An Interview with Morgan Neville, Director of 'Man on the Run'

Where do you go after leaving the most famous band in the world? In the wake of his heavily publicized departure from The Beatles in 1970, Paul McCartney took to the plains of Scotland with his wife, Linda. There, after 15 years of near-constant publicity, he rested and recuperated. But even the plains of Scotland were not remote enough for McCartney, which begs the question: can we ever stop running from ourselves?

Image courtesy of Amazon Prime.

In a subversion of the mainstream rehashing of Beatle-mania, Academy Award-winning documentarian Morgan Neville takes a deep dive into McCartney’s life through his time after The Beatles, through the formation and dissolution of Wings. Man on the Run was pitched to him by McCartney himself, who has been notoriously guarded about his time with Wings until now.

Rather than feature assorted talking head interviews elaborating on this tumultuous period in the icon’s life, Neville opts for a looser, more narrative framework through a blend of archival footage, new interview audio, and a treasure trove of McCartney’s songs. Ahead of the film’s release, Neville sat down with Buffed Film Buffs to speak about McCartney, The Beatles and the serendipitous manifestation of such a sought-after documentary.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

August Hammel: When did you first come across Paul McCartney? From your childhood, was it The Beatles? What was your intro?

Morgan Neville: We had a jukebox in my house growing up, and it was full of Beatles 45s. The Beatles were always part of my consciousness – my dad was a big Beatles fan. He had seen The Beatles [in concert], I don't remember a time when I wasn't into The Beatles. I loved the music. I was born in 1967, so throughout the ‘70s, as I came into consciousness, Paul was putting out records. One of the first records I bought was Back to the Egg, the last Wings record. I've subsequently watched and read pretty much everything about The Beatles, so it's a subject I've spent a lot of time thinking about.

When I got a call four years ago, saying, “would you be interested in doing something about Paul?” I was like, “absolutely.”

AH: My intro was Yellow Submarine on DVD as a kid. You literally came in at the tail-end of the ‘60s, into when Paul was going into Wings and that's the era that [Man on the Run] covers. What was that initial pitch and how did you whittle it down to this era in Paul’s life?

MN: The pitch was, “Paul's interested in revisiting the Wings period of his life.” He had done one thing about it 25 years ago, a TV special, but otherwise had never done any documentary about it. That was it. Then they said, “Well, what do you think the story is?” I said, "the story begins when The Beatles break up.” That's where I start the film.

I feel like the film's a bit of a sequel to Get Back. So Get Back does the "Let it Be" sessions, but it's kind of a snapshot of who The Beatles were at the very end: the complication of the relationships, the humor, the love and the friction and all of it, but also how creative they are and watching them come up with these songs, particularly Paul, out of thin air.

So the question was: what happens the day after that ends? What happens when this thing you've been a part of since you were 15 [years old] disappears?

Suddenly you're left with all these questions, so that was a starting place. That's a really interesting time to start a story, both Paul trying to figure out those things, but at the same time, trying to get away from the shadow of The Beatles, which is kind of an impossible task. That's why I called it Man on the Run.

AH: One could look at [the film] and see it as a snapshot of the Wings era, but it also captures him at a point of maturation and discovery. Is that something that you found along the way, either going through the archival footage or speaking with him? Because he's very candid.

MN: The first key for me was what I read in that first interview he gave in spring of 1970. It's that written Q&A he gave out when he put out McCartney, and there's a woman handing it out. It’s the interview where he reveals that The Beatles have broken up and the last question is, “So now that you're not a Beatle, what's your plan?” And he says, “My only plan is to grow up.” That's what this film is. He's only 27 when The Beatles break up, but he has to figure out everything about his life.

Right from the beginning, I thought ‘that's my way in’ – just trying to figure out how you put your life back together.

Paul does it in a way that seems kind of crazy, but it makes a ton of sense: moving to the middle of nowhere in Scotland and being a farmer and having kids and slowly starting a band, deliberately starting small and getting bigger and bigger, trying to do something organic as opposed to – he could have started a supergroup and been playing Madison Square Garden six months later. He didn't want that. The only thing he had known, he said, was how The Beatles started, starting tiny and building your way up. That said, he was still Paul McCartney at that point, so it wasn't always easy to fly under the radar.

AH: The structure of the film struck me as almost unorthodox for [the] documentary [genre] and I was trying to put my mind to what it was, then I read someone from Telluride who said that it's almost structured like Paul's songs, in a way that he used the pentatonic scale. Was that ever in your consciousness or subconscious? If not, how did you approach the structure of the doc?

MN: I love that idea, but I did not think, ‘I'm going to edit this pentatonically’. Part of it is – and this is something I think about in all my films – is that I'm less concerned with events or, certainly, if you're doing a film about a music artist, there's often a way of defining them by their records. But there are a lot of records Paul put down in the ‘70s that I don't even mention.

It's not about just cataloguing what he did, but it's figuring out where the emotional turns are, and that I also really wanted to tell the story with the music as much as I could. Particularly, if you're doing a film about a singer/songwriter, they put themselves into these songs. So, how do you think about how the songs help tell the story or reveal character? I actually started a soundtrack before we ever started the film just because I wanted to start to think about how the songs help tell the story.

AH: As the skeleton?

MN: As a skeleton. Even though it changes when you're editing, I've done that for a lot of films. Like [in] 20 Feet From Stardom, I had a soundtrack first just because I see a lot of music films where the music is like wallpaper – like, here's a big hit, it plays. [Here] every song is trying to say something about the character of the story. You listen to it differently because it's revealing something. There's a lot of that within this film and every stitch of music in the film is Paul. Even in the drowning scene in Hawaii, that's outtakes of drums, of things he's playing, so it's just trying to score the entire thing, just using Paul’s music.

AH: It really is the structure of the movie. Structurally, did you always know this was going to be archival, or did you ever consider a mix of that and interviews, talking head-style?

MN: Almost at the beginning. Before I fully decided, I wanted to make sure the archive was rich enough that I could get away with it. Paul's manager, Scott [Rodger] said, “look, Paul's archive is about as good of an archive as there is next to a presidential library.” I thought that sounded pretty good. Paul actually has three full-time archivists: one for photos, one for music, one for ephemera. And he married a photographer who also shot home movies, so there was a wealth of material.

But the other thing I thought about for this film was: if I interview everybody on camera – which I've done a lot – it becomes very retrospective. It's like you're cutting to an 80-year-old person who's talking about being 30. But, if you take everybody off-camera, it becomes more present-tense. It's like you're in the story, and not looking back on the story. It's just more immersive in that way. Then, I had this idea to try and do some interesting animation, too, and do it in a very handmade kind of way because I feel like this whole decade is about handmade art. Everything Paul was doing was so DIY.

Paul McCartney: Man on the Run will have a limited theatrical release on February 19 and 22 before its February 27 streaming premiere on Prime Video.

-August