The new documentary includes new interviews with McCartney, Starr, Yoko Ono, George Martin, Tom Petty, Eric Clapton (who recalls watching Harrison write “Here Comes the Sun”) and many more. But Scorsese and his team relied heavily on archives kept by Harrison himself: footage of the Beatles on vacation; a recording of Harrison’s first sitar lesson with Ravi Shankar; home movies of Harrison fooling around in his recording studio with his son Dhani. “We set up a little production office in our house,” says Olivia. “George lived in the house for 30 years, and he would just throw things in this drawer and that drawer. So every cupboard had something in it.” The production team set up research offices in New York and London, working for years to find footage and photographs, including every filmed Harrison interview they could track down.

From their sleepless Hamburg days to their Let It Be-era squabbles, the Beatles’ story has been told again and again, so Scorsese took great pains to use rare or unseen footage for the first part of the film. “The scenes of them running from hotel rooms and airports and such are just a little bit different than the ones you’ve seen,” says Sinclair. “He approached the Beatles story from George’s perspective, so it becomes a more inside, more first-person experience.”

The film doesn’t shy from Harrison’s darker side, showing footage of a ravaged performance from his 1974 solo tour, and hinting at challenges in his marriage. “He never said he was a saint, but he always said he was a sinner,” says Olivia. “He wanted to do everything in life. He really did.”

The surviving Beatles provide some of the film’s most powerful moments: McCartney makes an impassioned argument that anyone who thinks only he and Lennon were important in the group is wildly wrong; Starr begins to weep when he recalls visiting Harrison as the guitarist battled terminal lung cancer.

The post-Beatles section of the film has the most surprises, from intimate footage of Traveling Wilburys jamming to Olivia’s harrowing account of a 1999 home invasion by a violent, deranged fan. It also gives equal weight to Harrison’s nonmusical ventures: his work as a movie producer; his motor-racing fandom; his loving efforts to restore his country estate. “George thought hard about how to live his life after being a Beatle,” says Sinclair, “and what I take away from this film is that he figured it out.”

George Harrison and his women: Martin Scorsese's new documentary reveals the candid truth
The Guardian; September 4, 2011
By Vanessa Thorpe and Ben Dowell
Recollections by surviving Beatles and second wife Olivia cast new light on the emotional intensity that drove his music
Previously unseen private letters, home movie footage and intimate personal recollections of George Harrison are set to radically correct public perceptions of "the quiet Beatle" in a new documentary by Martin Scorsese.
Revelations include the fact that Harrison's widow, Olivia, struggled to keep the relationship with her wayward husband on track. In the film Eric Clapton also talks about how he felt consumed with envy as he fell in love with Pattie Boyd, Harrison's first wife.
Scorsese, who has focused his camera in recent years on musical subjects, from his history of the blues to a concert film of the Rolling Stones and an acclaimed study of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, now sheds light on the self-confessed "dark horse" Harrison. Living in the Material World shows a man who – as well as being the stylish hippy of popular perception – had a caustic wit and a talent for deep friendship as well as an abiding obsession with his music.
Olivia Harrison, who produced the film with Scorsese and allowed unprecedented access to the family archive, talks candidly about her late husband's "challenging" attitude to other women and about the stranger who broke into the couple's home and nearly ended Harrison's life shortly after he had recovered from the first bout of the cancer that would eventually kill him.
She reveals that, although she and Harrison "seemed like partners from the very beginning" and shared a strong interest in meditation, their marriage survived a series of "hiccups". "He did like women and women did like him," she says. "If he just said a couple of words to you it would have a profound effect. So it was hard to deal with someone who was so well loved."
Paul McCartney also speaks about his old friend's appreciation of women: "I don't want to say much, because he was a pal, but he liked the things that men like. He was red-blooded."
Endurance was the key to the second, long-lasting Harrison marriage, according to his widow. "You go through challenges in your marriage and here is what I found: the first time we had a big hiccup in the road, we came through things, and then you go, 'Wow!' There is a reward at the end of it," said Olivia Harrison. "There is this incredible reward because you have lived through more and you have let go of something."
By the end, when her husband was ill, she was glad that they had "worked this through together. Through all these things that came between us."
She also reveals Harrison's fury at John Lennon's murder in 1980 at the hands of Mark Chapman. "He was angry John did not have a chance to leave his body in a better way," she says.
A few years later the Harrisons were to face danger themselves at the hands of a stranger. An attacker in what Olivia Harrison recalls as "a florid, psychotic state" smashed a window at their Friar Park home during the night and seriously injured them with a knife. "[George] thought that, after everything that had happened to him, 'I am going to be murdered in my own home.'"
Interviews with Phil Spector, who produced Harrison's first solo work, and with Sir George Martin reveal Harrison's central concern with music. Spector remembers an emotional intensity and an attention to detail. "Perfectionism is not the word. It went beyond that."
Harrison's widow says that his most important relationships were conducted through music and recounts that some of the lyrics to the song I'd Have You Anytime, written with Bob Dylan, were addressed to Dylan himself, whom Harrison felt had retreated from their friendship.
Clapton talks about the Camelot-like world of the Beatles and of feeling like he was an envious Lancelot. "I had become more and more obsessed with [George's] wife, Pattie," Clapton admits, describing how he confessed to his friend, "who was very cavalier" about it, almost giving him "carte blanche". Clapton adds: "To be honest there was a lot of swapping and fooling around."
Interviews with Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam confirm Harrison's crucial role in funding the Monty Python film Life of Brian by mortgaging his home. Harrison, through HandMade Films, went on to produce other leading British films such as The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa and Withnail and I.
Ringo Starr is brought to tears on screen by the memory of his final conversation with Harrison who, dying in a Swiss hospital bed, still managed a bleak joke. Starr had to leave because his daughter was undergoing emergency brain surgery in Los Angeles.
"George said: 'Do you want me to come with you?' They were the last words I heard him say."
George Harrison: Living in the Material World is released on Blu-Ray and DVD on 10 October and will be broadcast by the BBC later in the year

Olivia Harrison talks about working with Martin Scorsese on a new documentary about Beatle George Harrison’s life
September 26, 2011; by Catherine Jones, Liverpool Echo
Catherine Jones talks to Olivia Harrison about a new film documenting her husband’s life
When George Harrison didn’t know what to do with a bit of paper he would pop it in a drawer at home. If it drove wife Olivia mad she doesn’t say, but his hoarding habit has certainly come in useful. Because when Olivia finally decided to create a cinematic legacy for the late Beatle, she discovered a treasure trove of letters, photos, poems and snatches of song lyrics. The result is George Harrison: Living in a Material World, a three-and-a-half hour documentary created by legendary director Martin Scorsese and being premiered simultaneously in London and Liverpool this weekend. “It’s taken five years,” marvels Olivia. “And to be honest, I’m happy it took this amount of time. “I was certainly not ready to rush through it. There was so much material that the first year was really the decision we were going to do this, and I’d had some of the archiving done but it was a real opportunity to go deeper into the material that I had – and that really took a long time.” When George died in November 2001 his widow had a number of requests from people who wanted to create a documentary about him, but at the time she felt it was too soon. “And then,” she explains. “It got to a point where I felt somebody may actually create it on their own, and I wouldn’t have been happy about that because I don’t think it could be rich enough without the involvement of the family.” Having seen Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan film No Way Home, Olivia put the feelers out to see if the Oscar-winning director might be interested. She recalls: “And that’s when somehow I ended up meeting Martin Scorsese, and he had a very definite idea about the story.” Scorsese says he ‘jumped’ at the chance to work on the picture. “Spending time with Olivia, interviewing so many of George’s closest friends, reviewing all that footage, some of it never seen before, and listening to all of that magnificent music – it was a joy, and an experience I’ll always treasure,” he enthuses. And he adds: “The closer I looked at his life and his career, the more I was drawn to him, and to the way he coped with and learned from the peaks and the valleys. “I think he eventually came to understand the ephemeral nature of both success and failure.” The finished documentary takes viewers on a trip through the ‘quiet’ Beatle’s life from his Liverpool childhood to the madness of Beatlemania, the ups and downs of his solo career and the joys and pain of his private life, using interviews, music, photographs and rare and never-before-seen film footage. Speaking about the man he first met as a Liverpool Institute schoolboy, Sir Paul McCartney recalls: “He was a cheeky little guy, he wasn’t cowed by anything. “He had a great haircut, this long hair that he quiffed back. We had a good friend Arthur and he used to describe it as ‘a ****ing turban’. It was a marvellous thing.” The film also features anecdotes from Ringo Starr, as well as George’s brothers Peter and Harry, son Dhani, and friends and collaborators including Eric Clapton, Eric Idle, Sir George Martin and Traveling Wilbury Tom Petty. There’s even racing driver Sir Jackie Stewart as George was a big Formula One fan. “He used to go to Aintree,” explains Olivia. “And one of his fondest memories was sitting on the fence watching Sterling Moss and Fangio, so probably that’s what gave him the interest.” She adds: “It’s extraordinary how you find people from different walks of life who, somehow, George has managed to be the thread that brought them together.”So did Olivia discover things she wasn’t aware of as she worked her way through the drawers and boxes at the Harrison home, Friar Park in Oxfordshire? “Oh yes,” she smiles. “Lyrics, songs, a lot of lyrics and poetry from when he was quite young that never made it into a song. Just expressions. “For instance, maybe like a tin box with football cards and then some lyrics and things, sort of little time capsules that probably came back from his mum and dad’s house.” George himself can be heard in his own words either through archive footage of the guitarist, or in extracts of letters he wrote to his parents back in Liverpool (and which came back to him when they died) about the madness of touring and which are read over old footage from the 1960s. Olivia reveals that her husband, fired by working on the Beatles Anthology series, had a plan to do his own documentary. “I can’t say what it would have included,” she says. “But we were honest. Marty’s created an accurate and honest documentary and I think that is probably the most soothing part of it for me. “You could make things one sided, but you can’t sanctify him, he was human, so I think it’s very fair.” Some media coverage of the documentary has concentrated on George’s attraction to women and the difficulties that caused. “I don’t actually read those papers,” says Olivia, who describes her husband as ‘a very creative person, a very charismatic person, and just a fascinating guy’. She continues: “The film is George being a musician, George’s interests and passions, but mainly what was it about him that he was trying to reach? “And that was what Marty was really interested in – what is it that gives a man true life when you have such a chaotic life? What is it you are looking for that transcends all those diversions? “I think that’s what makes it a very interesting story in a very material world, a man looking for something more satisfying than all the success that he had.” So has it been a cathartic experience, going back through all the old memories? “It’s emotionally exhausting really,” admits the 63-year-old. “Because even watching the film, when I’m seeing one shot I’m thinking ‘oh I remember what happened that morning’ or ‘after that we went somewhere else’ and then the next scene happens and there’s all this calculating going through your head, it’s exhausting, by the end actually I’ve travelled 20 years.” Only a proportion of the material Olivia uncovered was used in the film, so she has included the rest in a book, also called Living in The Material World, which is published next week. Meanwhile November 29 marks the 10th anniversary of George’s death. But Olivia maintains the timing of the film and book was not deliberate. “We started five years ago and I had no idea we’d still be doing it,” she says. “And I’m really glad because the process allowed me time. I feel ready now to let it go and for it to be out there. I didn’t feel ready a year ago, or two years ago, or three years ago. “The film is beyond my expectations. I had no idea it was going to be so profound, it really is. It’s a powerful film and Marty is just extraordinary.”

George Harrison: Living In The Material World will be premiered at Picturehouse at FACT on Sunday at 3.30pm. Tickets £12-15.
It will also be screened in selected cinemas on October 4, and available to buy on DVD and Blu-Ray from October 10. The book of unseen photographs and illustrations is available from October 3.