The first independent film to have successfully licensed original Beatles recordings.
"It's well known that Beatles music is not in many films, and so we knew that was going to be our largest hurdle from the very beginning. I'd never made a Beatles film before, but when you start talking to people who have, you hear about how it's a nightmare to deal with licenses and it's never gonna happen. So it's a total testament to Freda that we got that far, and that we have four Beatles songs in our film, which I think is almost unheard of. It's very clear, when you start talking to Apple - that's the umbrella organization for The Beatles - that there's still a lot of respect for her in that building... and so I think I'm a very lucky filmmaker, in that I could go to the Beatles organizations, and all the circles that are involved in signing off on Beatles music, and pitch my film as a film about a woman named Freda Kelly, who never sold out The Beatles." - Ryan White from a special features interview on the DVD
The DVD special features include an interview with director Ryan White in which he says, "Freda had just graduated from school and was working her first job as a secretary, as a typist, at a food cannery; and two of the guys from upstairs, two of the accountants, took her to the Cavern during a lunchtime session. She'd never seen The Beatles or heard of The Beatles, and they used to play the lunchtime sessions every day in Liverpool. So they took her for her lunch break, and she fell in love right away, and started going every single day; I think she saw The Beatles like 180 times during their lunchtime sessions. So The Beatles became familiar with Freda always being in the audience, so when it became time to hire a secretary, they knew that there was this girl that was always there, and she got hired. She was 17 years old."