Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Now we'll turn to a particular moment in the career of the musician Paul McCartney. A new documentary called Man on the Run, explores McCartney's career after the Beatles disbanded in 1970. Over the course of the '70s, Paul would retreat from city life to the Scottish countryside.

After a few attempts to find his footing, he started the band, Wings, with his wife Linda and guitarist Denny Lane of the Moody Blues. Man on the Run draws on interviews with McCartney, his bandmates in Wings and other Beatles adjacent voices, including John Lennon's son, Sean. Through those perspectives, we get a deep dive into an important decade in the development of Paul McCartney.

Let's listen to a little bit from the documentary. First we'll hear the voice of Chris Thomas, a music producer who worked with the Beatles, talking about visiting Paul as he was working on his first solo record. Then we'll hear Paul himself reflecting on his songwriting around that time.

[clip play]

Chris Thomas: I remember I was in Abbey Road one day, Paul was in number two listening to the records. I popped my head in there and he suggested come in. I stood there and I listened to this song. I said, "Who have you got playing on that?" He said, "Oh, I did it all myself. It's like, "What?"

[music - Paul McCartney: Maybe I'm Amazed]

Paul McCartney: It's not that I have any doubts about loving you, but conversation in my head, it's more intense. I'm mixing in fear of being a grown up.

Alison Stewart: Joining me now to talk about Man on the Run is filmmaker, Morgan Neville. He is the director of the great documentary, 20 Feet from Stardom, for which he won the Academy Award for best Documentary feature. Morgan, welcome.

Morgan Neville: Hi. Good talking to you.

Alison Stewart: Morgan, you've said that you were excited with this film to get a look at this underexplored decade in Paul McCartney's career. What were some of the thread from this era that you were most excited to explore?

Morgan Neville: You think of Paul McCartney as somebody who's just gone from success to success, but I knew that this period of time was really probably the biggest struggle he ever had in his career. Really after watching Get Back and having read way too many Beatles books, that I knew there was a moment after the Beatles broke up where Paul was really adrift.

He had to ask all of these existential questions about who am I? Who am I as an artist? He, in one year gets married, has a child, adopts a child, and the Beatles break up. He really has to figure out a lot of things. This story begins at the moment the Beatles break up. Then you see him basically spend a decade trying to figure out who is Paul McCartney.

Alison Stewart: Paul is an executive producer on this film. He's obviously been asked every question imaginable. First of all, what access did you have to him?

Morgan Neville: I had great access. I have to say that I've been making documentaries for a long time, and it was important to me to not just ask the usual questions or get the usual answers. I think Paul, like all of us, has a jukebox of anecdotes in his head. If you ask him about a song or an album, there's a familiar story. I just thought, "Let's not do that--"

In a way, the film is really about the emotional story he went through in the decade. I sat down with him numerous times over numerous months. I would go and interview him a couple of times and I'd edit. Then I'd go back a couple months later. This went on for a year maybe. Really trying to get Paul to have conversations that were going deeper into his emotional state.

He was game. I think it was really him trying to make sense of what he went through in this time. He also, I will say, left me completely alone creatively. He didn't have any input on the film ever, really. He saw the film when it was done and had no comment on it other than, "I just felt like I watched my life flash before my eyes."

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new Paul McCartney documentary, Man on the Run, about the songwriter's career in the decade after the Beatles disbanded. My guest is documentary filmmaker, Morgan Neville. What do you think Paul says? Most people get wrong about the Beatles? What do you think that most people get wrong about the Beatles?

Morgan Neville: Oh. The thing that I think really came out here, which is something that I-- Again, I think it started with the Get Back project, which is in the popular telling of the demise of the Beatles and the breakup, it was that they all hated each other and that Paul was overbearing and would tell George what guitar solos to play. The film of the Let It Be sessions, the original film, Let It Be, is really a divorce film that concentrates on all the dark stuff, but then Get Back, eight hours or whatever it was, really shows the humor and the fraternity, and the friction, and all of it.

It was like a bunch of brothers who were sick of each other and all wanted to go know who they were as individuals. Though Paul was probably the one that wanted that the least. John says Paul's the one that wanted the Beatles to stay together more than anybody. Paul was the one, ironically, who first let it leak that the Beatles were no more.

Newspaper headlines became, Paul Quits the Beatles. That was how many people came to think of it. Paul really was the one who didn't ever want the Beatles to end. I think what you see is, even in their estrangement, particularly in the early '70s, when Paul was suing the other three Beatles to get out of the Apple legal arrangements, and basically to free himself from a manager he didn't want, it was the only thing he could do, that even then, you see them talk about each other with love.

Even when they're feuding, you see John Lennon referring to Paul as his best friend or his brother. There is really this sense that they had experienced something together again from the time they were 15, that only the four of them ever knew what that was like. They shared that bond through the rest of their lives.

Alison Stewart: Another voice we hear in the documentary is that of Sean Lennon, John Lennon's son. What parts of this time period did you feel that Sean's voice needed to be included?

Morgan Neville: I felt like I wanted somebody to talk about John's feelings, again, to understand how John felt about that time. Sean mentioned a lot of things I've never really heard, talking about all of Paul's records in his dad's record collection, or talking about just how much John was really clocking everything that Paul was doing. In fact, the last album John did, Double Fantasy, came out of John hearing Paul on McCartney II, and hearing the song coming up and thinking, I've got to get back to this.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting him describing how well played the Wings records were in the house.

Morgan Neville: I don't know. It just made me feel something emotionally. Then also Sean, in talking about his dad's death and how Paul reacted to it, Paul, there's this famous clip where the night of John's death, Paul's confronted by journalists on the street and they say, "What do you think?" He has a long answer, but at the end he just says, "It's a drag." Of course, that became the headline, which sounds callous, but Sean unpacks it. You understand that Paul was just in shock, as the world was in shock. I think he couldn't process what had happened. I think, frankly, it took him years and years to process.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new Paul McCartney documentary, Man on the Run, about the songwriter's career in the decade after the Beatles disbanded. My guest is documentary filmmaker, Morgan Neville. Early on, we see Paul in the Scottish countryside living a very simple family life. What was he doing when he was up there? What was he thinking about?

Morgan Neville: I think he was thinking about feeding the kids and shearing the sheep, and mending fences.

Alison Stewart: He wasn't thinking about being a musician at the time, or was that in the back of his mind?

Morgan Neville: I think he was trying to figure out, if I'm not a Beatle, who am I and what kind of a musician am I? He even says there was a moment where he wasn't even sure he was going to make music anymore. It was so disruptive. Really what happens is, two weeks after John Lennon says in a band meeting, "I want a divorce," Linda and Paul and their new child, Mary go to Scotland.

Paul had bought this tiny farmhouse in the middle of nowhere on the Kintyre peninsula. Paul never liked it. He had barely spent a night there. Linda said, "Let's just go up there and just get lost." They go up there and it's really-- I've been up to the house. It's a tiny, dingy, two room stone farmer's house, and they make their home there and they grow their own food and they raise their children there. It really, as crazy as that maybe seemed at the time, it actually is the best way to stay grounded when you're coming out of something like being a Beatle.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because you say Paul is really good at making you feel very comfortable when you're talking to him. He puts you at ease. Did that happen with him with most musicians, once he decided to go other avenues with music, did most people think, "Oh, my God, I'm talking to a Beatle," or were they able to take Paul as who he was at that moment?

Morgan Neville: They were not, in the beginning able to Take Paul just as he was. I called the film Man on the Run because what you see again and again is Paul trying to run away from the shadow of the Beatles. You realize it's an impossible task. Every interview he gives, every record review he receives, all compare everything to the Beatles, talk about the Beatles, when are the Beatles going to get back together?

Particularly in the first half of the '70s, there's a real sense of anger, actually, to maybe to all the Beatles, but particularly to Paul. Just a sense of heartbreak that I think fans and critics had about the Beatles breakup. There's just this attitude of, why can't you guys just get back together, stop making this silly solo music and can we have the Beatles again?

Everything is really judged through this harsh, inescapable prism. Paul starts making music that he intentionally tries to make not sound like Beatles music. He doesn't do Beatles songs in concert for years. He's really trying to separate himself from that. Slowly, over the course of that decade, he starts to become a little more comfortable with it, but really, it's not until John's passing that he can stop running from it.

Alison Stewart: What was interesting to you musically about his first stabs at writing and recording after the Beatles as Paul McCartney?

Morgan Neville: If you listen to his first two albums he did, which is McCartney I and Ram. A lot of them were written or some recorded in this farmhouse in Scotland. You have songs like Long Haired lady and Lovely Linda and Heart Of The Country, and Ram, Ram On, they're pastoral, they're sweet, they're handmade, and they're not cool. Cool meaning in 1972, singing about life in the farm is. not where the attitude of rock criticism or rock music was, which was very angry and politically involved.

In the film, I quote one of the reviews, but of the many bad reviews that Ram got calling it the nadir of '60s music at that point. That was from Rolling Stone magazine. Now, Ram is one of the 500 greatest albums of all time in Rolling Stone magazine. In a way, I think Paul's music was out of sync with the time, but it was timeless. I love those albums. I think a lot of people love those albums. It just, at the time, was not cool.

Alison Stewart: We get a lot of Linda in this Documentary as well. Why was it important for you to spotlight her role not just as Paul's wife, but also as his bandmate?

Morgan Neville: Linda's always been a two dimensional character. Again, the frustration people had with the Beatles breaking up, there was a lot of anger directed against Linda and a lot of anger directed against Yoko. It's interesting that both Paul and John married women who were older than them, who had already been married and divorced, who already had kids, who they made new families with and made music with.

They were both looking for some balance, I would imagine, to equal something they had had with each other. Linda, who had no musical training beyond choir and high school, is drafted into the band because they love each other and they don't want to be apart. Paul wants everything he's doing to come from the family. The family is the center of what Paul creates in the '70s. Every tour they have, the whole family is there. When they're in the studio, there's a crib in the middle of the studio.

The family is always together. Linda, it was really important for me to understand who she was as a person, and that of course she-- It was no accident that Paul fell in love with her, is that Linda was smart. She had been a very accomplished rock photographer, so she had traveled in that world, but she was worldly. Her father was a lawyer. She's not part of the Eastman Kodak family, though many people still think that.

Her father was a successful lawyer for the music industry and for the fine art world. She grew up knowing those worlds too. You start to understand that she really created a buffer for Paul. Paul, in the Beatles, often would run into people rolling their eyes and saying, "No, I don't want to do that." With Linda, Paul said the refrain she would always say when he'd ask her about a new idea, she would say, "It's allowed." She gave him permission.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new Paul McCartney documentary, Man on the Run, about the songwriter's career in the decade after the Beatles disbanded. My guest is documentary filmmaker, Morgan Neville. Let's hear a clip from the earliest days of Wings. Just after Paul invited guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell to make music with him.

[clip play]

When did Wings really find its groove?

Morgan Neville: The first couple of Wings albums, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, again, are not particularly well received. As Paul says in the film, Wings were a dud when they started. It's also interesting to remember that Wings was actually a revolving door of a band. It wasn't supposed to be. He wanted it to be a band. This is part of what Paul had to wrestle with, which is Paul in the beginning said, "We are starting a new band, Wings, and I'm just going to be the bass player. We can start at square one and we can tour in a van."

It was romantic and it's what he had known in the Beatles, and it was the path he knew how to follow, but it was an impossibility. There's no way to not be Paul McCartney and some other guys, which is something that all the other members of Wings through the years had to wrestle with. It's really when the first lineup of the band disintegrates in 1973, and Paul and Linda and Danny Laine, who is the one consistent member of Wings all the way through, go off to Lagos in Africa to record what becomes Band on the Run.

That album, I think, is the album where Paul really figures out who he wants to be as an artist. It's also the time when the Beatles business is getting settled, that all of the acrimony and the legality of everything they're going through all wraps up. I think at that moment, Wings really takes flight, I guess. Sorry for the pun.

Alison Stewart: Do you have a favorite Wings song?

Morgan Neville: Oh, I love so many of their songs. Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, I'm a big fan of, Let 'Em In, I'm a big fan of. So many great ones. That was part of it, is that he made so much music in this decade. He put out 10 records, and every record has great music on it. I think it's interesting because he's trying on different hats of who am I as an artist?

In a way, that's what the Beatles were doing. If you look at the range of the music, particularly that Paul wrote, look at the White album to Abbey Road, the diversity of music that Paul was doing, I think he liked to be able to wear all these different hats and not just be one thing.

Alison Stewart: I like Let 'Em In as well. So much of your work deals with celebrating and exploring the lives of famous creatives, including Steve Martin, Lisa Fisher, Keith Richards, Mr. Rogers. What made Paul McCartney stand out to you when so much has been written about him? You would think people know everything they need to know about Paul McCartney. What stood out to you?

Morgan Neville: I think I really tried to show a side of Paul that he doesn't show, which is that Paul-- I think at one point when John and Paul were feuding, John referred to Paul as rock music's best PR man, in a way that's a little bit of a dig that Paul was just good at glad handing people. Paul could be incredibly charming and funny, but the thing that gets lost is Paul was tough, and that you don't have a career like that if you're a pushover, if you don't know what you want.

You realize that both John and Paul both had a really steely interior that really allowed them to do what they did. I think exploring that side of it-- The other thing I thought going into the film was, talking about Paul McCartney as musical genius, is in a way the least interesting thing about Paul. Because we know that, we've heard that, we hear the music, we know he's a genius when it comes to music. Going into it, I said, "Let me just take that idea and put it on the shelf, and think about the film about a guy named Paul who's dealing with a divorce from his band and suddenly has to put his life back together."

In that way, I think the thing that surprised me is how relatable Paul was, and the questions he was asking of how to balance your family and your art, or how do you deal with your own legacy? Do you lean into it or run away from it, and the expectations that are put on you and a lot of things that I guess I could relate to.

Alison Stewart: The name of the documentary is Man on the Run. My guest has been filmmaker, Morgan Neville. Hey Morgan, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Morgan Neville: Great talking to you.