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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Dave Davies.
Our guest today.
Actor Michael Shannon has appeared in nearly 100 movies and television productions, perhaps best known for playing brooding, villainous or unhinged characters like Agent Nelson Van Alden in HBO's Boardwalk Empire.
But Shannon's range is far broader, and his two latest projects find him playing real-life historical characters engaged in noble pursuits.
In the film Nuremberg, he plays the U.S.
Supreme Court justice who organized the International Tribunal to try Nazi leaders for war crimes after the Second World War, serving as lead prosecutor in the ensuing trial.
And in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, he's President James Garfield, who fought against corrupt Washington politicians for civil service reform, before being assassinated only four months into office.
Michael Shannon earned Oscar nominations for his performances in the films Revolutionary Road and Nocturnal Animals.
He's also appeared in the films Take Shelter, Knives Out, The Shape of Water and Man of Steel, among many others, and in the Showtime series George and Tammy.
He also formed an indie rock band and has collaborated with musician Jason Narducci in performing songs from several albums of the group REM.
We'll talk about that.
I spoke to Michael Shannon last Thursday.
Well, Michael Shannon, welcome back to Fresh Air.
It's been a while.
Oh, it's my pleasure, Dave.
Thanks for having me.
You know, you've had a lot of roles and, as I said, in many of the better-known ones your characters are unhinged or villainous.
In these films you play not just good guys, but you know real historical characters fighting battles to right wrongs, strengthen democracy.
Do you think this was intentional to cast you in these roles?
Oh, gosh.
I don't know.
So much of what has happened in my career just seems like dumb luck, you know?
I don't know... what got into these people's heads to look my way for these things.
But I sure am grateful that they thought of me.
I mean, I guess, typically with a project like Nuremberg.
I think when people hear that I'm in Nuremberg, they assume I'm playing a Nazi.
And when they hear about Death by Lightning, they assume I'm playing the assassin.
So I guess it's nice to surprise people.
All right.
Well, you know, you play President James Garfield, as we mentioned, in Death by Lightning.
That's the Netflix series.
He was elected in 1880.
What drew you to this project?
Well, it started with Candace's book, Destiny of the Republic.
Candace Millard.
Yeah, she's been on our show.
Terrific historian.
And for anybody who watches the program and gets a kick out of it.
I highly suggest you read the book if you haven't already, because it's very captivating and very informative and illuminating.
But I find that a lot of people really don't know much about this period.
It's kind of sandwiched between the Civil War and the World Wars and the Depression, you know, which are, all I guess, more inherently dramatic periods.
But...
I think this period is really worth studying and looking at, because the country seemed very lost at sea, as Garfield hints at in his address at the Republican Convention.
And it's easy, I think, to feel that way now.
So if you're curious about how we might get out of this quagmire we're currently in, it might behoove people to take a look at this period in our nation's history.
Yeah, and it's interesting because Garfield was kind of an accidental hero.
I mean, he was initially going to nominate someone else for the presidency and the convention got deadlocked and people were so captivated by his speech they turned to him.
You know, I didn't remember anything about James Garfield.
I'm sure most of us don't.
But when I saw you in that suit, in that big beard and that long coat and vest and bow tie.
I thought, yes, that's the picture we've seen of James Garfield.
Talk a little bit about physically occupying the character.
Did you grow that big beard?
I literally could not grow that beard.
Even if you gave me five years, it wouldn't look anything like that.
But we had such a brilliant team. of hair and makeup and wardrobe.
And they just, they do their magic, you know.
Did you find you're carrying yourself differently?
I mean, did you feel like a president?
Did people treat you with deference on the set?
Yeah, I mean, it was a very happy set.
And, you know, we shot in Budapest, Hungary.
And it was interesting because it's not their history, you know, and most of the crew was Hungarian.
But they took it very seriously, as if it were their own story they were telling.
But, yeah, the wardrobe... You know, a lot of the vests I wear have these very stiff fronts to them.
And the buttons are all studs.
So if you move too much, the studs pop out of the little holes.
So it does... do something to your posture.
You're a little more like a statue than an active human.
Yeah.
Although it was fun.
What was fun about it is the contrast between that.
And then you see him on his farm and he's actually quite rugged in the beginning.
I mean, comparatively speaking anyway.
Right, right, right.
Different era when a real farmer could be in Congress.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, I want to play a clip.
And, to set this up, Garfield was a Republican and the Republican Party had been the dominant party in Washington for years.
But it was a party beset by corruption.
You know, patronage, employment, self-dealing were kind of the rule of the day.
There was no such thing as civil service, which Garfield was determined to change.
And the scene we're going to listen to is where Garfield had been president a short time and his opponents within the party were blocking all of his cabinet appointments in the Senate because he refused to give these corrupt politicians the control of key federal jobs, especially the port collector in New York, because that was a big center of money and patronage.
Anyway, in this scene, there's a bunch of senators and cabinet members gathered in the White House and they're all arguing with each other because you, as Garfield are determined – to stick with this fight that they think he's never going to win.
They think he should just give in and play ball with the machine.
You've been listening quietly while they argue, and then you finally erupt with a stern message.
Let's listen.
Gentlemen, calm yourselves this instant, or I will expel you from this building for good.
That includes you, Mr. Secretary.
Now, I made a vow to end the rot in our government.
Spoils, patronage, call it what you want.
It's no good.
Do nothing, siphoning taxpayer money for jobs that don't even exist.
Elected officials brazenly peddling their influence at auction.
This is not how democracy endures.
This is wrong.
And all of us know it.
This is our fight.
One day, years from now, each one of us will be judged by what we do in this moment.
How will they talk about us?
I wonder.
And that's our guest, Michael Shannon, in the new Netflix series, Death by Lightning.
That's a powerful speech.
You want to talk a little about that moment?
You know, it's interesting.
I know we're not talking about it right now, but it draws a comparison to something that Robert Jackson says in Nuremberg when he's talking to the Pope.
That's your character, right?
Yeah.
Yes.
He tells the Pope, you know, you validated the Nazis, and how will you be remembered?
And you know, sometimes I wonder— how much people are really concerned about how they're remembered.
In a sense, why would that be important?
I mean, you're gone, right?
But it's a shame that you have to appeal to people's ego to get them to do the right thing.
It shouldn't really be ultimately because you're concerned about how you're remembered.
It should be more that you're concerned about the future of the next generation and the generation that follows.
But...
If you can bend people at their ego, then you might as well take advantage of it, I guess.
So let's talk about Nuremberg.
You play Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice who's the lead prosecutor in this trial, trying former Nazi leaders for their crimes.
People of a younger generation might not be as aware of this as you and I, But he also – really kind of organized the whole thing.
And I thought we'd hear a clip here.
You, in this clip, are speaking with the army psychiatrist who has been sent to the prison where these captured Nazis are being held.
His job is to keep them from committing suicide for one and then to pursue some combination of therapy and also building psychological profiles to assist in the prosecution.
And in this scene, this is well before the trial gets underway.
You're telling the psychiatrist you want him to get information from Hermann Goring, the highest-ranking Nazi, about their defense strategy.
And the psychiatrist is resisting.
The psychiatrist, he's played by Rami Malek, speaks first.
You want me to be a spy?
I want you to do your duty for your country.
No, you want me to break doctor-patient confidentiality.
I think you already have, doctor.
We read every report.
We need more.
Why not just shoot them?
That's what everybody wants.
I mean, if you're just going to cheat... It's not cheating.
If you're asking me to betray my oath, why not just shoot them and be done with it?
After the last great war, we made Germany crawl.
We humiliated them. made them pay reparations they couldn't afford.
We made them hate us so much that in less than two decades they went from a broken nation to near-world conquerors.
We have to do this right, because if we don't, if 15 years from now they come back even stronger, I don't know if we can beat them a third time.
If we just shoot these men, we make them martyrs.
I'm not gonna allow them that.
There will be no statues of them.
No songs of praise.
I'm gonna put Herman Goering on the stand, and I'm gonna make him tell the world what he did.
So that it can never happen again.
You brought me here because of Goering.
No.
I brought you here to show you that, before the bullets were fired, before tens of millions of men died, all of this started with laws.
This war ends in a courtroom.
That's our guest Michael Shannon with Rami Malek in the new film Nuremberg.
Give us your sense of your character here.
Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice on this historic mission.
How you got into his head?
You know, I was able to do some research that was helpful, a lot of reading.
In addition to his work on the Nuremberg trials I mean throughout his career he was a part of so many momentous decisions in the court's history.
But I feel like he's a pretty plain dealing, straight shooting kind of guy, you know.
And what was really fascinating to me was just how extraordinarily difficult it was for him to do something that seemed very logical and necessary, and how much opposition he met at every step of the way.
How many people said you know you shouldn't do this, or this isn't how we should handle this situation, or let's just shoot him, which was the prevailing sentiment among a lot of the people in power in America at the time?
Yeah, we just finished a dreadful, catastrophic war, yeah.
Yeah.
And then now here he is, you know, talking to this very well-meaning at the time doctor and still just meaning.
So much obstruction.
And it goes all the way throughout the story.
And I think you finally actually, in the showdown with Goering, see him really start to lose it a little bit.
Just say, why is this so difficult?
It's so obvious what's happened.
It seems to be so obvious what the outcome should be.
Why am I having such a hard time doing this?
But I'm so glad that he insisted on it.
You know, it was the first time in our civilization's history that there was an international tribunal.
I believe
And it was an important precedent that he established.
I wish that it was being honored more fervently nowadays.
Right, but there really weren't these international laws before that.
Oh, no.
They were improvising a lot of it.
Yeah, I mean the charges themselves were.
I believe that was the first time that anybody had been charged with, you know, crimes against humanity.
I don't think that was a term that existed prior to this trial.
Well, you know, the climactic moment in the film is in the courtroom at Nuremberg which had been reconstructed, I gather carefully, to really be historically accurate.
And you, as the prosecutor, have this long exchange with Herman Goring, who is played by Russell Crowe, who just does an amazing job of it.
I will say
Yeah.
I read something interesting in the production notes.
Scenes like this would often be shot in pieces.
One character makes a dramatic speech or asks a tough question, and then the reaction and response might be shot later with – and then it all gets pieced together.
In this case, as I understand it, four cameras were set up to capture everybody and it was shot in one long continuous take, which is closer to a real-life courtroom exchange.
I wonder how that affected – you know, the dynamics, the feel of it.
Yeah.
Russell and I had met the weekend before we were set to shoot that scene just to go through it.
And we both agreed that it would be our preference to do the entire scene without breaking it up.
They had scheduled it, I believe, for three days of shooting, because typically on a film set you would not attempt to shoot that many pages in one day.
It was around about, I think, a 20-page scene.
And we both agreed that to break the scene up into acts, if you would, over the course of three days would deflate the momentum and the tension of the scene.
And I just always am a big fan of getting lost in a scene if and when I can.
A lot of times.
For me, the most difficult scenes are actually the very short scenes, because sometimes it takes a minute to get your bearings, you know.
And I like to get to a place where I just forget that there's a camera or anybody's filming it and it's just something happening.
And so it was actually an opportunity that I relished.
Some people, I think, would say oh, you must have been so anxious about having to do so much in that fashion.
But it was kind of the opposite.
I think I would have been more anxious had we kept it the way they had scheduled it.
You know why don't we just listen to a moment of this?
You and Russell Crowe as Herman Goering in this trial at Nuremberg.
For the record, is there any doubt in your mind? that Adolf Hitler is dead?
I have no doubt.
So you are aware that this makes you the only living man who can expound to us the true purposes of the Nazi Party and the inner workings of its leadership.
I am perfectly aware of this, sir.
Your party, from the very beginning, intended to overthrow the Weimar Republic.
That was our firm intention.
What the hell?
And upon coming to power, you immediately abolished parliamentary government in Germany?
We found it to be no longer necessary.
Is that because you believe people are not capable of self-government?
We were elected by the people and given a mandate for change.
The systems that had previously existed had brought Germany to the verge of peoples in Europe who have forsaken democracy, not because they did not wish for it, but because democracy had brought forth men who were too weak.
And that's our guest Michael Shannon and Russell Crowe in the film Nuremberg.
I understand that this film was shot in Budapest, as was the Netflix series Death by Lightning, and you had a big crowd of extras who were the audience in the film.
I heard that After you finished a take, they burst into applause.
Is this true?
They did.
They also did that when I gave my opening statement to the tribunal.
Yeah, you know, Hungary is a country that really went through a lot over the course of the 20th century between Nazi invasion and also communism, communist regime and I think a lot of the people that were extras in that scene, if not directly been affected by it, had had a member of their family or previous generation affected by it, and so, even if their English wasn't fluent, they Just to be in that room and to have an opportunity to hear these words and to see these actions, I think was very meaningful to them.
Let's take another break here, then we'll continue our conversation.
We are speaking with Michael Shannon.
He stars as President James Garfield in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, and he plays a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes in the new film Nuremberg.
We'll talk more about his life and career after this short break.
I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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In 2008, you were in the film Revolutionary Road with director Sam Mendes.
I have a clip I thought we'd listen to here.
This is a story where Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet play a suburban couple.
I guess it's the 50s, early 60s, and... kind of in this conventional suburban life.
They have friends in an older couple who are played by Kathy Bates and Richard Easton.
And this older couple have a troubled son who's in a psychiatric hospital.
That's you.
And in this scene we're going to hear They brought him out of the hospital for an afternoon to come and visit this lovely couple.
Everybody's in the living room and we're serving sandwiches, and it's the 50s, so everybody's smoking.
And you kind of take over the conversation and we'll hear Kathy Bates, who plays your mom briefly first.
Let's listen.
This egg salad is delicious, April.
You must tell me how you fix it.
You a lawyer, Frank?
No.
No, I'm not.
I could use a lawyer.
John, let's not get started again about the lawyer.
Pop, couldn't you just sit there and eat your wonderful egg salad and quit horning in?
See, I've got a good many questions to ask, and I'm willing to pay for the answers.
Now I don't need to be told that a man who goes after his mother with a coffee table is putting himself in a weak position legally.
That's obvious.
John, come have a look out this fabulous picture window.
If he hits her with it and kills her, that's a criminal case.
Oh, look, the sun is coming out.
If all he does is break the coffee table and give her a certain amount of aggravation and she decides to go to court over it, that's a civil case.
Maybe we'll have a rainbow.
John, come have a look.
How about doing everybody a favor?
How about shutting up?
Settle down now.
Maybe I can look into it.
Recommend someone.
What do you say?
So, what do you do, Frank?
I work at Knox Business Machines, actually.
You design the machines?
No.
Make them, sell them, repair them?
All these questions.
I help sell them, I guess.
I work in the office.
Actually, it's sort of a stupid job, really.
There's nothing interesting about it at all.
What do you do it for, then?
Maybe Frank doesn't like being questioned like this.
Oh, okay, okay, okay.
I know.
It's none of my business.
And besides, I know the answer.
You want to play house, you got to have a job.
You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you've got to have a job you don't like.
Anyone comes along and says, what do you do it for?
He's probably on a four-hour pass from the state funny farm.
All agreed?
That's our guest, Michael Shannon, hijacking a nice pleasant conversation in the film Revolutionary Road.
That's quite a cast you were with as a young actor.
I mean, what do you remember about that experience?
It was just one of the most sublime situations you could hope for.
I mean, in addition to the cast, you've got Sam Mendes directing.
You've got the astonishing Roger Deakins photographing everything.
Fortunately for me, in that instance I was playing someone who really didn't give a rat's butt about anything, so it was okay to let go.
I frankly think the hardest part in that story are the parts that Leo and Kate are playing, because they don't get to just say whatever comes into their head.
They're trying to hold on to something, and And my poor fellow John is not trying to hold on to anything.
You were only in two scenes in this movie, I think.
And you got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Did that change things?
Did that open doors?
Well, I definitely think it kind of paved the way towards Boardwalk Empire.
It's hard to say.
I mean...
A lot of it's speculation, you know.
I don't know what goes through people's heads.
Because I feel like, you know, John Givings and Nelson and Alden are very different people.
But I do know that I got that meeting with Terrence Winter and Mr Scorsese not long after that nomination.
And that led to Boardwalk Empire.
Yeah.
You know, Boardwalk Empire was...
A long project for you.
You know over, I guess, five seasons, over four years, or something like that.
And you play this FBI agent Nelson Van Alden who, well boy, he goes through quite a journey into some dark, dark places.
Did you know where that character was going as it was coming?
Yeah, sure.
So first of all, just for the record.
Nelson was not in the FBI.
He was in the Treasury.
Right, right.
It was Revenuers back then.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, no, I didn't know.
You know I went in for the meeting with Terrence Winter and Mr Scorsese and it was presented to me that he was kind of the avenging angel of the whole thing, that he was a stand-up fellow, very devout, religious individual.
They didn't indicate the fall from grace so much, but it was about as broad of a story arc as you can hope for.
I always kind of secretly wished that there would have been more of a phoenix rising from the ashes kind of quality to the whole thing, but he kind of never really was able to redeem himself.
But you know, it sure seemed to tickle people, and that's something that you can be proud of, I guess.
But I was very sad for him.
You know, that's really when I first really became aware of you as an actor, is that.
You know it is a pretty dark role.
Did you find that people recognized you more and casting directors were calling more?
Well...
When you're on a TV show, it's a whole different ballgame than doing films, because you really become a part of people's routine.
People develop very strong feelings.
The number of times people would come up and say, oh, I just hate you, I just hate you.
I'm like, well, you actually don't even know who I am.
But they get very personally involved.
Did it typecast you anyway as a guy who's mentally unhinged or, you know?
I don't know.
You know, I have this annoying proclivity to see all the characters I play as distinct and unique individuals.
Now some of them.
There may be a propensity for darkness or being troubled or whatnot, but they're all very different to me.
You know, even like...
Like I said earlier, the difference between John Givings and Nelson Van Alden is pretty astronomical for me.
Givings is the guy on Revolutionary Road.
Yeah, yeah.
Or the difference between Nelson Van Alden and Richard Kuklinski from The Iceman is very different.
What's similar is it's me.
That's the similarity is it's always me.
It's always my body and my face and my you know, And I guess you know, I'm a big fella and I got this giant head and it's not too difficult for me to seem intimidating, I suppose.
But it couldn't be further from what I'm actually like.
Right, right.
You know, it's funny.
I got a call from my son this morning who has grown and has kids.
And he said, oh, today's your interview with Michael Shannon.
Did you see all of the 1,200 films he made?
Yeah.
Not all, but a lot of them.
I don't know.
When you look back at all the career, this career you have, what do you think?
Is it amazing to you?
I'm always reminded of something that I believe is attributed to Bob Dylan.
This notion that what he's done in the past isn't terribly compelling to him on a day-to-day basis.
He's not sitting around listening to Blonde on Blonde and saying boy, I really crushed it, you know.
He's thinking about what he's doing now.
And I kind of look at it that way, too.
But it can give you a little bit of vertigo if you actually look back at everything and think, oh my God, I was a part of all of that.
It makes you a little dizzy, for real.
But it's also the past, you know, and I'm always thinking well, what can I do now?
That would be worth a darn, you know, and keep pushing myself.
And I still feel like I have so much to learn.
There's so much, not just about acting, but about life and the world.
And I guess the thing I'm most grateful for in my career is how much I've learned about the world through acting.
And when I look at these projects that I have now Nuremberg and Death by Lightning I learned so much.
I would have never known anything about Robert Jackson had I not done Nuremberg.
And I probably wouldn't have known anything about President Garfield had I not done Death by Lightning.
So I just want to keep discovering and learning.
You played a contract killer in the film The Iceman.
It's based on a real guy.
And Ray Liotta was also in the film.
He's done a lot of mob films.
He's quite a tough character in a lot of them.
What was that experience like?
Oh, gosh.
I mean, that was a thrill, you know.
I'm as big a fan of Goodfellas as anybody and also the movie Something Mild.
The Jonathan Demme film.
I remember seeing him in that and thinking that's the scariest demon being I've ever seen in my life.
And he had those beautiful blue eyes, those ice water eyes, you know, just very powerful eyes.
I was a little weak in the knees, I suppose, but I got over it.
Was Ray Liotta a scary guy in any way?
Well, I mean, the issue was is that, you know, I had to be scarier.
Right.
And there's a scene in the movie, if you see it, where he points a gun at my face and I'm completely expressionless.
Like, okay, go ahead.
And it spooks him out so much that he leaves me alone.
And I think I actually managed to spook him out for real.
Yeah.
Not many people have done that, I imagine.
We're going to take another break here.
Let me reintroduce you.
We are speaking with Michael Shannon.
He stars as President James Garfield in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, and he plays a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes in the new film Nuremberg.
We'll be back after a short break.
This is Fresh Air.
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This is Fresh Air, and we're speaking with actor Michael Shannon.
He has a busy acting career, but he's also revived his longstanding interest in music.
For several years, he and musician friend Jason Narducci have assembled a band and toured performing covers of whole albums by several artists, focusing in particular on REM.
Here's Shannon and Narducci performing the R.E.M. song Driver 8 on The Tonight Show.
Michael Shannon is the lead singer.
That is our guest, actor Michael Shannon, singing Driver 8 with a band including Jason Narduzzi.
That band sounds tight, I got to say.
Do you think that music has informed or affected your acting in any way?
You know, rhythm, pace?
Oh, definitely.
Yes, they're very interwoven.
Particularly when I'm doing theater, I rely on music to inspire me and to give me energy to perform.
A lot of times i i listen to music uh, on my way to the theater, before the show.
I mean, i have so many albums on my phone that i'm constantly having to delete things because i'm running out of storage in my memory.
But i just i like to have as much music as close to me as as possible at all times.
Yeah, yeah.
REM is aware of your doing this and I think some of the band members showed up at a performance once and went on stage with you, right?
They've all yeah, when we play in Athens Georgia we've done two tours so far and when we go to Athens, they all make a point of coming to that show, which is really sweet and special and mind-blowing.
And there have been other shows where one of them might make an appearance, depending on where we are in the country.
But yeah, they're definitely interested in it and they've been unbelievably gracious about the whole thing.
So what's next for you?
Oh, goodness.
Well, we are going to do yet another REM tour.
These tours have been commemorating the 40th anniversary of particular albums.
So the first one was for murmur, rem's first full-length album, and the second one we did was the 40th anniversary of fables of the reconstruction.
So now we are going to go back out on the road with the 40th anniversary of an album called life's rich pageant, And that tour is in February and March.
In terms of my actual day job, I'm not quite sure what I'm doing next.
I did shoot a film earlier this year called Mr Irrelevant, which is a football movie in which I play the coach Bill Parcells.
Right.
And that will be coming out, I assume, sometime next year.
But other than that, I don't have anything in the can, the proverbial can.
So it's as much a mystery to me as anybody else right now.
Michael Shannon, thank you so much for speaking with us again.
Thanks for having me, Dick.
Michael Shannon is a two-time Academy Award nominee.
He stars as President James Garfield in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, and he plays a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes in the new film Nuremberg.
Coming up.
David Bianculli reviews a revived and expanded TV documentary series about the Beatles on Disney.
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From Sony Pictures Classics and Fathom Entertainment, merrily we roll along.
Three best friends through two decades of time.
Directed by Maria Friedman, starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez.
In 1995 ABC presented an eight-part documentary series called The Beatles Anthology, telling the history of the band and its music in the first and only fully authorized TV biography.
The only one that is, until now.
Thirty years later, the Beatles anthology is back, with the sound and images restored and with a brand new ninth episode added at the end.
Disney Plus is presenting the newly refurbished series Beginning Tonight, with three episodes unveiled nightly.
Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.
When the Beatles released the original The Beatles Anthology in 1995, it was a next-generation British invasion, attacking on two fronts at the same time.
On the one hand, there was the music.
Three box-set anthology collections released on CD by Apple Records, full of studio outtakes and alternate versions.
And on TV, there was the eight-hour The Beatles Anthology documentary on ABC.
It was shown across the globe and later released on home video.
That was in 1995, 25 years after the Beatles had broken up.
That documentary extended their legend and their impact for several more decades.
It told the story of the group via performance, film, and TV clips, and lots and lots of interviews.
John Lennon, who had been shot and killed 15 years earlier, was represented in vintage interview clips.
So were the other Beatles.
But for the 1995 documentary.
Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr also sat still for new interviews, separately and together.
So when it comes to the key moment when John meets Paul and invites him to join his group, the Quarrymen, The documentary recounts it by having Paul in 1995 playing on guitar and singing the song he sang for John as a sort of audition when they met.
Then John, in an old interview, is heard picking up the story.
It's told the same way in the new The Beatles Anthology 2025 as in the original, only with crisper video and art.
I was the singer and the leader.
I made the decision whether to have him in the group or not.
Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in?
Obviously.
Or not.
And that decision was to let Paul in to make the group stronger.
And I turned around to him right then on first meeting and said, do you want to join the group?
And I think he said yes the next day.
Peter Jackson and his team who turned outtake footage from the 1970 Let It Be documentary into his superb multi-part Get Back Beatles miniseries, for Disney did some of the restoration work here.
So did engineer Jeff Emmerich and music producer Giles Martin, the son of Beatles producer George Martin.
Their combined efforts make all the music sound so much better.
For the audio release of this new Beatles Anthology 2025, they've issued a brand new fourth CD set of recordings.
The remastering, on all four volumes, is a quantum leap forward.
Listen to John Lennon on Free as a Bird, and his voice no longer sounds distant and tinny.
It sounds like John Lennon, right there in the studio with the other Beatles.
So the new audio release definitely is worth it.
Is the new TV documentary?
Absolutely.
There's something about the Beatles and the way they approach things that makes their output seem fresh, no matter how many years have passed.
The music certainly is that way, but so is this documentary.
The first eight hours of the Beatles' anthology seem vibrant and exciting and not at all dated, even though it's the same content as before, only shinier.
And the final hour, full of cutting room floor gems, is a treat.
In the original documentary you saw and heard only one complete song from the Beatles on their first Ed Sullivan show appearance.
In this new hour of the Beatles Anthology 2025, you get another, along with plenty of studio outtakes.
And there's a lot of fascinating footage of Paul George and Ringo reuniting to record new Beatle tracks in the 90s, based on old demo recordings from John, along with a juicy origin story told by George of how the musical reunion came to be.
It's a story that wasn't told in the 1995 documentary.
My recollection now.
This again.
You'll probably have three or four different versions of this, but Jeff Lynn and myself we had this band called The Traveling Wilburys and we had Roy Orbison in it.
And then Roy Orbison died.
Nobody can replace Roy as Roy, but maybe we should have some other person.
And then we thought of Elvis and somebody had talked to the Elvis estate and they loved the idea of Elvis being in the Wilburys.
The idea was that we put Elvis onto a multitrack machine and then we redo the entire backing, change the chords, change the tune, whatever and even the lyrics, and we'll then all sing this song.
And then, when it comes to the chorus, we bring up the other fader and there's Elvis singing the chorus.
We never did it because I don't know, at that point I thought it seemed a bit too gimmicky.
But I was talking to Yoko and telling her this idea and she said oh, I think I've got a tape of John.
Jeff Lynn ended up producing those new Beatle tracks, and you can see him working here with George, Paul and Ringo, and you witness the same sort of genial vibes that were on view in Jackson's Get Back.
These were men who, despite all the fame and fights and complicated lives, clearly loved one another.
The Beatles' anthology 2025 ends with the three of them at George's Friar Park estate lounging on the grass.
George is playing a ukulele, he and Paul are singing, and Ringo is slapping his legs in time.
Instead of brand new interviews with Paul and Ringo.
The documentary ends there, but it's a moment that feels not only fresh and natural, but unabashedly tender and sweet.
Ain't she sweet?
I ask you very confidentially Ain't she sweet?
Cast an eye in her direction, On me.
Oh my, Ain't that perfection for your dough?
I repeat, don't you think she's kind of sweet?
Now I see very confidentially.
Ain't she sweet?
Ain't she sweet?
Ain't she sweet?
Let's go.
TV critic David Bianculli is writing a book about the visual artistry of the Beatles.
He reviewed the Beatles anthology, premiering tonight on Disney+.
On tomorrow's show.
A filmed version of the 2023 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, opens in movie theaters December 5th.
It won four Tonys.
We'll feature Terry's interview with Groff and the show's director, Maria Friedman, and hear tracks from the revival's great cast recording.
I hope you can join us.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzold, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Taya Challenger and Anna Bauman.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V.
Nesper.
Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson.
Susan Yakundi directed today's show.
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davis.
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