What Paul McCartney really thought of Danny Boyle film ‘Yesterday’
The Beatles in film has long been a hot topic. The Fab Four themselves appeared in five films between 1964 and 1970, starting with A Hard Day’s Night and ending with Let It Be. With that, they often played fictionalised versions of themselves, adding to the Beatlesmania sweeping the globe at the time.
In 2019, Danny Boyle released a film entitled Yesterday, in which Himesh Patel plays a young musician who finds himself in the strange circumstances of being the only person in the world who has listened to the Beatles’ music. With a stroke of luck, he then finds fame and fortune after introducing the world to their classic tunes.
Discsussing the movie, McCartney once said: “That began when Richard Curtis, who [directed] Love Actually, wrote to me with the idea. And I thought, ‘This is a terrible idea,’ but I couldn’t tell him, so I said, ‘Well, that sounds interesting – good luck.’ I didn’t think anything more of it. Then someone said Danny Boyle would direct it, and I thought, ‘They must think they can pull it off.’ And I thought nothing more of it until they asked if I wanted to see a screening. I asked Nancy, and we said, ‘Let’s go, you and me, on a date to the cinema.'”
“We were in the Hamptons in the summer and there it was, so we got two tickets and walked in when the cinema went dark,” he added. “Only a couple of people saw us. We were in the back row, giggling away, especially at all the mentions of ‘Paul McCartney.’ A couple of people in front of us spotted us, but everyone else was watching the film. We loved it.”
McCartney also opened up on the musical that he was writing in 2019 with Bill Kenwright. He was adapting It’s a Wonderful Life for the stage version of the 1946 film directed by Frank Capra. A musical film version also came out ten years later, directed by Val Guest.
“The reason I never wanted to do a musical is I couldn’t think of a strong enough story,” McCartney said. “But a guy I’ve known since school in Liverpool became a theatrical impresario in London [Bill Kenwright]. He rang me up and said, ‘I’ve got the musical rights to It’s a Wonderful Life.’ That’s a strong story. So I met with the writer, Lee Hall, and I asked him to write the first 20 minutes of how he sees this as a play. So I was on holiday in the Hamptons, and I had lots of free time.”
He added, “[I thought] ‘This isn’t working! I don’t work – I play!’ So I read it and thought, ‘That’s a good opening, I like this,’ and I sat at the piano and threw this melody at these dummy lyrics he had written. This was August. I sent it to them, and they said, ‘You’ve nailed it.'”
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