Three years ago, we had the epic Disney+ documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back. Last year, it was a new song, “Now and Then,” from The Beatles coming to life thanks to old John Lennon recordings. This year, a restoration of Let It Be and now, Beatles ’64, a documentary revisiting the first U.S. visit in 1964 from director David Tedeschi and producer Margaret Bodde.
It feels as thought the Fab Four are as popular as ever, and revisiting the original 1964 footage from David Tedeschi and Albert Maysles. It turns out that the team at Apple has been working on this for a while by way of Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production and WingNut Films. After those companies did their job, Giles Martin handled the remixing. The 1964 footage both looks and sounds amazing, and the filmmakers show the care of being longtime Beatles fans.
Margaret Bodde spoke to Awards Focus about their previous work on Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary and how it gave them an in with Apple. David Tedeschi felt the biggest challenge was to revisit this time in history and yet tell something new through the footage. The idea from Maysles was to do something with the fans, so the film is more than just archival footage and new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. The inclusion of interviews with fans and other musicians makes for a breathtaking engagement for new and old fans alike. Disney+ releases Beatles ’64 on November 29, 2024.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you both today.
David Tedeschi: Hey there!
Margaret Bodde: Hey, Danielle, it’s great to see you.
AF: How did you first become attached to working on Beatles ’64?
David Tedeschi: Margo, you want me to answer that?
Margaret Bodde: David Tedeschi, Martin Scorsese, and myself have been working on nonfiction documentaries, primarily music-related culture documentaries, for over 20 years. This project had came about—we had made a film that Marty directed years ago, called Living in the Material World about George Harrison. We got to know Olivia Harrison very well and the team at Apple. When the team at Apple had worked on restoring this black and white footage from 1964, they were thinking about who might be appropriate to produce and direct this. Naturally, they thought of David and Marty because of the work that they had done on the George Harrison documentary and other documentaries, but also on the fact that they both knew Albert Maysles very well and revered him and David’s work. They’re New Yorkers so it made a lot of sense. That’s the long story of how that project came about.
David Tedeschi: I would stress the end of that. It’s surprisingly a very New York story. All of us are New Yorkers. We have a feeling, a sense of New York City.
AF: Yeah. I was honestly surprised—as big of a Beatles fan as I am—that I heard nothing about this documentary until Disney sent out the initial press release that it’s going to be coming to Disney+.
Margaret Bodde: Yeah. This was a very kind of quick turnaround. There was a lot happening before we came on board in terms of just the restoration, the beautiful restoration that Peter Jackson’s company Park Road Post Production and Wingnut, which did the audio restoration. They had been working for several years on restoring this footage. When we came on board, all of that work was done, and then it was a process that David really had to accelerate because the goal is to try to get this film out while we’re still in the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ first arrival in New York.
David Tedeschi: The edit room was open a year ago last October and for us, that’s a pretty quick turnaround.
AF: How long was the initial edit?
David Tedeschi: (Laughs) I don’t know. That’s a very good question.
Margaret Bodde: It’s just over 2 hours, David, maybe 2:10.
David Tedeschi: Yeah.
Margaret Bodde: Something like that.
David Tedeschi: It’s probably 2:10. That’s probably right. Yeah.
AF: What were some of the most challenging decisions in deciding what to keep in and what to take out as you’re getting Beatles ’64 down to the final runtime?
David Tedeschi: I’d say it’s not so much about what stays in and what stays out. The biggest challenge was that it’s a very famous story. In the beginning and this is something we were very conscious of, what could we do that’s different and new? How could we breathe new life into this story? Although it seemed like a big challenge at the beginning, the fact that it’s such a specific time frame helped us because it’s just a trip in February of 1964, and we didn’t—somehow it allowed it to distinguish itself from a lot of other Beatles projects. It’s just this one moment in time.
AF: Yeah. I own The First U.S. Visit on VHS but since it’s not streaming anywhere, I haven’t really had that opportunity to compare and contrast what’s different between the two films.
Margaret Bodde: Well, the real, true fans such as yourself. Right? People have seen bits and pieces of the of the Maysles footage. We have screened the film for select colleagues and friends as the film was being made, as we do. It was surprising people who were really, really deep Beatles fans. There were things here that they had never seen before. I would think it’s something like 17 or 18 minutes of footage.
David Tedeschi: 18 minutes of footage that Maysles shot.
Margaret Bodde: Of just the Maysles footage that has never been seen by anyone before. Like David said, the challenge, too, is that the Maysles only shot for what, 2 or 3 days. They were shooting film so it wasn’t 24/7 digital footage when you never turn the camera off. There was about 8 or 10 hours of footage in total, which is not a lot of time and not a lot of footage that you usually have to work with for a feature doc.
David Tedeschi: It was a little more than 2 or 3 days, but it was very limited. They were hired to shoot the footage in New York, but they did it on their own dime in Washington and Miami so it was even more limited what they did in Washington and Miami. What was your initial question? I had one other answer, but I don’t remember what it was.
AF: It had to do with owning The First U.S. Visit but it’s not on streaming. At some point, I’m gonna wait and see if they ever remaster for Blu-ray before upgrading to compare and contrast.
David Tedeschi: There’s certain things that, let’s say, we were interested in that had never been really addressed before. Even Al Maysles himself at one point said, It’s not what we did at that point. It’s not what we were interested in but I wish that we had spent more time with the fans. That’s part of the footage has never been seen before, is the young girls and the young boys on the street talking about the experience. Also, part of it is just a question of technology that the Maysles were not so interested as were interested in the music.
The Washington Coliseum, which maybe you own the VHS of that, also—what Park Road and Wingnut were able to do with it, both the look of it and Wingnut restored the sound is to me, it’s miraculous. It really puts you in that arena, that arena designed for wrestling and boxing, like I’ve never experienced before. It’s different—they’re so energetic and joyful, and it’s a document of who they were as a live band in 1964. That’s very different from anything else I’ve seen.
AF: I will say seeing David Lynch pop up on screen in Beatles ’64 was quite the surprise.
David Tedeschi: There were a lot of surprises like that. Lynch was there in Washington. A remarkable amount of people saw them at Sullivan, Carnegie Hall, or Washington Coliseum.
Margaret Bodde: David Lynch, everybody who was at that, anyone that was at that concert, or even in the audience for Ed Sullivan—everyone just says you couldn’t hear the band. You couldn’t hear them. All you could hear was girls screaming, young people screaming, and that is the miracle of what Wingnut was able to do and what Giles Martin on his remixes was able to do is, you can hear the band, and you can hear how great they are. I mean, even with the kind of primitive stage technology that existed in 1964, it just really captures the band and all the energy around them, too. That’s a real revelation, I think, for us.