Sir Peter Jackson says it would have been "far easier to do a runner" than direct the new Beatles music video.
The Lord of the Rings filmmaker has directed his first ever music video for the Beatles' new song 'Now And Then' which is released this week.
In a lengthy statement on The Beatles website, Sir Peter said he was "very reluctant", revealing the idea of creating a new video for a song that was never performed by the group filled him with "intense insecurity".
"I thought my next few months would be a hell of a lot more fun if that tricky task was somebody else's problem, and I could be like any other Beatles fan, enjoying the night-before-Christmas anticipation as the release of a new Beatles song and music video approached," he said.
"All I had to do was say no to The Beatles. To be honest, just thinking about the responsibility of having to make a music video worthy of the last song The Beatles will ever release produced a collection of anxieties almost too overwhelming to deal with.
"My lifelong love of The Beatles collided into a wall of sheer terror at the thought of letting everyone down. This created intense insecurity in me because I'd never made a music video before, and was not able to imagine how I could even begin to create one for a band that broke up over 50 years ago, had never actually performed the song, and had half of its members no longer with us. It was going to be far easier to do a runner."
Sir Peter also expressed fears that with no footage of any of the surviving Beatles performing the song, he didn't want to use CGI Beatles to recreate the magic.
However, he told the website that Apple had unearthed over 14 hours of "long forgotten" film from 1995 recording sessions which also showed Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison working on the song.
"To cap things off, a few precious seconds of The Beatles performing in their leather suits, the earliest known film of The Beatles and never seen before, was kindly supplied by Pete Best."
Sir Peter concluded his note by saying that he had "genuine pride in what we made and I'll cherish that for years to come".
The 'Now and Then' video will be released on Friday, November 3.
