By Gill Pringle
Ron Howard’s documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years – which looks back at the happier, cheerier early stages of The Fab Four’s career, when the boys from Liverpool were still mates and still able to knock out their glorious tunes live – has been one of the surprise hits of the director’s canon. In Australia, the doco was intended as a one-week-only limited release, but impressive numbers at the box office saw it stick around for considerably longer. It also scored critical raves, with FilmInk giving it a full score $20 rating.
As it turns out, however, the prolific Ron Howard had not exactly intended for The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years to be such an important work. “Well, I did it as kind of a lark,” the director laughs to FilmInk while chatting about his latest release, Inferno. “But I quickly began to feel so much pressure and responsibility around it. The more that I read about it and interviewed people, particularly Sir Paul and Ringo, I began to feel more and more determined to try to find a way to tell the story so that it respected and honoured dedicated fans who have been living with the band for five or six decades now and know everything about it. I wanted them to feel that it was intelligent, thoughtful, thorough, and authentic. But I really wanted the millennials to understand the story too. I wanted it to unfold in a short enough period of time so that they would actually understand the world, the genius of the creativity, and the personalities of the individuals, and the intensity of that journey that was personal, societal, and creative over that very short period of time. It’s just the touring years. It became just as important to me as any other film. I think that it can service a lot of different audience members in different ways, and that they can get different things out of it.”
