CANNES, France (AP) — The day John Lennon was shot, on Dec. 8, 1980, he and Yoko Ono gave an interview to a San Francisco radio crew from their home in New York’s Dakota Apartments.They were promoting their new album “Double Fantasy,” but the two-hour conversation was wide ranging. Though the interviewers had been warned “no Beatles questions,” Lennon and Ono were thrillingly open. That day, Annie Leibovitz also shot the famous portrait of a clothes-less Lennon wrapped around Ono.The interview is similarly naked. The two, particularly Lennon, riff on love, their relationship, creativity, life after the Beatles, raising their toddler son, writing songs in bed and much more. At the age of 40, Lennon sounds like someone who has found real clarity. “I feel like nothing happened before today,” said Lennon. In “John Lennon: The Last Interview,” Steven Soderbergh turns those surviving tapes into a documentary that does as much to demystify Lennon and Ono as “Get Back” did to the Beatles. The film debuted Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival.
“I was just so compelled by their generosity of spirit throughout the conversation,” Soderbergh explained in an interview Saturday in Cannes. “It’s like the world took place in one day, in this apartment.”
