Paul McCartney’s new documentary, Man on the Run, was a particularly emotional project for the music icon because it heavily features his late wife, Linda McCartney.
Man on the Run, which premieres Friday, February 27, on Prime Video, follows Paul, 83, in the years after The Beatles split in 1970 and he formed new band Wings, with Linda joining the group as keyboardist. The doc also gives a rare glimpse into Paul’s home life with Linda and their four children, Heather, 63, Mary, 56, Stella, 54, and James, 48. (Paul also shares daughter Beatrice, 22, with second wife Heather Mills.)
“I think all the stuff with the kids and Linda is lovely to see,” Paul said at a special screening of Man on the Run attended by Us Weekly in London on Wednesday, February 18. “I mean, obviously, the Linda stuff was very emotional. She looks so beautiful. She’s so cool.”
Paul and Linda married in 1969 and remained together until her death from breast cancer at age 56 in April 1998.
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“Me and Linda interacting is very special, because she’s not here,” Paul said of watching the documentary. “Seeing the kids little, ’cause they know they’re not little anymore … they’ve got kids of their own. Linda, the kids, me and John [Lennon], just these memories … it’s like a life flashing in front of me.”
Man on the Run director Morgan Neville had exclusive access to home videos and photographs of Paul and his family, many of which were taken by Linda.
“I thought I’d lost it,” Paul said of the archival footage used in the doc. “Because in the ’60s and ’70s, you’d have a lot of break-ins. You wouldn’t really bother locking your door too much. So fans would come in, just nicking a lot of stuff. It was just like … it was how it was.”
“So I kind of automatically just thought, ‘Well, it’s all gone,’” he continued. “But [the] kids at my office were fantastic. They looked in every little, you know, storage units and every little drawer and everything, and they found it all.”
Wednesday’s special screening was attended by A-list stars including Paul Mescal, who will play the singer in Sam Mendes’ upcoming Beatles biopic movies, Gracie Abrams, Sharon Osbourne, Noel Gallagher, Marcus Mumford and Paul’s daughter, fashion designer Stella.
Watching the film, Paul said in a Q&A, was “like drowning.”
“It’s like your life flashing in front of you. It’s exhausting for me, ’cause it’s such a story,” he said.
Paul reminisced about the humble beginnings of Wings, which was a stark contrast to the height of Beatlemania.
“I’m reminded [that] we tried to follow The Beatles. It’s mad. … I actually just see the madness,” he recalled. “I think it was so impossible to do something like that, that the only way you could do it was just in a kind of loony way that we did it. Just, you know, think, ‘Yeah, we’ll just go back to square one, and we’ll just go and show up at a university, don’t book hotels, and take the dogs in a van.’ For some reason, we thought that was a great idea.”
Paul hopes that fans will walk away from Man on the Run with a deeper appreciation of his post-Beatles career with Wings.
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“I said to someone just when it was finished, ‘It’s a heck of a story.’ I think that it would be nice if people took away the fact that, in my craziness and my enthusiasm, that we did this crazy story. We stuck with it and we made it work,” he said. “So there’s something brave about that. That it didn’t have to work out, but it did.”
Man on the Run is available to stream on Prime Video Friday, February 27.
