Rubber Sole

Director: Jon Lefkovitz
Produced by: Stephen Paratore
Talia Stol
Screenwriter: Jon Lefkovitz
Cast:
Joseph Bearor
Denice Lee
Andrew Perez
Dillon Porter
Cinematography: Anthony C. Kuhnz
Editing By: Jon Lefkovitz

No band has been more thoroughly analyzed, had more covers of their work, it’s hard to think of a stone left unturned; a treasure that had not already been found, packaged and sold.
Jon Lefkovitz, a self professed life long Beatles fan, focused his attention to a set of interviews, the first, one John Lennon and Yoko Ono granted to Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner in the winter of 1970; the other, ten years later, for Playboy to promote “Double Fantasy,”

While there were audio recording made by the writers during the interviews, there was no video, a significant problem for a professional video editor looking to make a film. He decided to hired actors to accurately recreate the interviews. In the Q&A following the screening, Lefkovitz told that he chose to employ Joseph Bearor (Lennon) and Denice Lee (Ono) to reenact them word-for-word, even going as far as to include the pauses and inflections.
The film was shot in just four days, only after there were months of working with the actors, particularly Joseph, to memorize over 100 pages of dialogue and bring the interviews to life. The actors look sort of like John and Yoko, but it was their voices and mannerisms that sold the performances.

Each interview was interesting on its own, but the strength of the film was created in editing
by weaving the two scenes together. Lefkovitz compares and contrasts Lennon’s different versions of the same events, illustrating how time and state-of-mind effect how people remember and recount events.

As a student starting the Film department at Northwestern, it was great to see a former graduate of that program win a special documentary award.