John Lennon, Yoko Ono's son says new film feels like 'extra time' with his dad
In 1972, the FBI tapped John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s phone at the request of Richard Nixon, who worried Lennon might undermine his reelection bid. The paranoid president couldn’t have anticipated that the couple’s son would be thrilled to hear the captured conversations.
“Growing up without my father, most of my experience of him has been through videos and film and music,” Sean Ono Lennon says. “So I always feel like I’m gaining extra time with him. It was really great fun to hear the audio calls. It’s nice because it’s so candid and unfiltered.”
Those phone calls − some amusing, others goosebump-inducing − are at the center of the new documentary “One to One: John & Yoko” (exclusively in IMAX theaters Friday, in theaters everywhere April 18), which culminates in a benefit concert that would be Lennon’s only full-length post-Beatles show.
John Lennon (left) and Yoko Ono making music in New York in the early '70s, when they became involved with radical activism. "My parents ultimately felt they were in danger," Sean Lennon says. "The people they were hanging out with were pushing for violence, which they were absolutely against."
Sean Lennon − who has produced the music for a Record Store Day EP and a box set to mark Lennon’s 85th birthday on Oct. 9 − describes it as “an unmanicured window into their lives during a very tumultuous but also very creative time period.”
By the early ‘70s, “my parents had fused into a superorganism. Everything they did, they did together; all the songs they were writing were together. It was a team of two,” he says. “This film represents the reality of that moment in time very faithfully and accurately.”
“One to One,” directed by Kevin Macdonald, follows John and Yoko as they align with Jerry Rubin and other leaders of the radicalized left. Plans are hatched for the couple to head the all-star Free the People tour, with a final stop at the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, the two peaceniks grow uncomfortable with the potential for violence and call the whole thing off.
Source: usatoday.com
