In 2000, Beatles nut Mark Stanfield achieved the rare feat of releasing a genuinely good Beatles film. He’s the writer behind Two Of Us, an imaginative exercise that dramatised the legendary night, in 1976, when Paul McCartney visited his formerly estranged pal John Lennon at the latter’s apartment in New York. Directed by Let It Be filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, it’s become a cult favourite among those in the know, NME reports.
Now a professor at the University Of Minnesota, Stanfield has reworked the film into a new play starring Barry Sloane (Shameless) as John and Jay Johnson (who played John’s cousin Stan Parkes in biopic Nowhere Boy) as McCartney.
Mark Stanfield: “Back in the ‘90s, I had seen an interview that Paul did on the Charlie Rose show. I couldn’t help but notice that when they brought up the subject of John, his whole face – his tone of voice, everything – changed. I remember thinking: ‘Wow, that’s underneath all the showbiz, thumbs-up Macca and all that stuff. He’s really sad; he’s really lost someone dear to him.’ I thought: ‘There’s something there.’”
Michael Lindsay-Hogg said he’d had no interest in making another “rock ’n’ roll movie” after Let It Be, but he liked Two Of Us because it was more of a story about two friends. Is that how you saw it, too?
“The title is Two Of Us after the Beatles song, but it’s also ‘two of us’ – you know, you and me. Like, just as two people trying to look out for and check in on one another as the years go by.
Michael said to me, ‘I’ve received a lot of Beatles scripts over the years and they’re interesting for one reason or another, but I always say ‘no’ because I don’t wanna do something so narrow.’
But the way he saw it – and I think he directed it this way – is that it was about two friends, in their mid-thirties, at that stage in your relationship where there’s a lot of stuff that’s gone under the bridge: a falling out, a reconciliation.”
