McCartney and Apatow Discuss Beatles, Wings in Post-Screening Q&A for 'Man on the Run'

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Sep 29, 2026 10:59am PT

Paul McCartney and Judd Apatow Have a Free-Wheeling and Revealing Conversation About the Beatles and Wings in ‘Man on the Run’ Post-Screening Q&A

The conversation, which also included documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville, took some surprising turns at the Ted Mann Theater in L.A.

By Chris Willman

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Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

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Paul McCartney met up with Judd Apatow for a 45-minute conversation following a screening of “ Man on the Run ” in Los Angeles Monday night, and it was very much a case of banter on the run . With Apatow at the helm, the chat took some comical turns, as might be expected, and also some unusually revealing ones, as Apatow getting McCartney to loosen up provided some real personal asides as well as screwball dialogue. By most standards, it was probably the most irreverent interview the former Beatles has ever participated in.

Morgan Neville , the director of the Wings doc being screened, also participated in the discusssion, playing straight man and looking decided amused — if not anxious — when Apatow turned the conversation toward drugs or McCartney’s experiences with naked men in a Japanese prison. The occasion was an FYC event for “Man on the Run” being held in the Academy Museum’s Ted Mann Theater, where 275 attendees got to experience some relative intimacy with a McCartney who seemed ready to meet Apatow at his level of candor and comic asides.

“I was so excited when I heard that you were doing this (documentary) because, you know, I was born in ’67” — “as was I,” pointed out Neville — “so we grew up Wings fans. We’ve talked about it. We’re the Wings kids. We’re the people who were like, ‘Was there a band before Wings?'”

“I was born before that,” quipped McCartney, immediately getting into the spirit of things.

Asked by Apatow if he looked forward to dealing with the 10-year period between 1970-1980 in the Amazon Prime documentary that came out earlier this year (along with an accompanying book), McCartney said, “No, I like that period. Now it’s a fond memory. It was, what do you do after the Beatles? You know, the Beatles break up, that’s been your only job you’ve ever had, and then you don’t have it anymore. It’s like you got sacked. So that was Wings, trying to figure it out. And, as you can see in the film we did, well, it’s kind of madcap.”

Apatow told Neville and McCartney that he saw the film as “a slight nervous breakdown movie — right? There’s a mental health challenge. The Beatles ended; you wanted to live with sheep.”

“Yes. I do love sheep,” said McCartney. “Yeah, it’s very difficult. I’m sure any of you can imagine that. You’ve got this great job, it’s all going great, and then suddenly you haven’t got this great job and it’s not going so great. Oh, and then on top of that there was, like, this business guy, Allen Klein, who was basically stealing the Beatles, and I was the only one who thought that. The other guys thought, ‘No, we love him.'”

“Why were they so dumb?” Apatow blurted.

“Well, I’ll tell you why,” McCartney answered. “Because you’d be at a meeting with him and he’d go, ‘What do you want?’ The New York guy. And we all go, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What do you want, a million dollars?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Okay, you got it.'”

“I can’t believe you had Donald Trump as your manager,” Apatow kidded.

“Great similarities, yeah,” said McCartney, noting of Klein, “He just promised the earth and didn’t deliver it. But meanwhile, I could see that this was a crook. But it was me against the other guys and that was the worst thing, you know. I mean, I’d come up against the guys making music, but it was OK because you could say, ‘You know what? I know I really think this is right,’ and they’d either agree or they wouldn’t, and I’d go with their version, but it was relatively easily solved. But this this was suddenly… all the money we’d ever earned was going to go in this guy’s bank account. And I just really had to fight it, you know?”

Apatow explained the tension that ensued when “you’re suing your three best friends,” with McCartney saying “the world will go against me, number one, and I’ll go against me, and it’s not a great idea. (But) in the end that was the only way, so I had to do it.”

“And how nice was it, years later, when they were like, ‘We were wrong’?”

“It was years later, yeah,” McCartney said, then paused, and added, “But it was nice.”

Of starting a solo career, a duo career (with Linda McCartney) and then the band Wings, McCartney said, “I think just being on my own was very scary, because I’d always had the union of the group. But then I had to figure out how I would do it and make it different. That was the trick. Because I thought, ‘Well, I could just write some more kind of Beatle-y songs and get people, and we can imitate. We would be like a Beatle cover band.’ … Actually doing Beatles songs, I wouldn’t do that. Promoters would say, ‘And you’re gonna do the Beatles songs?’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m not.’ They said, ‘Well, just do ‘Yesterday’.’ I said, ‘No, not gonna do it.’ ‘Well, so what are you gonna do?’ And that was my dilemma.

“So, you’re right,” McCartney continued. “It was kind of like a mental breakdown. I mean, I did start drinking. I was up in Scotland on my own, (with a) new little family. No one was gonna tell me off for drinking too much, so it’s like, ‘Yay, here we go. Come on, let’s go.’ And it was a lot of fun till it wasn’t, you know. … I had kids, and that turned me round. And Linda was a very smart woman, so she sort of let me do it” until he backed off of partying at home.

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_Originally reported by [Variety Music](https://variety.com/2026/music/news/paul-mccartney-judd-apatow-conversation-man-on-the-run-1236878304/)._