CRAVE ONLINE: I’m curious as to what your take is in the book on the Pete Best situation. Brian was the one who had to fire him from the band, and I think Pete Best, in his autobiography, said something about how Brian had propositioned him at one point, and he turned it down. I don’t know if that’s a causal relationship, or if Pete Best thinks that was a causal relationship – what’s your take on that?
TIWARY: I’ll be honest, we don’t get into the Pete Best story in the book. The book is 128 pages and there’s a lot of story in there, so one of the very difficult things that I had to do with this book was try to figure out what to put in and what to leave out. In the final equation, I believed that it would be irresponsible not to tell the Pete Best story if you were telling the history of the Beatles, but if you’re telling the history of Brian Epstein, I’m not sure it’s one of the must-include beats in the story, so ultimately, we left it out of the graphic novel. Interestingly enough, I did put it back into the film – we do deal with it in the film adaptation of the book, and it’s also a great example of how the book and the film are different. My take on it, from my research, was that we’ll never really know why Pete was left out of the band, but there is no question that George Martin thought that he was not right for them, musically speaking. So that is a reality. The other band members have said that.
CRAVE ONLINE: They said that George Martin thought that, or that they thought that, too?
TIWARY: That they thought that as well. Not that he was a bad drummer, but he wasn’t the right drummer. That might sound like a lot of hyperbole, but, to use a modern example, imagine Neil Peart from Rush, who is one of the greatest drummers in the world – imagine if he played drums for the Beatles. Probably wouldn’t be right for the band. Doesn’t mean he’s a bad drummer, but you can’t really see Neil Peart playing drums for the Beatles. So in that sense, he was not right musically for the band, and something that the band has touched on, and that a lot of people in my research – not members of the band, but friends of the band, friends of Pete, people involved in the scene – said was that Pete didn’t really fit in personality-wise. He didn’t really hang out as much. They were kind of a gang, a team, and Pete was a little bit on the outskirts of that. He didn’t have the same sense of partying and socializing that they did, so he was just probably not right for the band. By all accounts, it was the Beatles and George Martin who told Brian ‘this is the deal, now you need to go and tell Pete.’ So it really wasn’t Brian’s decision, it was Brian’s job to carry out their wishes.
As for Brian propositioning Pete? I think that’s a lot of hogwash. That’s ludicrous. As I said, a large part of the Brian Epstein story and the obstacles that he had to overcome was that it was a felony to be gay. Part of what haunted him was the concern that it would come to light that he was gay and A.) he would be thrown in jail and B.) it would reflect badly on his artists. So for Brian to proposition someone who was being fired from the band, who could stir up all sorts of trouble if he felt bitter about that, is just unfathomable. If only for business reasons, I can’t imagine Brian would have even dreamed of doing something like that. And, you know, I didn’t know him personally, but I just don’t see Pete as really being Brian’s type. I’ll put it that way.
CRAVE ONLINE: What was Brian’s type, then?
TIWARY: Brian’s type was the Beatles, really. For the same reason Pete didn’t fit into the Beatles, I’m not sure Pete would have fit into Brian’s type. There’s no question that Brian was attracted to the band, and I think that his homosexuality was actually a key part in his vision. Brian was able to see, in a way that perhaps a straight manager might have had a harder time seeing – not that they couldn’t, but maybe it might not have come as natural to them – that here was a group that everybody could fall in love with – that girls would love, boys would love, parents would love, grandparents would love. Brian could really see that, and because he had a physical attraction to them, that’s part of what allowed him to have that vision. You know, people also talk a lot about wondering whether or not he and John had any kind of homosexual escapade in Spain, and that is covered in the book. I’m not going to tell you how we cover it, because I’d like people to read the book and find out for themselves, but we do get into that.
CRAVE ONLINE: Was The Fifth Beatle originally designed as a film, and then the storyboards for it became the graphic novel?
TIWARY: The short answer is no. I really came up with the idea of the film and the graphic novel at the same time, so we really started developing them simultaneously. The film will definitely be more informed by the graphic novel. The film could probably be viewed as an adaptation of the graphic novel, but really, it’s its own thing. Pete Best as an example. I think, when you see the film and when you read the book, you’ll see that they’re based on the same sort of source material, if you will, but they are very different. I grew up loving films and loving comics, and I think of them as two very separate media, and I wanted to respect both art forms, so there are entire sequences in the book that you don’t see in the film, and there are sequences in the film that we don’t see in the book. One obvious example is that we secured music rights to put Beatles music into the film.
CRAVE ONLINE: How in the world did you secure music rights?
TIWARY: It took two and a half years. In order to do that, we had to get the sign-off of the band, and we also had to do a deal with Sony ATV, who controls the music publishing. It’s literally never been done before. No film about the band has had Beatles song in them. There have been other films about the band, like Backbeat and Nowhere Boy, but they’ve gone without songs of the Beatles.
CRAVE ONLINE: They always had to use the old rock and roll cover songs, although Nowhere Boy did get to use “Julia” at the end, through special dispensation from Yoko Ono, I believe.
TIWARY: Very rare. It’s just not done.
CRAVE ONLINE: So this should be a very hot commodity.
TIWARY: Thank you, yeah. Between this beautiful graphic novel and the music rights, there’s a lot of excitement for it in both Hollywood and the UK film industry. The film is very much in development, it’s not an idea. It’s a completed screenplay with music rights in place. It is a very real development. Because we have music rights, we want to use those music rights, so there are quite a number of sequences in the film that are music driven, and those are not in the book, because while we do have sequences in the books that reprint lyrics, there is no audio in the book. But there’s one page that I particularly love, when Brian presents Sgt. Pepper to the world, where Andrew Robinson did this gorgeous collage that I describe as what it would look like if Salvador Dali had designed some of the early Star Wars posters. It’s set to a riff on Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. You can do that in a graphic novel, you can do that with art, but you couldn’t really do that in a film in a way that wouldn’t be ludicrous, so that’s an example of a scene that exists in the book that doesn’t exist in the film.
CRAVE ONLINE: Did you take stylistic liberties with that, actually giving him a full Shakespearean speech?
TIWARY: He did give a speech that was very fanciful and occasionally bordered on surreal in its poetry, and he was a huge fan of Shakespeare. So those two things are facts, but I put them together to come up with that speech. But I would say that everything that happens in the book actually happened, but there are a few things where we’ve taken stylistic liberties. I don’t want to give away too much, but the book is told with quite a few fantasy sequences, dream sequences, hallucination sequences. It’s also in a lot of ways about the birth of the psychedelic era, so we try to capture that in both the artwork and the written storytelling. So there are quite a few moments where we take creative departures, I would say, but I would probably use the word ‘departures’ rather than ‘license.’ Does that make sense?
CRAVE ONLINE: Yes, I know what you’re saying. Are there the same sorts of creative departures in the film as well?
TIWARY: Absolutely, absolutely. First of all, I’ve been talking about the Brian Epstein story as a great business and music story, but it’s also a really inspirational human story. I always say, in film comparisons, even though it’s technically a music-related biopic, it’s far less like Ray or Walk The Line and far more like Billy Elliot or Rocky – you know, the least likely guy to succeed going the distance in their chosen field. So when I describe it as a film, it’s Billy Elliot meets Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It has those surreal, psychedelic Wall moments that are driven by music.
