How Peter Jackson Discovered The Biggest Bombshells In 'The Beatles: Get Back'

There are many documentaries about The Beatles. Once the biggest music band globally, they still have millions of fans who watch these documentaries to learn more about the men who held the world in a trance for years.

One of the most recent is the Disney+ docu-series 'The Beatles: Get Back,' which offers fans of the famous band a more intimate journey into the creative process of The Beatles. It features hours of footage in which John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison work together and build their songs.

The documentary also has one thing no other has had before: the band members' actual conversations during this process. Peter Jackson directed it, and he recently spoke about how he was unable to uncover the conversations that were previously hidden beneath the music and other noise. Here is all he said at the conference.

Jackson launched his company Park Road Post Production in New Zealand, and through the work of his team, he was able to develop technology that would isolate and separate the sound from the 1969 Beatles documentary "Let It Be." 

"Let It Be" included a lot of raw footage, but Jackson could draw out even more content from this footage with his tech. On November 16, Jackson spoke about his documentary at a Zoom press conference and explained how the digital tools he developed uncovered the new dialogue.

Jackson spoke at a Zoom press conference for 'The Beatles: Get Back' on November 16. He said, "It was like, 'Okay, well, it's great, it's fantastic, but God, I wish we could hear what they're saying.' So what we ultimately did, here in New Zealand at Park Road Post, we've got these very clever people. They've developed an AI program, artificial intelligence, and a machine learning program."

"We could take this mono tape, digitize it, teach the computer what a guitar sounds like, what a human voice sounds like, teach them what a drum sounds like," Jackson continued, "So, when the guys are playing and the drum and the guitars are drowning out the vocals and it's all kind of weird, you know, say, 'Okay, just give us the guitars by themselves."

The core focus on the technology Jackson developed was to isolate the band members' voices as they talked to each other, and it was a huge success. This isolated audio makes The Beatles: Get Back such an amazing documentary.

Jackson also said in his conference, "So, you see Ringo drumming and you can't hear him. Then you say, 'Give us the vocals.' And you literally just have the voices all by themselves. So, we developed this technology that allows us to de-mix, split the-all the audio components off these mono tracks."

Jackson was very dedicated to the documentary. He even dug through more sound from the 1969 documentary with no corresponding video footage. This meant he edited over 40 hours of footage for The Beatles: Get Back.

He said, "One of the things I'd always wondered about over the last 40 years is what happened to all the unused footage from Let It Be? Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot a lot of stuff that didn't get used. I had no idea if it survived, I had no idea how much there was, and no books really talk about it."

So, he first met with Apple Corps Ltd. to discuss the possibility of creating a Beatles-focused virtual reality experience. He asked about the unused material during this meeting, and he got way more than he bargained for.

"They said, 'Yeah, yeah, there's about 60 hours of film and 130 hours of audio and we've got all that,'" Jackson explained. "I sort of arrived at this meeting to talk about VR, and I left with getting that. I was in the right place at the right time."

'The Beatles: Get Back' premiered on December 25 and immediately garnered high praise from viewers and critics. Many noted, in particular, the historical merit of the documentary's footage, the uncovered audio, and how its upbeat nature challenged the longtime theory that "Let It Be" was marked with a tension between The Beatles.

The documentary has an approval rating of 94% and an average of 8.6 on Rotten Tomatoes. Its critics' consensus also reads, "It may be too much of a good thing for some viewers, but The Beatles: Get Back offers a thrillingly immersive look at the band's creative process."

According to Sheri Linden of The Hollywood Reporter, the documentary is an "immersive, in-the-moment chronicle of a generation-defining band in the act of creating, offering an up-close look at the quartet's alchemy" and concluded that it "offers ample evidence that necessity is in the eye of the beholder."