The Beatles Archive - The Fab Four Frolic Again

The Fab Four Frolic Again

John, Paul, George & Ringo Return to the Silver Screen With the 35th Anniversary Reissue of "A Hard Day's Night"

Richard Lester: The deal was that if we got it ["A Hard Day's Night"] into the cinemas before the beginning of July [1964], then they would make it because they, the music department of United Artists, felt The Beatles probably wouldn't last the summer. We are talking about Britain, of course. So we started shooting in February. We had to make the film, cut it , dub it, and all of it in a very short period. We had to do it quickly so that the company wasn't left with a film about some has-beens. We set out to make the film that best captured what was going on around us. The week we began shooting, The Beatles went and did "The Ed Sullivan Show," and we provided a bit of material to take with them. By the time they came back, it was fairly obvious we were going to be all right. It still didn't alter the fact that on the first run of the picture, one of the [United Artists] executives said, "Fine, but we're going to have to redub it! We're going to have to postsync them because nobody in America will understand their voices." Alun Owen, Walter Shenson, and I went to Paris where The Beatles were doing an Olympia concert at the beginning of 1964 with Silvie Vartan. We watched them in their hotel room at the George V behaving in a way that was extraordinary. In other words, they were prisoners. They had come to Paris and they saw the car that took them there, they saw the backstage of the Olympia, they went to their hotel room and stayed there and sandwiches were brought up. In essence, a screenplay began to form in our minds because we were watching it happen. And since we had already decided we wanted to make a documentary film, or a film that was going to be a fictionalized documentary, all we were doing was just trying to keep our eyes open.

Walter Shenson: We were calling the picture "The Beatles Movie." We didn't have a title. Our distributors were calling from New York and begging us to come up with a title because they didn't know how to publicize it. I said we would keep calling it "The Beatles Movie" until we came up with a title. Originally I thought the title of one of the six or seven songs would lend itself. But neither I nor Dick Lester nor The Beatles themselves felt that any of those songs would make a good title. Then one day, while we were filming, I had lunch with John Lennon, who asked me, "Have you ever heard Ringo misuse the English language?" I asked him to give me an example and he said, "Well, when we work hard on a recording session that lasts until four or five in the morning, the next day Ringo's apt to say something like, "Wow. That was a hard day's night!" It struck me that it was kind of a catchy phrase. So I said to John, "Why don't we call the movie "A Hard Day's Night" and get them off our backs about the title?" John said, "Why not?" Then we asked the other Beatles and Dick Lester and they all said it was pretty good. Now it dawned on me that I didn't have a song called "A Hard Day's Night," and I wouldn't be much of a producer if I let a picture go without a title song, so I asked John one evening, "Can you and Paul write a song called 'A Hard Day's Night'?" He said, "Oh, God, we've already written all the songs!" But I told him we needed it. He said, "Does the song have to reflect the story?" I told him it didn't, and he said he'd do the best he could. That was at ten o'clock at night. At eight-thirty the next morning John and Paul called me into their dressing room at the studio. On the back of a matchbook cover they had the lyrics of "A Hard Day's Night." The two of them took out their guitars and played this song, which became a number-one song when it came out. I couldn't believe the genius of these two writers who could write a hit song on demand.

Richard Lester: They'd seen a short film of mine ["The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film"]. They knew I'd made a pop film ["It's Trad, Dad!"] before that. They knew I could play a bit of piano and that I would understand them musically. By accident, I happened to know who they were and they knew I was a kind of surrealist gag man. It all came together and it worked. We didn't set out to change the world. I don't think any good work is conceived with the objective of saying, "This is the film that's going to alter mankind." Films are mirrors. Films reflect the times. I had a marvelous image in front of me to reflect, and that is, or was, their energy and their originality. And whatever I had came because I was an enthusiast of Buster Keaton's work and of French cinema in the late 1950s. It just gelled."

Victor Spinetti: The set of "A Hard Day's Night" was chaos because nobody really knew what they'd gotten into. Walter Shenson went to the American movie companies and said, "I'm doing a movie with The Beatles." And they said, "Who?" But The Beatles had a ball. Dick Lester had five cameras running all the time because The Beatles would never stick to the script. You never knew what they were going to say or do. They had to cut so many scenes. Honestly, if you could get all of the outtakes, you'd have another film because they shot enough to make "Gone with the Wind. "They sent each other up all the time. They'd say things like, `Paul, you're the prettiest. You get out of the car first.' As the lunatic director, I'd walk up to them and say, `You're late. You should have been at rehearsals ages ago.' John would say, `You're not a television director. You're Victor Spinetti acting as a television director.' They were always sending people up, and because the cameras kept rolling the whole time, the essence of The Beatles was caught, and that's the magic of the film.

Walter Shenson: After the first day of shooting, I looked at the rushes and my wife said, "Can they act?" I said, "I don't know. But I do know you can't take your eyes off them."

John Lennon: Our acting in the film? Well, it is as good as anybody who makes it but can't act, you know.
Paul McCartney: As you all know, we are not actors. We're, first of all, singers and then, sort of, musicians, but last of all, we're actors. So we didn't really know how to act, but lots of people on the film helped us with it. The real actors, like Wilfrid Brambell and Norman Rossington, who were in the film, helped us with it and told us one or two things to do.
Reporter: How do you like the movie?
Ringo: It's not bad. It's okay.
Reporter: Are you pleased with your performance?
Ringo: Yeah, I think so. We all went to see it on the Saturday before we had the premiere in London. About 10 of us, meaning the four of us and managers and that, and we didn't like it too much because we pulled ourselves to bits and things like that. But when we went with an audience, they were sort of laughing at the jokes and it made it a lot better, so I like it now.

Walter Shenson: People ask me, "Were The Beatles good actors?" And I say, "The Beatles were better than good actors. They were brilliant at being themselves."

Victor Spinetti: I was in a car with The Beatles on the way to shooting for "A Hard Day's Night," and we couldn't move because of all the crowds of kids in the street. Some of the girls grabbed the back bumper of the car and were dragged along. They scuffed their legs, but they didn't care because it was The Beatles' car that did it. George was the first to get out of the car, and a girl grabbed him and pulled some of his hair out. Well, the blood started rolling down his face. It was an extraordinary time.

Richard Lester: For three years I was in the center of the universe, from "A Hard Day's Night" to "Help!" to "How I Won the War," and I knew at the time that it would be the pinnacle of whatever I did. I said in the late 1960s that 30 years from know, if I'm knocked down by a bus, the Evening Standard poster will be, "Beatles Director in Dead Drama." You can't avoid that and I'm perfectly happy because at least I've had the opportunity to have had that experience. So life is downhill, okay, but at least you've been up and seen the view. The fact that a part of you lives on, apart from your own children, is a rare privilege and I'm perfectly happy. I'm thrilled to have made a film like "A Hard Day's Night" that will always be a good antique mirror. One that will say, "This is as accurate as I could produce what it felt like to be around that experience at the time."

Excerpted quotes are from The Beatles: An Oral History written by David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght, based on their interviews for their radio documentary "The Beatles: The Days in Their Life," available from Hyperion.

Our Players: John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr; Richard Lester, director of "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!"; Walter Shenson, producer of "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!"; and Victor Spinetti, the British actor who co-starred in "A Hard Day's Night," "Help!" and "Magical Mystery Tour."

"A Hard Day's Night." Starring John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Directed by Richard Lester. Written by Alun Owen. Produced by Walter Shenson. Comedy. For its 35th anniversary, Miramax is reissuing this 1964 UA/Proscenium production with new footage this spring.