The Beatles: Get Back: See the Exclusive First Look at Peter Jackson’s Documentary About the Band21.12.2020

Although the film is slated for release in August 2021 and only halfway through the editing process, the director decided to give fans a surprise sneak peek at the documentary. 

"We hope it will bring a smile to everyone's faces and some much-needed joy at this difficult time,” says Peter Jackson, prefacing the footage. The director, who spends much of his days intensely working on the documentary in his editing bay in New Zealand, maintains however, that the sneak peek is neither a trailer nor an excerpt from the upcoming movie—instead, it’s a selection of scenes intended to show the spirit of the production, making up what amounts to a kind of music video for the song Get Back. Jackson personally selected the scenes by sifting through 56 hours of previously unpublished footage. 

The sneak peeks shows the band in 1969, fooling around in the recording studio as they worked on what would be their final album, Let It Be. Under the thin veneer of fun, jokes, and friendly energy, there is something darker—the beginning of the end of The Beatles. Over the next couple of months, work on the album would be suspended, John Lennon would leave, and the band would eventually break up. Jackson’s film intends to look behind the scenes of the Fab Four’s split, to answer decades-old questions about what actually happened.

Best known for his spectacular adaptations of Tolkien’s high fantasy sagas The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, in recent years Peter Jackson has been spending most of his time on documentaries, seeking to pioneer new techniques in the field. His Beatles documentary will use the same digital remastering tools that Jackson used in his widely acclaimed They Shall Not Grow Old, which featured footage from World War I. These methods allow Jackson to restore and breathe new life into archival footage, making it look as if recorded using modern technology. 

The Beatles: Get Back is slated to premiere on August 27, 2021. The film is produced with both the blessing of and in collaboration with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, respectively.