Ringo Starr admits to early anxieties over Beatles biopics: “I was stuck”
Ringo Starr will be a key character in Sam Mendes’ forthcoming quartet of Beatles films, but the drummer has revealed that he had some early reservations about the dramatisation of his life.
In the new issue of Uncut, Starr discussed his involvement in the movies, as well as his relationship with actor Barry Keoghan, who will play his likeness.
After revealing that Keoghan had come over to his house “for two hours and we said hello,” Starr turned his attention to the project as a whole.
“The good thing about it is, there’s gonna be some reality to it,” the drummer revealed. “Though we all love the Dick Lester movies, we’re just ‘the boys’, you know. But I spoke to Sam [Mendes] for days.”
Starr reminisced, “The first time he sent the script, we were in London, and we sat for two days. There was a lot of stuff I personally didn’t want in the film. ‘OK, we’ll take that out…’ “
After shuffling the script around, Starr knew he had to lay down some of the overwhelming creative control that he felt over the project of his life.
“We’re all in each other’s stories,” he continued, “I thought, ‘I don’t know how he’s going to do it, just let him get on with it.’ We trust him. I’ll be as surprised as any of you, because it’s a movie, not a documentary.”
Therein lay the issue for Starr: the difference between fiction and non-fiction. He admitted, “The first couple of weeks, I was stuck in documentary mode. ‘Well, that didn’t happen then and he wasn’t there…’ In the end, actually speaking to Paul [McCartney], we’re both like, ‘What’s that? OK, it’s a movie. It’s not a documentary. Let’s relax behind it.’”
Starr recently released his latest solo album, Long Long Road, which received a happy three-and-a-half-star review from Far Out: “Contrary to popular belief, Ringo isn’t exclusively a human peace-sign meme at this stage of his life. It has indeed been a “long, long road,” and the thing worth celebrating is that an 85-year-old man with all the money in the world still enjoys that old-timey Americana music enough to make more of it.”
All four movies are slated for release in 2028.
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