{"id":198656,"date":"2025-09-04T04:41:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T04:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/198656\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T04:41:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T04:41:10","slug":"paul-mccartney-doc-man-on-the-run-morgan-neville-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/198656\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul McCartney Doc Man on the Run: Morgan Neville Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Listening to documentarian Morgan Neville<\/a> and actor Paul Mescal dive down the Paul McCartney<\/a> rabbit hole at the Telluride brunch<\/a> was one of my festival highlights. Both are McCartney experts at this point, as Mescal <\/a>is returning to rehearsals in London to play Paul in the first of Sam Mendes\u2019 four Beatles movies, and Neville has spent the last three years prepping \u201cMan on the Run<\/a>,\u201d his post-Beatles portrait of McCartney as he created his solo albums and assembled the band Wings. When I was growing up in \u201970s New York, I loved McCartney albums Cherry <\/a>and Ram, <\/a>but was never a Wings fan. Now I see how many of his catchy songs have seeped into the culture: I\u2019m adding a bunch to my playlists.<\/p>\n

\"Best<\/a> \"'Wuthering<\/a> <\/p>\n

\u201cMan on the Run\u201d reveals an artist who must reinvent himself without the Beatles and with his great ally and love, Linda McCartney. But he never fell out of love with John Lennon. <\/p>\n

This is a Q&A with Neville by documentary filmmaker David Wilson that took place after the film<\/a>\u2018s second screening on September 1. (Full disclosure: My daughter works for Neville\u2019s Tremolo Productions.)<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. <\/p>\n

David Wilson: You\u2019ve worked primarily in music films, although every time you make a film about music you\u2019re coming at it from a different place. What role did music play in your life growing up?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Morgan Neville: <\/strong>A lot. We had a jukebox in my house. Lot of Beatles 45s. My dad was a music obsessive. He saw the Beatles in \u201964 in Indianapolis. I started playing music. I formed my first band when I was 12. My wife and I played in a band together. I just love music. And I love the stories of music, too. And I have made a lot of music films, but to me, they\u2019re all exploring some different thing I\u2019m trying to find out about.<\/p>\n

That is a through-line in your films. With all these different subjects, there\u2019s a big idea you\u2019re grappling with. Is that something you think about going in? Or it comes out as you make it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s both for this one. When I first started thinking about it, I started reading that first interview Paul gave, which was the Q&A where he revealed that the Beatles were no more. And you see the woman handing that Q&A out to the press. And that last question: \u201cWhat are you going to do next?\u201d And he said, \u201cMy plan, my only plan, is to grow up.\u201d And I thought, \u201cThat\u2019s the question I want to start with. What does that mean when you\u2019ve been a Beatle since you were 17, you\u2019ve been a quarter of this entity that\u2019s gone to outer space and back. And how do you be a person in the wake of that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Directors\u201cBruce Springsteen: Deliver Me\u201d director Scott Cooper and Morgan Neville at the Telluride brunch. Anne Thompson<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve made a lot of biographical films. The films are always a form of therapy for me, and certainly for the subject. And with Paul, we could talk about that, trying to get him into a certain headspace. But the questions Paul was asking at that time were questions I was always wondering about: \u201cHow do you wrestle with your own legacy? How do you stay grounded in show business? How do you deal with being a parent and a father?\u201d All these different questions that I grapple with all the time. So all that was resonating. So even though it\u2019s Paul McCartney, who\u2019s a genius to me, it was this guy who\u2019s just an artist trying to find his way and trying to listen to his gut as much as he can. So \u201cMary Had a Little Lamb,\u201d which is the flip side of \u201cMull of Kintyre,\u201d they\u2019re both crazy ideas. One turns out and one doesn\u2019t, but it\u2019s the same impulse, and I totally respect that fearlessness.<\/p>\n

McCartney also talks about a quest for \u201cpersonal peace.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, and that quote at the end where Stella [McCartney] says, looking back on it, these were the happiest years of our lives? And I just sent my last child off to college 10 days ago. I get emotional even thinking about it. I don\u2019t think anybody\u2019s ever understood what Linda meant to Paul in all ways. And that\u2019s what my wife means to me: having somebody who can be your wingman in every imaginable way, who has your back, is the greatest thing. That\u2019s what you need to survive.<\/p>\n

Had you met Paul before this project?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"PaulPaul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, John LennonCourtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

I met him once for a shoot on another documentary years ago. And then I met him again when we talked about the film, and he was, \u201cOkay, this sounds great.\u201d The first interview, we did in London at his office. He had a sound man in the Bates Studio in the basement. He said, \u201cMy guy will set up some mics.\u201d So I show up, and there are two mics in this tiny love seat in his office. I\u2019m sitting close. Okay, you have to forget it\u2019s Paul McCartney and just go for it. And Paul\u2019s great at helping you forget he\u2019s Paul McCartney, because he\u2019s been Paul McCartney for a very long time. For somebody like him, who\u2019s been public for so long, who\u2019s talked so much, to not do the jukebox of greatest hits, of things he says about albums or songs, and trying to really break that, was great. <\/p>\n

I did many audio interviews<\/a>, but I wanted to have conversations with him. So we started talking about ideas. We talked about painting, we talked about all different kinds of things, because I wanted to get him to be thinking and speaking in the present. That helped. He recognized in the conversations he would get carried away. We ended up having seven sessions of interviews over more than a year.<\/p>\n

The Beatles are famously difficult interviews, right? Was there a moment with him, as you were in those sessions, where you thought, \u201cOh, this is something new. I\u2019m getting a side of Paul that wasn\u2019t there.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I like to think so. When he would get excited about things, we were doing one interview at his house, and he\u2019d run over to the piano and start playing, show me stuff. And then he\u2019d go on about getting high with Fela Kuti. It was helpful to get him in a certain headspace. He hadn\u2019t talked about Linda in any deep way in decades. I just showed the film two weeks ago. He had a little family screening with his family and all the grandchildren, and invited my wife and my son. All the grandkids are sitting in front of me. Stella\u2019s son said, \u201cI\u2019ve never heard my grandmother\u2019s voice before,\u201d and that punched me. And then I heard another grandson say, \u201cGrandpa went to jail?\u201d<\/p>\n

Was there a moment where you thought you would go all the way up to Linda\u2019s death?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I always felt like that decade and the bookends of McCartney, one and two: leaving the Beatles and John\u2019s passing, and running away from the Beatles and what he had done for that decade. And I definitely thought about Linda\u2019s death and we played with it, but it just felt extraneous in a way that Linda did live on for another 17 years past this time. And when I showed Paul the film, he said, \u201cI\u2019m so glad that you left Linda at the end of the film like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s something I\u2019m piecing together from talking to Paul again just a couple weeks ago, in the beginning of the film where he said, \u201cI thought myself as the bastard, when people blame me for all this.\u201d He internalized it, and that period of \u2018Let It Be,\u2019 and then suing the band was so painful. And the \u201cGet Back\u201d project actually opened up something in him, saying it wasn\u2019t all bad. Everybody said everything was horrible, but actually it was much more nuanced. There was love, there was tension. And that process of self-forgiveness was the reason this film happened: if that wasn\u2019t that bad, maybe I should think about this other period that I\u2019ve also pushed out of my head in a lot of ways. And that\u2019s amazing that still 50 years later, that\u2019s still going on.<\/p>\n

The parallel love story here, obviously, is him and John. Do you think that \u201cGet Back\u201d experience opened up his ability to talk about him and John?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In watching \u2018Get Back,\u2019 which I devoured as soon as it came out, you see how much real love that he still has, to the point where John is in his life every day. And I\u2019m not exaggerating. I have no doubt he thinks about John every day, if not many times a day. So it\u2019s not something that\u2019s distant to him. It\u2019s something that he holds onto.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re digging through an archive and trying to find something usable, and then this clip rises up to the surface, what were those clips for you? <\/strong><\/p>\n

God, there\u2019s so many. Paul has an amazing archive. He married a photographer, so that was convenient, all of Linda\u2019s negatives of that entire decade, which is just incredible. There are so many things in this film that have never been seen. And there\u2019s so many tiny things from the way people talked about Paul in the press at the time. I love that little clip of the reporter going back to the Cavern Club to interview the young punk girl about the Beatles. The best thing is the home movies. Who documents themselves that much? Now, we maybe do with phones, but you see Paul filming with a 16 camera. And Linda\u2019s taking pictures of Paul taking film of her. <\/p>\n

There are so many great shots in this film of the actual construction of songs, where you\u2019re in the studio, and you\u2019re seeing them work through something. Was that something you specifically went looking for? How much did you want to have that behind the scenes?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I geek out on that stuff. And hearing the studio chatter. You can hear him orchestrating this stuff in his head in real time, which is what makes him Paul McCartney. And we have fragments of so many different songs in here. I loved the Beatles, but Wings were the band that were putting out albums when I was a kid, and that\u2019s what I was buying. And I loved Wings. There\u2019s so much interesting, good work through that decade that people don\u2019t think about that much. He put out 10 records in 10 years. One of the happiest things was after I showed my son the film two weeks ago, I saw that he quietly added a whole bunch of Wings songs to his playlist on Spotify.<\/p>\n

One of the joys was every three minutes there was hit after hit song that has been a part of the fabric of our world. Even if we didn\u2019t identify with them the same way that we did with The Beatles.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We put that tiny snippet of \u201cWonderful Christmastime\u201d in there, because in the midst of all that other stuff, that was a tiny single he threw out at the end of the year in 1979 which was a footnote, but a song that for better or worse we hear every year. It\u2019s both the contextualizing and rediscovering of a lot of the songs we know, a deep dive, going through some of these records. And Ram is one of my favorite albums. It\u2019s amazing how reviled that album was, again, you see the savage Rolling Stone review by Jon Landau, who went on to manage Bruce Springsteen. And now Ram is one of the top 500 Albums of All Time, according to Rolling Stone. So it\u2019s that long game: Let\u2019s not pay attention to what people want this week, this year. Let\u2019s just make music that works for us.<\/p>\n

How can people tell their friends to go see this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Amazon\/MGM bought the film and it\u2019s not going to come out till February. Six months from now, hopefully you will hear all about it. We\u2019re going to do a theatrical release, and then it will eventually stream. It\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listening to documentarian Morgan Neville and actor Paul Mescal dive down the Paul McCartney rabbit hole at the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":198657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,2104,1020,1149,104190,104191,53,53324,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-198656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-festivals","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-interviews","12":"tag-man-on-the-run","13":"tag-morgan-neville","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-paul-mccartney","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115144195163523614","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}