“I think it took 40 years because people did try. They just tried the wrong route, I suppose,” says producer Julia Nottingham in our webchat about the Netflix documentary “The Greatest Night in Pop.” “I had enough naivety and tenacity to find a different road, and I hadn’t really made a music film with this many stars, ever. , ‘I’m sure I can just phone the Michael Jackson estate and ask them if they want to partake.’ I really did genuinely go in with that naivety.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“The Greatest Night in Pop” is directed by Bao Nguyen and was released on Netflix on January 29, 2024. The film documents the recording of “We Are the World” in 1985. The song was co-written by Jackson and Lionel Richie, produced by Quincy Jones and recorded in a single night by the world’s biggest stars
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“We always wanted Lionel because he was the master, he was so involved, but we didn’t actually realize how amazing a storyteller he is,” Nottingham recalls. “And it wasn’t until the interview that it was almost like he had a semi-photographic memory. [We were] like, ‘This is a gift, we have been given documentary gold.’ He’s the most wonderful man. I think especially where he’s at now in his career, he takes so much joy looking back to the time when maybe the industry was very different. And for him, it’s been a real source of joy.”
Besides watching Jackson in the recording studio, Nottingham’s favorite moment in the film comes as Stevie Wonder imitates Bob Dylan. She reveals, “I watched that and I’m like, ‘It’s musical genius. It’s so incredible,’ because even when we were doing the mix and stuff, we’d be listening and we were like, ‘He sounds exactly like Dylan.’ And I just didn’t know that about him, so I love that moment in the film.”
“This film was just such a gift,” she says. “It was hard. The idea first came to me in October 2019, so it was a long road. And to be fair, there were many moments in that road that we were like, ‘Maybe this film is not possible to make. It’s not possible to make it because we don’t have the archive, we don’t have the audio. Are the other permissions going to get too difficult? Is anyone going to want to talk to us?’ And yeah, it was really a team that was very determined. I’m very thankful we pulled it off.”
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