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DFG Interview with John Scheinfeld

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by DFG
DFG interviews John Scheinfeld director of The US v John Lennon, about documentary making, archive-hunting and the incredible story of the United States government’s plans to silence Lennon.

DFG: The US v John Lennon is a slight departure from your previous work. Tell us about your relation with this subject and how you got interested in the story?

John Scheinfeld: I think the inspiration behind making the US v John Lennon is that it’s just such a compelling story. I was a huge Beatles fan growing up. More than any musical group they inspired me and I thought I knew everything and I didn’t!

When this story became public knowledge in the nineties, I thought wow - this is a really compelling story. And so I was attracted to it even then. In terms of my other work, I liked the biographies but I did some other things too. I did a film on heaven and how the great religions view heaven; I did some things on Stonehenge and places like that. So history in general – whether it’s the history of a person or the history of a place or the history of a movement – interests me, and in so many ways [the Lennon story] brought together a lot of these disparate interests.

One of the things that’s very important to us in this film was when we say the US versus John Lennon isn’t just the case; it isn’t just what the government was trying to do. In some ways it’s the history of what was going on in America socially, politically and culturally at the time. Because we felt it was very important to contextualise it so that we knew and understood what John and Yoko were working to. So you had to understand the war in Vietnam, you had to understand the anti-war movement, you had to understand the black panthers, you had to understand the yippies. So in some ways it combines all my interests in history and all my interests in music with the John Lennon songs, through the Beatles and the rest of it.

DFG: Was it the story of John Lennon that drew you in and then you contextualised it or what was your approach?

JS: I think I’m attracted to issues of free speech and this was really of paramount importance in this story. And then the rest just sort of came along. But yeah I was absolutely stunned. I was like ‘the government did what?! They tried to do WHAT to John Lennon?’ And you look at these documents and it’s the extent to which they covered a lot of it up specifically which is just so strange and that was really compelling to look at.

DFG: When did this story come out?

JS: You know some critics have looked at this movie and they were very smug and they said ‘oh there’s nothing new in this movie’… but for most people this is all new. Rolling Stone magazine in America published just a little part of this story in 1974. In the film you see the memo from the US senator where he’s suggesting to the White House that they go after Lennon. Part of that was known in 1974 but how it connected to other things was not known until the nineties. What happened is [that] the University of California spent twenty years trying to get hold of these documents. There’s a law in America called the freedom of information act, where either as a concerned citizen or as a journalist you can request secret government documents. So it took them twenty years but they got eventually got the Lennon file – all 13 documents. So we were able to look at them. Some people know it but most people don’t, and so to find a relatively unknown story about someone as famous as John Lennon is rare thing and for us a great challenge.
DFG: Lennon’s music and the amazing archive makes the film so rich and such a pleasure to watch. How did you source the rare archive and music, and how important was it to get the cooperation of Yoko Ono for access to rare music and footage?

JS: In terms of Yoko we could not have done this film without her and what I mean by that is not that we needed her permission to do it but we needed her support. Because any time we set out to make a film we want it to be definitive, and for it to be definitive we have to have access to the greatest amount of material and the greatest amount of unseen and unheard material, and in this case she had so much. In some ways from 1969 to 1972 there was kind of a John and Yoko reality show. There was rarely a day went by when they didn’t have a camera filming them or a microphone recording them and she has all this. So I got to walk into her archive. Nobody goes in there so I was quite honoured and we got to have a lot of pieces of video and audio that we would not have had otherwise.

But she didn’t have everything, so my partner, David Leaf, calls me the Hercule Poirot of documentary making because I am relentless in going after sources around the world to find not only the sheer volume of archive material but just the right piece for just the right moment in the film. And this is very key for us. It isn’t just ‘oh, we’ll just have a John Lennon song here or just have a piece of film here’. Every strip of John Lennon in this movie is there for a reason; it either speaks to what is going on story-wise, or makes a point about John that we need to make, or it’s John following up on something that was said just about 10 or 20 seconds before. So we really cast a very wide net so that we could make all the points we needed to make.

In terms of music every piece of music in this film is John Lennon’s, which most people don’t know. We use the lyrics to advance the story or to illuminate what he may have been thinking or feeling at a certain time. When you hear music and there are no lyrics that’s also significant because what Yoko allowed us to do was to go in to the studio and remove his lead vocals on 26 tracks leaving just music underneath George Harrison playing guitars, Ringo playing drums, and that became the score to the film.

One of our biggest challenges, because Lennon is not here to speak for himself, is how do we keep him alive as a valuable presence in the film? So we did it in three ways: one is the constant use of his music, he’s there all the time in the music and the lyrics. Number two, in the film he talks and you get a great sense of his charisma and a great sense of his sense of humour and also we have him narrate. We found interviews that he did where he can then tell us what was going on. So there’s no narrator in this film and that became very important to us because in a sense Lennon is narrating his own story.

DFG: How do you approach making a feature-length documentary of this kind without a narrator?

JS: What I would say is we apply a very traditional three act dramatic structure to our storytelling. It isn’t just a documentary that shows in 1967 this happened, in 1977 this happened; it has all the colours of a narrative.  We have [the] love story with John and Yoko, we have all those sort of sub plots of the Black Panthers and the Nixon administration. It’s all rolled in together in a three-act structure. And I think that is what distinguishes our work from other documentaries.

DFG: What has the reception been like in the States?

JS: It was released in theatres in New York and Los Angeles in September 2006. Reviews for the most part have been really really good. But it points out to me something that I didn’t know really and that is that it’s a people’s film. People who come seem to love it, they get emotional or it provokes thoughts and debate. Or it gets them thinking ‘I need to go and do something about what’s going on in the world’. I think that if we can have that affect on people then we have been successful.


The US v John Lennon is screening at this year's London Film Festival and is out in cinemas across the UK from 8th December 2006.

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