Lennon Naked | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Naoko Mori, who plays Yoko Ono in Lennon Naked, was on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek this morning. The interview starts three minutes in and lasts for nine minutes. I didn’t hear any info on broadcast dates.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sm8l1

Toying with the idea of making a Two Virgins ‘smiley’. Anticipating the complaints…

Right. I’ve finally got a TX date for this: Lennon Naked, BBC Four, 9.30pm, June 23. And here’s some info I managed to get from a BBC source.

He is one of the iconic musicians of the 20th century, founder of the Beatles and an advocate of primal therapy. And his story is well known, so John Lennon is perhaps a surprising choice for a film made for BBC Four.

But instead of charting the controversial Liverpudlian’s rise to fame or his tragic murder in 1980, Lennon Naked examines the star as a family man and his relationship with his father, with Christopher Eccleston taking the lead role.

The 90-minute drama charts Lennon’s life from the death of Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein in 1967 to 1971, when Lennon moved to America to begin a new life with Yoko Ono. The content was inspired by a candid interview he gave to Rolling Stone magazine that year and is part of the channel’s Fatherhood season.

Director and co-producer Edmund Coulthard brands it a ‘re-imagining’ of this important period in Lennon’s life.

‘We are not saying love him, we are saying here he is. We are trying to give a flavour of him,’ he comments.

This view is echoed by Jamie Laurenson, commissioning editor for drama on BBC Four, who believes focusing on Lennon at a time when he was re-examining his life and relationships with people made more sense than the ‘cradle to grave’ approach.

‘I think that notion of someone who has achieved such a level of fame and fortune and goes through a process of personal re-examination is very interesting,’ Laurenson adds.

‘Chris Eccleston really captures the restlessness of his character and writer Robert Jones has also done that by giving us a slant on Lennon’s life, rather than going down the well trodden route of the rock star biopic. It’s a look at an intense and passionate period of his life.

‘It is interesting to place a subject as famous as Lennon into a topic that is universal, that of fatherhood. I think his family life is key to understanding him and this film is an interesting counterpoint for both.’

This is Eccleston’s first role for BBC Four. He worked with a vocal coach to get the Liverpool accent just right, and says he knew very little about his subject before getting the role.

‘I was not a huge fan of Lennon or the Beatles but I was very interested in him as a person and I embraced that,’ he explained.

‘I became fascinated by him because he was just a very flawed human being. He was incredibly arrogant, and could be dismissive, but he was also humble and gentle. So I listened and read as much about him as I could.

‘Lennon is loved for his abrasiveness, and he was a very confessional man. I felt a lot more for him afterwards.’ The project was two and a half years in the making, but filming itself only lasted 18 days, so it was an ambitious project with shooting at a large number of locations.

Penned by Robert Jones, screenwriter of The No1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Lennon Naked was made more ‘real’ by using archive footage of the Beatles and Lennon and their songs, which was available thanks to a blanket agreement with the BBC.

‘The archive footage emerged as the project went on but it undoubtedly enhances the feel of the film. It is aesthetic – it is not trying to be social realism,’ says Jamie Laurenson.

The film has a dreamlike quality in places – through the use of this footage and flashbacks Lennon has to his childhood you get a sense of his feelings of abandonment. It makes for a very different film from Sam Taylor Wood’s recent Nowhere Boy which focused on John as a young man trying to set up his band.

In that respect it is an interesting take on part of the star’s life and the perhaps lesser known issues surrounding his parents which, in turn, it is suggested, affected his relationship with his own son from his first marriage.