(L–R) Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “One to One: John & Yoko” at The Ray Theatre on January 23, 2025 in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
“Is there really room for another film about The Beatles and John Lennon?” Kevin Macdonald had asked himself when brought on to direct One to One: John & Yoko. But after seeing the footage of Lennon’s One to One concert, his only solo full-length performance post-Beatles, he realized that not directing this film would be “a ridiculous crying shame,” he tells the audience after the premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. “I should grasp this with both hands,” he recalls. And he was right, considering the crowd shoots several hands into the air to ask questions right away.
Having premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, One to One: John & Yoko brings a treasure trove of 1970s culture on tape, what Macdonald calls “the shards of things that are left behind.” Opening when former Beatles member John Lennon relocated from London to New York City with Yoko Ono in late 1971, One to One presents a detailed staging of the Greenwich Village apartment where the creative couple spent 18 months absorbing the media, locals, and anti-war sentiments. Macdonald and his co-director and editor Sam Rice-Edwards have pieced together numerous archival clips from television shows, advertisements, and news segments of the era as well as interspersing interviews with Lennon and Ono, home footage, and personal taped phone calls.
During their time in New York City, Lennon and Ono became rapt in America’s obsession with television, despite the volatility of politics at the time: the Attica prison riot and its aftermath, followed by remarks from President Nixon and investigations into the Watergate scandal. One to One reflects the experience of channel surfing and being sucked into the bombardment of the screen, mimicking what many of us have abandoned for the seemingly more controlled simplicity of on-demand streaming platforms online. In this way, One to One not only captures a record of the political tensions of the 1970s, the mass-marketed consumerism gluttony of commercial advertisements, and the beginnings of never-ending content feeds, but also harkens back to the nearly forgotten form of activity known as watching TV.
When asked about portraying pop culture and consumerism through television so thoroughly, Macdonald replies that Lennon “spent so much of his life in America watching TV. So I thought, oh that’s interesting, you’re getting to know this world through the media, through television. Once we started to look at what would have been on TV at that time, you start to see so many things that are resonant to today.”
The documentary is not just a portrait of John Lennon though: it also shows us Yoko Ono in intimate detail. Rice-Edwards didn’t know very much about Ono at the start of the project. “I think she became a kind of three-dimensional character for me, whereas before a lot of what I’d heard about her was vilification from the time,” he says. Hearing about Yoko Ono from her own archive helped him to understand her more wholly than surface-level tabloids. “One of the keys when we were making the film,” Macdonald adds, “was trying to get inside her head as a mother, whose daughter had been effectively kidnapped.” The story of Ono’s daughter, Kyoko, was unknown to both directors, but was an important aspect of her to include in the documentary portrait. Macdonald explains that his goal was to start from Lennon’s perspective and flip to Ono’s by the end of the film. Their son, Sean Ono Lennon, told Macdonald after seeing the film, “This film captures my mother like nothing else ever has.”
Within the montage of ’70s history is a dark side though: the fear of deportation that Lennon faces from the U.S., due to possession of marijuana five years earlier. As he makes the most of his time in New York City, his creative plans with Ono are bursting, culminating in the only full-length performance he gave after his departure from The Beatles: the One to One benefit concert to raise funds for the children of Willowbrook, an institution home that was found to be in gross mistreatment of its wards.
John and Yoko sought to spread peace and love, to protest the growing war efforts, and to balance the media carousel of disheartening news that never stopped screening at them from their television set 24/7. But they didn’t know that setting out on this journey from their Greenwich Village apartment would have numbered days; after 18 months, deciding they loved living in New York, they moved into the Dakota Building uptown. Decades later, their legacy of activism and creativity is still visible, audible, and inspiring audiences.
