Award-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, director of the new “Man on the Run” documentary on Paul McCartney, joined host Kenneth Womack for a special bonus episode of “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
Neville, whose films include “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and “20 Feet From Stardom,” said that when it came to telling McCartney’s post-Beatles story, he’d essentially “been preparing for it my whole life.” As he told Womack, “My dad was a big rock fan. He saw The Beatles in Indianapolis in 1964, and he took me to my first ‘Beatlefest’ when I was 11. I spent years reading every book on them. It’s amazing how much that prepared me for doing this job.”
As he got older, Neville took up piano and guitar and started playing in bands, and eventually, making music films became a part of his life. “It legitimized my nerd-dom,” he explained with a laugh. “Filmmaking is very rhythmic – the music is the story. It’s how to connect music and song with story and character. The subject is telling you how they’re feeling through their art.”
Neville, who has been nominated for five Grammy awards, said he often works on a soundtrack before starting a film, which served him well with “Man on the Run.” The documentary, which focuses on Paul McCartney’s first decade in the wake of The Beatles’ breakup, “sounds amazing on the big screen.” In terms of the narrative, Neville said that “Paul’s solution [after The Beatles] was the unlikeliest of solutions – moving to a farm and removing himself from rock ‘n’ roll and having kids. He had to begin at square one and get to square 100. But The Beatles also started that way. There were some great things that came out of that period, and there were some missteps, too – but the missteps were as important as the hits.”
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As with many great artists’ stories, it’s that realization that made all the difference. “When you stop running from a shadow, stop trying to get away,” said Neville, “then there’s no running anymore. He could just be Paul.”
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“Everything Fab Four” is distributed by Salon. Host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin and the bestselling books “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles” and “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.” His latest book is the authorized biography of Beatles road manager Mal Evans, “Living the Beatles Legend,” out now.
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