Peter Jackson can’t get enough of The Beatles and restored Let It Be, too

Peter Jackson has found his niche in life, and it is advancing technology to restore Beatles stuff. He pioneered the tech for the 2021 docuseries Get Back, which restored cut footage from the filming of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 Let It Be documentary. Then he used it to restore an old John Lennon demo to make the final Beatles song “Now And Then” (plus a music video). And now, in a full circle moment, he’s using it to restore the actual Let It Be doc, which will be released on Disney+ on May 8.

“I’m absolutely thrilled that Michael’s movie, Let It Be, has been restored and is finally being re-released after being unavailable for decades. I was so lucky to have access to Michael’s outtakes for Get Back, and I’ve always thought that Let It Be is needed to complete the Get Back story. Over three parts, we showed Michael and the Beatles filming a groundbreaking new documentary, and Let It Be is that documentary—the movie they released in 1970,” Jackson said in a statement. “I now think of it all as one epic story, finally completed after five decades. The two projects support and enhance each other: Let It Be is the climax of Get Back, while Get Back provides a vital missing context for Let It Be. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was unfailingly helpful and gracious while I made Get Back, and it’s only right that his original movie has the last word… looking and sounding far better than it did in 1970.”

This news isn’t just notable for Jackson’s restoration. It’s a significant release in the Beatles world, because Let It Be has been out of circulation since the 1980s. There was never even a DVD release of the movie; if you did see a bootleg, it was lifted from an old VHS tape somewhere. As Beatles fans are usually completionists (case in point: Peter Jackson), having genuine access to the final film made with the entire band’s actual involvement is going to be a huge draw.

“Let It Be was ready to go in October/November 1969, but it didn’t come out until April 1970. One month before its release, The Beatles officially broke up. And so the people went to see Let It Be with sadness in their hearts, thinking, ‘I’ll never see The Beatles together again. I will never have that joy again,’ and it very much darkened the perception of the film,” Lindsay-Hogg said in his own statement. “But, in fact, how often do you get to see artists of this stature working together to make what they hear in their heads into songs. And then you get to the roof and you see their excitement, camaraderie and sheer joy in playing together again as a group and know, as we do now, that it was the final time, and we view it with full understanding of who they were and still are and a little poignancy. I was knocked out by what Peter was able to do with Get Back, using all the footage I’d shot 50 years previously.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Lindsay-Hogg promised that the newly restored Let It Be “looks now like it was intended to look in 1969 or 1970, although at my request, Peter did give it a more filmic look than Get Back, which had a slightly more modern and digital look.” The filmmaker said Jackson had proposed re-releasing Let It Be from the beginning of the Get Back project, and began advocating for it in earnest after Get Back was a success and he’d built relationships with the Beatles families and Apple Corps.

There’s no denying that Jackson has been the most significant figure in new Beatles content of the 21st century. The restoration of Let It Be seems a good way to close the chapter on Get Back, and perhaps now Jackson’s work in this space can be over. But using his new technology to Frankenstein other Beatles stuff “did cross my mind,” he admitted previously while promoting “Now And Then.” “We can take a performance from Get Back, separate John and George, and then have Paul and Ringo add a chorus or harmonies,” he said. “You might end up with a decent song but I haven’t had conversations with Paul about that. It’s fanboy stuff, but certainly conceivable.”