‘Let them kick the crap out of the songs’: how we recreated the Beatles to make Backbeat

‘I knew people who said John Lennon was angry, insecure and cruel in the early days. When I met Ian Hart, I saw he could provide that’

I was working at Granada in the 1980s when I came across a photograph of Astrid Kirchherr and Stuart Sutcliffe while going through the station’s Beatles archive. They looked confident and interesting and I wanted to know more about them. I’d heard about the Beatles becoming a great live band while playing the clubs in Hamburg, but not the background story of Stuart, the group’s first bass player, and Astrid, a brilliant German photographer. Stuart died just on the eve of the Beatles becoming big, having left the group to pursue his art and be with Astrid. I was keen to get into feature films and had been kicking a few ideas around. This story, I decided, was the one I wanted to tell. Continue reading...


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