David Leaf and John Scheinfeld had produced and directed more than a dozen television biographies when they came to the conclusion that it was time to move to the next level. Having brought documentaries about Frank Sinatra, Bette Midler, ex–Beach Boy Brian Wilson, and several others to the small screen, they wanted to make a feature film. They had known for several years that if they were going to make the move from television to the movies, it would be John Lennon who would take them there.

“In some ways, everything we have done has brought us here [to The U.S. vs. John Lennon],” Scheinfeld says. “Talking about Midler or Sinatra or the Bee Gees or Rick Nelson or anyone else we have profiled has refined our techniques. We feel that what we bring to the movie is storytelling. In fact, we are not the kind of documentary filmmakers who say, 'In 1972 this happened, in 1980 this happened.' We tell stories. This is a very traditional three-act dramatic structure with highs and lows.”

The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which opens on Friday (October 13), looks back at the impact Lennon made on the late 1960s and early 1970s through bed-ins and protest songs. To give balance to their documentary, Leaf and Scheinfeld employ a technique Warren Beatty referred to as “witnesses” in the film Reds, with commentators from both sides of the story telling how and why Lennon ended up on then-president Richard Nixon's list of enemies.

“If you look at the closing credits of the film we made about Brian Wilson,” Leaf says, “you will see that we listed the people who talked to us on-camera as 'witnesses', which was a deliberate homage to Reds. For this film we thought, 'Who better to immerse you in the time than the people who were there?' When we outlined the story, we said, 'These are the story points. Who do we get to address them?' We sought out the most credible people in the world to address every aspect of the story, so if we want to talk about the landscape of the 1960s, we have [social commentator] Noam Chomsky. If we want to talk about the Nixon administration, we have [former White House counsels] John Dean and Gordon Liddy. If we want to talk about the FBI, we have former FBI agents. If we want to talk about John Lennon and Yoko Ono, we have Yoko. We cast it very much like Beatty did when he put those witnesses there to tell the truth [about early-20th-century communist movements] as they saw it.”

“And they didn't just write a book about it or research it,” Scheinfeld adds. “The people we cast were players on the national stage who could speak to what was going on socially, politically, and culturally at the time, and that was important to us because we wanted to put what John and Yoko were stepping into at that time into context. We wanted to ask the question, 'What were they getting into and why were they feared?'”

The key to getting the documentary made was the involvement of Ono. Leaf says that although they didn't want to compromise the story so that it would appeal to her, they knew that she was essential to its telling. “Our goal was to make a definitive statement, and you can't approach that without Yoko. When we contacted her to do an interview, she wanted to know what the movie was going to say. She could see that we were taking a very serious look at why he was important and that the movie would tell that story. So as she got a better sense that we were approaching this with integrity, she became more and more supportive and opened her archives to us. So her participation was integral to making this movie as a dynamic film that is just trying to speak the truth. That is what she likes about it. She likes the fact that there are many sides to it and we are asking the audience to listen to the story and walk away with what they think the truth is.”

In the end, the film that was made was the one that Leaf and Scheinfeld wanted to make when they started producing documentaries. “We had started out with this idea for a film about John Lennon, and the film we made was that film,” Scheinfeld says. “I don't know how often that happens, but it's probably not common. The only difference is that it is better now than it would have been 10 years ago because times are more relevant to this film and we are better at what we do now than we were then.”