music video for Now and Then, and the 12-minute short documentary film by Oliver Murray, Now and Then: The Last Beatles Song, were both released this week. What do we think of the techniques used, and what does the...
10.30.2023
Rubber Soul
Jon Lefkovitz's 2014 film Rubber Soul recreates – very faithfully – John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1970 Rolling Stone and 1980 Playboy interviews, juxtaposing them and showing how John's thoughts on issues like drugs, fame and The Beatles changed over...
10.23.2023
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
That's right, we couldn't put it off any longer: it's the Bee Gees' towering hubris of 1978. We spend some time unpicking Robin Gibb's contemporary quote in which he confidently predicted that the Bee Gees' version would effectively make the...
10.16.2023
The Lost Weekend: A Love Story
We have a look at May Pang's documentary about her relationship with John Lennon, just released digitally and on blu-ray on 13 October 2023. We talk about perspectives and whether or not there's such a thing as "the truth" in...
10.09.2023
Caveman
Our attention turns to 1981's Caveman, starring Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach, Shelley Long and Dennis Quaid. We discuss where Ringo is in his life and career at this point, the shadow cast over the production and release by John Lennon's...
10.02.2023
George Harrison: Living in the Material World
We're opening season four with one of the big hitters: Martin Scorsese's 2011 George Harrison documentary. George's life gets a proper going-over for three hours, and we talk about how the film approaches his spirituality and how it relates to...
06.27.2023
Live and Let Die (with Neil Alcock)
To celebrate 50 years since the film's release we've got together with our friend and James Bond authority Neil Alcock for an episode on Live and Let Die. As we'll hear, the theme song by Wings represented a gear shift...
06.19.2023
Yellow Submarine (Part 2)
In part two we close out our third season with some good old-fashioned British magic realism. Is Yellow Submarine a magic realist piece, and if so are the submarine or the Beatles themselves the conduit for the magic? Plus! We discuss...
06.12.2023
Yellow Submarine (Part 1)
In the first part of our season finale we're discussing 1968's Yellow Submarine, the Beatles' animated film and, as we outline, their only musical. We talk about how the project came about and how much the Beatles were involved (spoiler...
06.05.2023
All Together Now
Who doesn't love Love? We're talking about the documentary about the Cirque du Soleil show The Beatles: Love. The film is an official Apple product and has talking head input from Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison, Neil...
05.29.2023
Living is Easy with Eyes Closed (Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados)
Here's a companion piece to last week's episode. In David Trueba's 2013 film, set in Spain in 1966, English teacher Antonio and two young hitchhikers take a road trip to Almeria where he hopes to meet John Lennon on the...
05.22.2023
How I Won The War
Onto John Lennon's solo acting debut in Richard Lester's How I Won The War, best known for John having written Strawberry Fields Forever in Spain while shooting it. We talk about how John is a significant figure to cast in...
05.15.2023
The Linda McCartney Story
We discuss the 2000 CBS TV movie in which Elizabeth Mitchell played Linda McCartney and Gary Bakewell reprised his Backbeat role as Paul McCartney. It's pretty corny of course, and there's a lot wrong with it, but there are positives,...
05.08.2023
Produced by George Martin
Produced by George Martin was originally a 2011 episode in the BBC's Arena documentary series, before being released more widely in 2012. We look at whether its informal conversational interviews work as a documentary technique, how watching it in the...
05.01.2023
Blindman
As ever, here's this season's "Ringo Starr appears in seventies film which is problematic by modern sensibilities" episode. Blindman, a spaghetti western produced by Allen Klein, features Ringo as an unhinged Mexican bandit. We discuss, inevitably, its sexual and racial...
04.24.2023
The Hours and Times
On to Christopher Münch's short fictionalised account of John Lennon and Brian Epstein's 1963 Spanish holiday, which explores their relationship and themes like miscommunication, and the power dynamic between the admirer and the admired. This was Ian Hart's first go...
04.17.2023
The Beatles and India
We're back in our documentary ashram with Ajoy Bose's 2021 film about the Beatles' relationship with his home country. The film does more than just tell the story of when they visited (though it does of course do that, AND...
04.13.2023
May Pang interview for The Lost Weekend: A Love Story
We're thrilled to bring you this special bonus episode where we got the chance to talk to May Pang about her documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story. We spoke about her part in the filmmaking process, her relationship with...
04.10.2023
Give My Regards to Broad Street
We knew this day would come. The 1984 film written by and starring Paul McCartney, derided by many, tolerated by some. We explain a bit about how a project like this actually gets as far as a cinema release, point...
01.06.2023
If These Walls Could Sing
We got an advance look at Mary McCartney's Abbey Road studios documentary If These Walls Could Sing, released in the UK and Ireland on Disney+ today, 6 January 2023. What did we think of its approach, and its array of heavyweight...
01.02.2023
Magical Mystery Tour (Part 2)
To close out season two, welcome to part 2 of our conversation about The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film. Thrill as we dissect the choreography of the Your Mother Should Know sequence in frankly punishing detail. Gasp as we unpack...
12.26.2022
Magical Mystery Tour (Part 1)
Magical Mystery Tour first aired on BBC1 on Boxing Day 1967 in black and white. It didn't go down all that well. Then it went out in colour on 5 January 1968 on BBC2 and wasn't much better received. This...
12.12.2022
The US vs John Lennon
We're talking about David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's 2006 documentary on John Lennon's activism, with its dizzying array of intellectual heavyweight talking heads. There's a lot to unpack here, from how it doesn't shy away from showing John's naivety, to...
12.05.2022
Wonderwall
The film whose soundtrack yielded the first Beatle solo album, and the first release on Apple Records, 1968's Wonderwall is on the face of it just a mad, psychedelic wig-out about a nutty professor. But is it saying something deeper...
11.28.2022
The Brian Epstein Story
Originally released in two parts in the BBC's Arena strand (as The Sun Will Shine Tomorrow and Tomorrow Never Knows on Christmas and Boxing Day 1998), The Brian Epstein Story was later re-edited and has aired twice on BBC4 with...
11.21.2022
That'll Be The Day
It's 1973: The Beatles are no more, but don't worry, David Essex has 100% filled the void. Here he stars as Jim MacLaine, a wayward youngster trying to make it after leaving home. His best work friend is played by...
11.14.2022
The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash
It's time to kill a sacred cow like the tiresome contrarian clickbaiters we are: is The Rutles actually terrible? Well, no, it's good, but we're not wholly convinced. Does it work as a parody, or does it too often just...
11.07.2022
McCartney 3, 2, 1
McCartney 3, 2, 1 arrived on Disney Plus and Hulu as a sort of Get Back appetiser in 2021. Rick Rubin asks Paul about his craft and runs through isolated tracks from some of his most famous songs. What does...
10.31.2022
I Am Sam
We're looking at Jessie Nelson's 2001 film, which features an Oscar-nominated performance by Sean Penn as a man with learning disabilities and a Beatles obsession, fighting for custody of his daughter, soundtracked by Beatles songs played by contemporary artists. Is...

What's The Beatles Films Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Beatles Films Podcast episodes:

The Beatles Anthology (DVD special features)

The Beatles Anthology (episodes 7 and 8)

The Beatles Anthology (episodes 5 and 6)

The Beatles Anthology (episodes 3 and 4)

The Beatles Anthology (episodes 1 and 2)

Let it Be (2024 restoration)

The Concert for Bangladesh

Scot Williams interview: playing Pete Best in Backbeat, and directing Two Of Us, a play

Ringo (1978 TV movie)

How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin

The Family Way

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Imagine: John Lennon

Sam Mendes' four Beatles biopics: movie release and casting discussion

Pipes of Peace video (40th anniversary Christmas special)

Let it Be (part 2)

Let it Be (part 1)

Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle

Mad Men: Lady Lazarus (featuring Tomorrow Never Knows)

Paul McCartney: In the World Tonight

The Compleat Beatles

Now and Then: The Last Beatles Song music video and documentary

Rubber Soul

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Lost Weekend: A Love Story

Caveman

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

Live and Let Die (with Neil Alcock)

Yellow Submarine (Part 2)

Yellow Submarine (Part 1)

All Together Now

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed (Vivir es fácil con los ojos cerrados)

How I Won The War

The Linda McCartney Story

Produced by George Martin

Blindman

The Hours and Times

The Beatles and India

May Pang interview for The Lost Weekend: A Love Story

Give My Regards to Broad Street

If These Walls Could Sing

Magical Mystery Tour (Part 2)

Magical Mystery Tour (Part 1)

The US vs John Lennon

Wonderwall

The Brian Epstein Story

That'll Be The Day

The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash

McCartney 3, 2, 1

I Am Sam

Other shows like The Beatles Films Podcast: