Ron Howard's 'Eight Days a Week,' Beyoncé's 'Lemonade' Visual Album Among Nominees in Grammys' Best Music Film Category
By Cynthia Littleton, Variety
The five nominees for Grammy’s Best Music Film category run the gamut from the Beatles to Beyoncé, from Yo-Yo Ma to the Grand Ole Opry to the peripatetic work life of top DJ Steve Aoki.
The filmmakers are also a diverse lot, from Beyoncé Knowles and the collaborators she enlisted for “Lemonade” to Oscar winners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer on The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years.
Related: How Ron Howard’s Beatles Documentary Became a Breakout Hit
Eight Days a Week marks an expansion of Imagine Entertainment’s activity in the documentary arena. Howard has a busy schedule of narrative feature film projects, but he loved the process of working with archival material to tell the behind-the-curtain story of the Fab Four during the most hectic and prolific period of their time together as a band.
“My biggest takeaway was that their individual integrity as people and as artists remains a lesson to all of us,” Howard told Variety. “I think the surprise of the movie is that the decisions these guys made as young guys guided them in lots of ways — creatively, politically, socially.”
Grazer had become friendly with Paul McCartney in the past few years but it was only in working together on the film that he fully understood the incredible legacy of the Beatles.
“Those four guys were all phenoms,” Grazer said. “What was unique is that they were together and the alchemy they created when they were together to write and create the greatest body of work in music.”
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Eight Days a Week opened in theaters in September and moved to Hulu shortly thereafter — representing the new distribution paradigm for high-end documentaries. “Lemonade,” the provocative “visual album” companion piece to Beyoncé’s album of the same name, made a splash in its HBO debut in April.
Steve Aoki: I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead was a Relativity Media production for Netflix. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble hailed from Participant Media and director Morgan Neville for HBO. American Saturday Night: Live From the Grand Ole Opry was distributed in markets around the country by Carmike Cinema’s DigiNext documentary joint venture with Nehst Out.
Veteran music documentarian Nigel Sinclair brought Eight Days a Week to Howard and Grazer after the Beatles’ Apple decided it was time to do something with all of the concert footage it had in the vault. A trove of additional material surfaced as they sought out footage from other sources, including home movies taken by fans. Howard said he applied the lessons of helming historical dramas such as Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon to shaping the story of the Beatles’ phenomenon.
“For somebody who likes to script and control everything, it was a good learning experience for me to see the movie significantly shift in the last month of editing when we found a new piece of footage or somebody gave us a powerful interview,” Howard said.
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Howard credits Sinclair, Eight Days a Week writer Mark Monroe, and editor Paul Crowder as essential forces in shepherding the film. Once word got out about the project, Howard felt pressure to deliver in ways he hadn’t expected. “You realize the importance of the Beatles to people,” Howard said. “I took this kind of as a creative lark but then I realized, ‘Wow I can’t f— this up.’”
The Grammy nomination is welcome recognition, but Grazer said there was only one measure that really mattered when it came to the movie.
“The benchmark of success for us was that Paul and Ringo liked it,” Grazer said.
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