#interviews: john

[torchlitinthedesert]

I Say It Just To Reach You

An interview with John Lennon from December 1968, printed in the January 1969 issue of Keele University’s student magazine. There’s more about the background for the interview - including a sweet bit about John and Yoko collecting them from Weybridge station and giving them lunch - as well as scans of the whole magazine (including a Pink Floyd interview) at the link.

John and Yoko spent most of December 1968 giving interviews. This one was with two students: Maurice Hindle wrote to John through the Beatles fan club, and was amazed to get a reply. He took colleague Daniel Wiles, who had a tape recorder - and who had already met Yoko. “If you look at UNIT magazine in 1967 you will find an article I wrote based on an interview I did with Yoko Ono about her film making. I actually got Yoko Ono to come up to Keele to give a performance in the FY Lecture Theatre (as it was then). I remember we paid her the princely sum of £40 for her visit." But unlike most of John’s interviews from this period, it’s not a JohnandYoko interview, even though she was there that day.

Hindle remembers: “I very clearly remember how up to the point of Weybridge station the pressure of the whole event was on me to take responsibility for having set the whole thing up – which included my decision to kick-start the interview by showing Lennon John Hoyland’s ‘open letter’ to him in Tariq Ali’s Black Dwarf paper - I knew it would get Lennon’s back up and make him talk about the things I wanted to hear about.” The letters described the Beatles as “less revolutionary than the Rolling Stones”, which went down about as well as you’d expect with John.

But he also finds time to enthuse about his new macrobiotic diet, and express his pride in how well The White Album is recorded. I love his enthusiasm for the technical side, of how much better the Beatles now are at using the resources of a recording studio: “we sounded more like us on this record than we do on the first one.”

[astrangetorpedo]

Julien Baker covers No Children by the Mountain Goats + an introduction from John Darnielle

➕

Excerpt from “I Hope We Both Die: How The Mountain Goats Wrote The Ultimate Anthem To Dysfunction” an interview with John Darnielle

[5ummit]

Thunderbolts* (2025)

[userirvingb]

interviews that have a whole new context after 2x09 dropped

[a-state-of-bliss]

Interview March 2008 - Michelle Buswell by John Midgley

[pablolf]

And Keanu says something really interesting to me on the first John Wick. He comes to me and he goes, “Look, just so you know, little bit of advice, when you edit, once a week, you should see the edit on the big screen.” And I’m like, OK, we’ll try. Later, alone with him, I’m going, “Well, why?” He’s like, “I’m a big-screen actor.” And I had no fucking idea what that meant. I thought it meant a movie star. And he’s like, “No, no, no, no.”

And he started talking to me about non-verbal acting, like gestures, motions. And he’s like, “Look, when you see me on a little monitor and I give this little look, it’s one thing. But when you see it on a 40-foot screen, that look’s going to say a lot. That’s what I want to play this guy as. So just please be aware of it, so when we punch in on the closeups, it’s going to mean something.” And it kind of really clicked for me right there.

I’ve always been fascinated by non-verbal gesture, body language. Keanu would go through and strip his dialogue down. It was like, “No, no, nope. I’m just going to cuddle the puppy.” In the first John Wick, he doesn’t talk for 32 minutes. Try to sell that one to a studio: You have Keanu Reeves and you’re not going to let him talk.

Chad Stahelski on what the John Wick movies owe to Buster Keaton

[benoits-neckerchieves]

Just found Hugh Grant’s Reddit AMA from 2014, featuring such gems as “I love to kill” and “I will pour almost anything down my throat”

Source: Hugh Grant Reddit AMA

[microsofttothemax]

to me, this is cinema

[warmrevolver]

Paul Mccartney in an interview with Charlie Rose talking about meeting John Lennon for the first time, October, 1991

PAUL: Who is this person? But then I met him a little later that day and uh, I was surprised at how drunk and horrible he was. Cause I was younger then, he was just sixteen-

CHARLIE: He was a bad influence on you, was he?

PAUL: -Well he was getting a six pack down him y’know, he was sat there and he was getting going. I was later to learn those tricks but I was a little bit innocent at the time. Yeah, I remember this guy sort of smelly breath over my shoulder, sort of thinking, “Oh dear me, hoodlum, y’know hello.”

There’s soooo many things I love about this particular telling of the story of John and Paul first meeting:

- His description seeming like such a caricature of a Liverpudlian teenage boy but knowing John was JUST LIKE THAT

- ‘I was a little bit innocent at the time.’ as if John corrupted him with his ‘hoodlum’ shenanigans

- It’s so clear that John was this image of older boy coolness to Paul when they were younger; the way he talks about his initial aversion to John’s antics while smiling, knowing that John’s influence would shape the rest of his life.

The comparison of younger Paul to a teenage girl with a crush on an older boy is so true- I mean, just look at him giggling about drunk John peering over his shoulder, defiling his ‘innocence’

[djkerr]

“I watched Noah as a young man go through this complete loss of his anonymity. He has dealt with it by becoming open and curious and available to people, which not everybody does. He’s very intelligent, very well read and fantastically empathetic. Honestly, he’s one of the great human beings in my life.”  ~John Wells, executive producer of “ER” and “The Pitt”

Watch the full interview

[yeoman-lawyer]

mama what is happening under that table

[thinkerlewispullman]

“Once we were on set and we were moving from shame room to shame room [in the film’s third act], I realized the power of the symbolism and getting to visualize these labyrinths of anxiety and trauma we subject ourselves to. It really uses the format incredibly intelligently because so much of what we’re talking about takes place in our minds. Wyatt Russell [who plays John Walker] said something brilliant the other day. He said, ‘A lot of Marvel is about the exploration of outer space, and this is the exploration of inner space, of the mind, which is just as limitless as outer space is.’ I thought that was a good way to frame it.”

LEWIS PULLMAN — about the visual metaphor for mental health by taking the characters traverse a series of ‘halls of shame’ that confront them with their own insecurities and failures.

[vimflam]

"yeah, now which one of you guys is the one with the, uh, obsession about the World's Fair?"

JL: uh oh ... wow.

[brotherconstant]

BLACK SAILS 4.09 INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 2.08

[thebeatlelove]

“I didn’t want to do anything else”

[tavolgisvist]

'I look in the mirror'

19 February 1963, the Cavern, photo by Michael Ward

Photo by Mike McCartney

August 13, 1966, photo by Bob Bonis

We wrote with two guitars, John and I. And, as I’ve mentioned previously, the joy of that was that I was left-handed while he was right handed, so I was looking in a mirror and he was looking in a mirror. We would always tune up, have a ciggie, drink a cup of tea, start playing some stuff, look for an idea. Normally, one or the other of us would arrive with a fragment of a song. ‘Please Please Me’ was a John idea. John liked the double meaning of ‘please’. Yeah, ‘please’ is, you know, pretty please. ‘Please have intercourse with me. So, pretty please, have intercourse with me, I beg you to have intercourse with me.’ He liked that, and I liked that he liked that. This was the kind of thing we’d see in each other, the kind of thing in which we were matched up. We were in sync.

(Paul McCartney, about Please Please Me in The Lyrics, 2021)

gifs by javelinbk

A lot of what we had going for us was that we were both good at noticing the stuff that just pops up, and grabbing it. And the other thing is that John and I had each other. If he was sort of stuck for a line, I could finish it. If I was stuck for somewhere to go, he could make a suggestion. We could suggest the way out of the maze to each other, which was a very handy thing to have. We inspired each other.

(Paul McCartney, about Eight Days A Week in The Lyrics, 2021)

gifs by nikidontsurf

When John and I met, the first year of our friendship was spent talking about these cover versions, the records we loved, and then playing them again and again. As we got to know each other, we practised these various covers until one day the conversation went, ‘You know, I’ve written one or two songs.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, so have I.’ That gave us something in common that was itself wholly uncommon. I went to a school of a thousand boys and I’d never met anyone who said he’d written a song. Mine were just in my head. So were John’s. We took each other by surprise. And then the logical extension was, ‘Well, maybe we could write one together.’ So that’s how we started. And we became versions of each other.

(Paul McCartney, about The Other Me in The Lyrics, 2021)

gifs by stewy

Q: "Can I ask you about Lewis Carroll?" A: "Oh, Lewis Carroll. I always admit to that because I love 'Alice In Wonderland' and 'Alice Through The Looking Glass.' But I didn't even know he'd written anything else. I was that ignorant. I just happened to get those for birthday presents as a child and liked them. And I usually read those two about once a year, because I still like them."

(John Lennon, June 16, 1965, interview for BBC)

Paul McCartney in his garden at Cavendish Avenue, 7; photo by Barry Lategan (for Observer 'What Makes A Man Stylish?', July 1968)

I think of the imagined world of Lewis Carroll [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There] that John and I both loved so much.

(Paul McCartney, about I’ll Get You in The Lyrics, 2021)

We’d been together so much that if you had a question, we would both pretty much come up with the same answer. [about their hitchhike to Spain by way of Paris] <…> It’s a bit crude, but it’s fair to say that, in general, I’d had a good life and John hadn’t. His life had been tougher, and he had to develop a harder shell than I did. He was quite a cynical guy but, as they say, with a heart of gold. A big softy, but his shield was hard. So that was very good for the two of us. Opposites attract. I could calm him down, and he could fire me up. We could see things in each other that the other needed to be complete.

(Paul McCartney about Ticket To Ride in The Lyrics, 2021)

Sometimes I look in the mirror Is nobody there? But I just keep on staring and staring No Can it be? Can it be? Can it be? And if I look in the mirror And nobody´s there But I just keep on staring, and staring No Is it me? Is it me? Is it me?

(John Lennon, circa 1977)

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