This article appeared in the January 21, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

It took place on October 8, 2021 in New York. On the run, you might say, had it not happened in a restaurant. Let’s say it came out of the blue, though it was a cloudy day. 

The next day was John Lennon’s birthday. He would have been 81. More than a decade earlier, in 2010, I had spent the evening of what would have been John’s 70th with my wife, Marietta, at Strawberry Fields in Central Park, following Yoko’s public invitation to mourners. That day, Lou Reed presented LENNONYC, a film about John’s American years, and after that we all listened to Beatles songs, sitting on the grass. People lit candles.

When John was shot in December 1980, I wandered aimlessly about Timișoara for several days, realizing that our youth had suddenly come to an end, and I made the firm decision that if I managed to obtain a passport —I had been invited to Heidelberg University in West Germany—I would not return to Romania. Eight days later, Marietta gave birth to our son Matei. Then, the following April, I got permission to travel abroad and I quit the Eastern Bloc forever.

Even before that evening in Central Park in 2010, the idea had taken root in my mind of making a film about the influence the Beatles have had on all of our lives—or, to put it another way, about the way they have molded us emotionally. I think I had already decided by then which moment I would focus on: their first concert in Shea Stadium, New York, which took place on August 15, 1965 and marked the peak of Beatlemania. I wanted to recreate that weekend—from their arrival at JFK on Friday the 13th to their appearance onstage on Sunday evening—from the perspective of several adolescents preparing to go to the concert. 

One of the principal characters in this film is Geoffrey, the son of Joe O’Brien, a popular DJ in the mid-’60s who hosted a morning show at WMCA, the first radio station in New York to broadcast songs by The Beatles. A young writer at the time, Geoffrey later became a well-known poet and essayist and is now in his seventies. His role will be played by a young actor.

So it is also a film about New York, a place where you immediately feel at home, no matter where you’re from. It’s the citadel of the 20th century. And it’s well-known, from being portrayed in so many films. Even while I was growing up in Timișoara, New York’s neighborhoods were more familiar to me than those of Bucharest, for example. 

I’ve been carrying this project within me for a decade. I began work on it in 2011 and repeatedly found myself stalled—first by Marietta’s death, then by problems with copyrights, then by the pandemic. Death was all about me, whichever way I turned. Each delay pushed things back by almost two years. Perhaps this project should have borne a stigmata, just as the shadow of John’s death has settled over the Beatles and deepened with that of George.

I was in New York in 2010 as a guest of the New York Film Festival, which presented my film, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Last fall they selected a short film, 2 Pasolini, that I’d kept in my drawer for 20 years. 

When I arrived in New York again in October 2021, the city had just recovered from the peak of the first wave of COVID-19 and was ashen, like a patient rising from a deathbed. I stayed again this time at the Warwick Hotel, because that’s where the band stayed in 1965.

The premiere of 2 Pasolini took place on Tuesday, October 5 at Lincoln Center, which hosts the New York Film Festival. There I met Geoffrey O’Brien, the hero of my in-progress film, and Josh Siegel, one of the curators of MoMA’s Department of Film, and we arranged to have lunch together the following Friday at a Manhattan restaurant not far from the Warwick. Dorothée Charles of the Cartier Foundation, who had organized my trip, was to join us. It was warm when Friday came, but overcast. We sat down at one of the sidewalk tables so commonplace now in New York. Geoffrey had brought two photographs, taken in 1965, of his father with the Beatles. We’d ordered our food and had begun chatting when I noticed Dorothée’s gaze lock on a table behind me, where two gentlemen were seated, and then move to her phone as she searched for something on the internet. Finally, certain of what she’d discovered, she leaned forward and said to us in a low voice, “Do you know who’s sitting behind Andrei?” 

Josh and Geoffrey looked over, surprised. “Who is it?” I asked. “Paul McCartney,” replied Dorothée, managing not to burst into laughter. “You have to talk to him,” she added. I shrugged and probably went pale. Josh, with more presence of mind than the rest of us, took the photographs Geoffrey had brought and passed them to the next table: “You should have a look at this.”

Paul turned around, received the photographs, asked when they were taken, and recalled The Good Guys—the group of DJs at WMCA that included Geoffrey’s father. Then I managed to utter something: “Sir Paul, it’s a great honor to meet you!” “Oh, dear,” he said, and put his hand on my shoulder with the calm of someone who can afford to love everybody. Josh proceeded to introduce me, revealing that for years I had been working on a film set around their first concert at Shea Stadium, at which point Paul said to me, with that mix of politeness and irony that he has always possessed, “Then you’re a famous director.” “Nowhere near as famous as you, Sir Paul,” I managed to respond, proud of what had left my lips. Everybody laughed, and he gave me a friendly clap on the shoulder again and wished me success with the project. I responded that if we ever managed to finish it, we’d let him know and invite him to the premiere. “Sure,” he said. “Now you know where to find me.” We all laughed again, before turning back to our own tables. 

Soon after this I got up and strolled away from the pergola to smoke a cigarette and try to calm down. When I returned, Paul and his companion were leaving, without bodyguards, like a couple of ordinary guys. I sent out some messages with the pictures Dorothée had taken, to show my friends what had happened to me. But the first message, of course, was to my son, Matei. After that I went to the hotel and spent some time on the balcony. My room was roughly on the same floor where the band had stayed in the summer of 1965, and images passed before my eyes of young people blocking the intersection of 54th Street and 6th Avenue, with girls singing “We Love You Beatles” by the The Carefrees and looking up in the hope that their idols might appear at the window. One of my friends responded to my message with that teenage expression: “You’ll never wash that T-shirt again.”

I had a feeling that this meeting could dissipate the deathlike cloud that had hung over my project from the beginning. I went out for a stroll, taking in the still melancholy city around me. Evening was falling, the lights were coming on, and New York suddenly looked the way it does in films. 

About two weeks after I got back home, The New Yorker published a fragment from The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, the McCartney book that would be released in early November. It’s a kind of autobiographical accompaniment to the songs. In it he relates how, every time he visits Liverpool, he retraces the route from his family home on Forthlin Road to Peter’s Church in Woolton Village, where he went to a dance in 1957 with the idea of finding a girl—and where Ivan Vaughan, a schoolmate, introduced him to John, who was playing there with his band, The Quarrymen. Every time, he asks himself how his life would have turned out if he hadn’t gone there that night.

On the evening of the day I met Paul, I walked by Central Park, on the side with the horse-drawn buggies for tourists, toward Lincoln Center, on my way to see a film. And I wondered how their lives would have turned out had John not died in December 1980. And then I wondered how my own life would have turned out.

Andrei Ujică and Sir Paul, 2021. Courtesy Andrei Ujică

Andrei Ujică is the director of Videograms of a Revolution (1992), co-directed with Harun Farocki, Out of the Present (1995), and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), among other films. He studied literature in Timișoara and Heidelberg, and his publications include poetry, prose, and essays.