The last interview that John Lennon and Yoko Ono gave, on the day of Lennon’s 1980 death, will be the focus of filmmaker Steven Soderbergh‘s upcoming, yet-untitled documentary. “I’m not looking to re-invent the form [of documentary],” Soderbergh said of his aim with the film, according to Variety. “I’m just hoping to create a film that gets as many people as possible to hear what John and Yoko had to say on that afternoon before he was killed.”
At the time of his death, Lennon and Ono were promoting Double Fantasy, Lennon’s first recording in five years, since he took a hiatus to raise his son Sean. It had come out in November, but Lennon was still doing press in December, including a nine-hour chat with Rolling Stone on Dec. 5, 1980. On the afternoon of his death, Dec. 8, RKO Radio’s Laurie Kaye and Dave Sholin spoke with the couple; Kaye recently wrote a book about the experience in her memoir, Confessions of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Name-Dropper. RKO aired the interview, which has circulated among fans ever since.
Speaking at the Doha Film Festival in Qatar, where he’s promoting The Christophers, Soderbergh expressed his enthusiasm for the project. “They were both so free in their discussions,” he said, according to Variety. “As someone who has been interviewed many times, I was surprised at how open and excited they were to talk. You would think they had never been interviewed before.”
He added that he felt the subjects they discussed in the interview, including his views on politics, feminism, and positive thinking, were relevant now, the same way they were 45 years ago. “It’s even more relevant in terms or relationships, politics, how we treat each other,” he said. “How systems work on the individual and above all on the importance of love in our daily life and our world.”
The film will be Soderbergh’s first documentary since his Spalding Gray profile, And Everything Is Going Fine, in 2010.
