Paul McCartney has admitted that he’s seen The Beatles inspired movie Yesterday and that he “loved it”.
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The Danny Boyle directed film stars Himesh Patel as singer/songwriter Jack Malik, who lives in a world where nobody knows that the iconic Liverpool band ever existed.
McCartney said he politely declined an offer to see the film at an official screening, but later asked his wife Nancy if she fancied watching it at a cinema in the Hamptons in the US.
“That began when Richard Curtis, who [directed] Love Actually, wrote to me with the idea. And I thought, ‘This is a terrible idea’, but I couldn’t tell him, so I said, ‘Well, that sounds interesting – good luck,'” he told Billboard.
“I didn’t think anything more of it. Then someone said Danny Boyle would direct it, and I thought, ‘They must think they can pull it off.’ And I thought nothing more of it until they asked if I wanted to see a screening. I asked Nancy, and we said, ‘Let’s go, you and me, on a date to the cinema’.”
He continued: “We were in the Hamptons in the summer and there it was, so we got two tickets and walked in when the cinema went dark. Only a couple of people saw us. We were in the back row, giggling away, especially at all the mentions of Paul McCartney. A couple of people in front of us spotted us, but everyone else was watching the film. We loved it.”
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McCartney also gave an update on his forthcoming musical adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life, which is due out next year.
He said: “The reason I never wanted to do a musical is I couldn’t think of a strong enough story. But a guy I’ve known since school in Liverpool became a theatrical impresario in London [Bill Kenwright], and he rang me up and said, ‘I’ve got the musical rights to It’s a Wonderful Life’. That’s a strong story.
“So I met with the writer, Lee Hall, and I asked him to write the first 20 minutes of how he sees this as a play. So I was on holiday in the Hamptons, and I had lots of free time. So I read it and thought, ‘That’s a good opening, I like this’, and I sat at the piano and threw this melody at these dummy lyrics he had written. This was August. I sent it to them, and they said, ‘You’ve nailed it’. So it’s going well.”