The music video for “Now and Then,” billed as “the last Beatles song,” is here.
Peter Jackson, who directed “The Beatles: Get Back,” helmed the music video, his first foray into music video production. The video features never-before-seen archival footage of the Fab Four: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the late John Lennon and George Harrison.
The music video is described in a press release as “poignant and humorous” and something for fans to “celebrate The Beatles’ timeless and enduring love for one another.”
Jackson also opened up in the press release about the stress he felt in creating the video for such an important project.
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“To be honest, just thinking about the responsibility of having to make a music video worthy of the last song The Beatles will ever release produced a collection of anxieties almost too overwhelming to deal with,” he said. “My lifelong love of The Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down.”
He continued, “This created intense insecurity in me because I’d never made a music video before, and was not able to imagine how I could even begin to create one for a band that broke up over 50 years ago, had never actually performed the song, and had half of its members no longer with us.”
The Beatles perform the song “Now and Then” in a music video created for the newly released single.
WingNut Films Productions
Jackson said that at first, he was worried about “the lack of suitable footage,” saying, “A Beatles music video must have great Beatles footage at its core. There’s no way actors or CGI Beatles should be used. Every shot of The Beatles needed to be genuine.”
To assist, McCartney and Starr shot footage of themselves performing the song and sent it to the “Lord of the Rings” director, while Apple, the families of Lennon and Harrison, and former Beatles drummer Pete Best all sent unearthed footage for him to use.
Jackson, who also directed a short film about the making of the song “Now and Then,” said that in making the music video, he wanted to achieve a “balance between the sad and the funny.”
“I have genuine pride in what we made,” he said, “and I’ll cherish that for years to come.”
