While Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson has tackled such sizeable projects as “The Lord of the Rings”, “King Kong” and “The Beatles: Get Back”, he admits he was “reluctant” to helm the music video for “Now and Then.” His reason? He thought he’d screw it up.
“My lifelong love of The Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down,” he says. “I told Apple how the lack of suitable footage worried me. We’d need to use a lot of rare and unseen film, but there’s very little — nothing at all seemed to exist showing Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then’ in 1995. There’s not much footage of John in the mid-seventies when he wrote the demo.”
However, it all started coming together when Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr shot footage of themselves performing and sent it to Jackson. He also received footage from Apple, Sean Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison.
“To cap things off, a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of The Beatles and never seen before, was kindly supplied by Pete Best,” Jackson says. “Watching this footage completely changed the situation – I could see how a music video could be made.”
Jackson made the right decision because The Beatles’ A.I.-assisted “Now and Then” has broken their own record for the most-streamed track ever, racking up 3.08 million streams in its first three days of release, according to the U.K.’s Official Charts Company.