Making a movie about a real person is a challenge. There will always be naysayers complaining about how the actor doesn’t have the right look, the right accent or even the right vibe to pull it off. There will always be diehard fans demanding to know why certain details or chapters of a career were omitted, and others insisting the movie tried too hard to cram an entire lifetime into 90 minutes. And if the subject of the film is still alive, there’s the added pressure to please them. No one wants to piss off the artist they’re attempting to canonize.
Perhaps that’s why director Sam Mendes — who is working on a four-part Beatles project due out in 2028, with each film told through the perspective of a different member of the Fab Four — allowed Ringo Starr to read the script of his movie and offer edits. According to a recent New York Times interview, the Beatles drummer recently spent two days in London with Mendes where the two “went over the script of the Ringo film, line by line, while Starr offered extensive notes to make his depiction truer to his own experiences.”
“He had a writer — very good writer, great reputation, and he wrote it great, but it had nothing to do with Maureen and I,” Starr told the Times. “That’s not how we were. I’d say, ‘We would never do that.’” He also expressed some skepticism about Mendes’s plan to film all four movies at the same time, ending with what perhaps amounts to the Liverpudlian version of “bless his heart”: “But he’ll do what he’s doing, and I’ll send him peace and love.”
On the one hand, this revelation is understandable. Especially when you’re dealing with artists as iconic as the Beatles, the stakes are pretty high; you want their endorsement so that they urge their hundreds of millions of fans to shell out $20 to see the movie in theaters, and you don’t want to offend them to the point where they decide not to grant you the rights to use their music. (Remember that David Bowie biopic with no David Bowie songs from a few years ago? Of course you don’t.) But allowing Ringo to read the script before the movie, which will feature Barry Keoghan as the “Yellow Submarine” singer, even enters production feels like a bridge too far.
Every Pop Music Biopic of the 21st Century, Ranked
From the electric to the downright cringe, we ranked every musical biopic from this centuryThe best biopics are the ones where the subject gives the filmmakers free rein to tell the story they want to tell — or even, as Bob Dylan did with A Complete Unknown, encourages them to take a few liberties for storytelling purposes. It’s perhaps why so many directors wait until their subjects are dead to tell their life stories. How would Elvis or Ray Charles or Johnny Cash react to seeing their worst moments — all fueled or intensified by some serious substance abuse — reenacted on the big screen? Some artists are an open book, of course, but most people have a hard time airing all their dirty laundry for the world to see, and that often results in a sanitized version of the truth, or a film that amounts to nothing more than self-aggrandizement.
Even after artists are dead and gone, sometimes their estates will try to throw their weight behind projects that overlook hugely significant (but perhaps unseemly) parts of their stories. Take, for example, the estate-sanctioned Amy Winehouse biopic that was panned for completely omitting the ways in which the troubled singer was exploited by those closest to her — particularly her father Mitchell Winehouse, who, as we saw in the 2015 documentary Amy, turned a blind eye to his daughter’s substance abuse, encouraged her to keep touring and even brought a camera crew to St. Lucia, where she was attempting to get clean, without her permission. Can we really expect the forthcoming Michael Jackson biopic, which features two members of his estate as producers, to deliver an unbiased retelling of the allegations of child molestation against him?
That’s not to say that Ringo Starr has any similar skeletons in his closet he’s attempting to keep out of his biopic. And fact-checking is important; no fan wants to watch a movie about their favorite musician that’s filled with inaccuracies. But his issues about how the first draft of the screenplay treated his relationship with his first wife shouldn’t mean he gets the final say. There are two sides to every divorce, and everyone has their own perspective. No matter who we are, we all tend to see ourselves through rose-tinted glasses. The pressure to get it right is understandable, but allowing Starr — well-intentioned as he may be — to go “line by line” and provide edits or notes sets a bad precedent.
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