“I don't find filmmaking fun at all”: a 1973 interview with Richard Lester

Since The Bed Sitting Room in 1969, his work has been confined to television commercials. One cherished film project, a spectacular adaptation of George Macdonald Fraser’s novel Flashman, was cancelled by United Artists a month away from shooting in 1970, after Lester had spent more than a year in preparation. ‘The Day of the Lesteroid’, as Manny Farber called it, had come and gone, leaving a permanent imprint on everyone’s filmic consciousness, but leaving the man himself temporarily stranded. When I met Lester in January at his office in Twickenham Studios, he was visibly anxious to get rolling on a new film tentatively scheduled for late March, in Hungary – The Three Musketeers.

Fraser was writing the script, his first, and Lester was heavily involved in period research. Also in cinematic research: the day after the interview, I went to the Academy Cinema to see the 1921 Douglas Fairbanks Three Musketeers, and there was Lester. His scholarship in listing the various film versions of the tale was impeccable, down to a footnote: ‘Rumour has it that there is also a Three Stooges version, but I haven’t run across it yet.’ An inkling of the tone of the Lester version came when the ‘All for one and one for all’ title flashed on the screen and he was heard to mutter, ‘And every man for himself.’

A man who approaches comedy with the gravity of a monk at prayer, Lester confirmed my theory that directors physically resemble their movies. Sitting tautly on the edge of his chair, dressed with too much elegance to be completely mod, large eyes staring out of a kind and haunted face, releasing words with the painstaking care of one who profoundly distrusts speech, he began by cautiously wading into the topic of The Three Musketeers.

Richard Lester: You look a bit of a fool, don’t you, having talked at length about a project which eventually becomes abandoned, or which someone else makes and does much better than you could. Genuinely, there’s no cast at the moment, the script is only starting to be written, and my ideas are nebulous, to say the least.

Have you read the Dumas original ? Very few people have; it’s always the children’s abridged version. It’s 700 pages, and it’s really fascinating. Very objective – it treats d’Artagnan as a fool, and the Musketeers are wildly mercenary. Typical Frenchmen. They’ll fight for queen and country provided they draw enough money to look pretty. I’m going to make the film set quite purely in its social structure… how did people talk? what did they eat? how did they brush their teeth? The Musketeers’ whole life was concerned with money, yet they weren’t German mercenaries. They fought not to make money but for a rather outdated system of honour which existed until they actually started to fight. Then they would kick each other in their private parts, thinking that was perfectly all right, and would very graciously pick the fellow up afterwards.

In A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum I tried a little bit to understand what it must have been like to lead an ordinary, boring life in Rome, and I hope to show in Three Musketeers what it must have been like to have to survive – what it meant having no sanitation, or what food you had when you were a lackey or a servant. What would your life expectancy have been? They didn’t realise when The Three Musketeers took place that blood circulated from the heart; that was discovered the year afterwards. So if you run somebody through in the field and want to be honourable and try to help him survive, what would you think of? You wouldn’t put a tourniquet on, you wouldn’t try to stop the bleeding. As far as you knew, the blood came from your head. It’s this that I find exciting. I think everything has to be images, and one has to try to study and learn as much as possible.

For a few years, you were a sort of watchword in film style; then we went through a period when the style became so common that there were imitations of you all over television. How does it feel to be the originator of a trend and then see it wash over you?

I didn’t really care, because in my own deluded way – I  must underline delusion – the style was purely secondary. The content was more important than the form. And therefore if someone used the form, the Monkees or anybody else, it didn’t matter. I never felt the style was that original, anyway. I’m perfectly prepared to be considered eclectic. And I don’t see a common style running through my films: other people may see it, but I found there were certain problems that had to be solved in one way in one film and one way in another.

I remember going to see You’re A Big Boy Now, having been told that it was, theoretically, a copy. I had already seen bits of the Monkees’ television show where they were actually pushing a bed through the streets, I mean quite specifically taking gag for gag, so I didn’t feel that You’re A Big Boy Now was totally derivative. I felt that it was probably trying to solve the same sort of problems as I was. Apart from everything else, I was very busy and happy in being able to do what I wanted. If other people were doing it at the same time, fine.

The trouble was that people became tired of the style because of the imitations, and that affected your own career.

There was an overemphasis on what at the time was called ‘Swinging London’. There was such a wave of enthusiasm towards things British, the Beatles, British football, British clothing, anything that anybody did here, that apparently you couldn’t go wrong. So naturally there was overkill, and when the pendulum swung back the reaction was going to be very strong. Also, the periods of a particular trend are getting shorter and shorter. We’ve gone through the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s as a wave of nostalgia in something like three years, so watch out – soon the 1980s will be nostalgic before they’ve happened.

Also, from How I Won the War onwards I was doing things which, to me, have absolutely no recognisable stylistic links with anything else. To me they had intellectual links, and my attitude towards all the films was the same, but I think the worst thing in the world is for a film director to chart his progress. You’ll never make better films because it has to fit the genre. ‘Will this be part of my work?’ and ‘Can I see it in my listings at the back of a film biography?’… You know, then you’ll never make it.

You’ve been working in commercials…

For the last thirteen years. Always. I think it’s unwise to do one without the other. There was a point when I made two, nearly three films in one year, but I still made fifty commercials – I find it a very good way to practise and experiment, because I never had either money or time on most of my films to have any technical tests started. So I used advertising films as a means of trying lab processing, trying to learn about the various new machines that were available, new lenses, new ways of doing anything. It’s a free ride.

Are the commercials you make seen in America?

I suppose about three were shown in America. I made a rather odd L & M commercial. John Schlesinger, Karel Reisz and I each made one of a series.

What was yours like?

It was like Marienbad. Why they came to me I don’t know. They said they wanted something which was absolutely me and suggested something which was absolutely Resnais. But, eclectic to the end, I sort of pitched in.

Mostly I work for Italian television. They’re not really commercials; you do two minutes of entertainment, to which you then stick on thirty seconds of advertising. You have a completely free hand, within reason, to do what you want in the two minutes. Silent comedy sketches and so on. You have to work quickly and you have to invent quickly, because usually it’s almost an ad lib session. It’s easy to think of one two-minute sketch of four people lost in the desert, but when you have to do ten in a row with the same people and the same desert and not many props and a crew of four, it’s very good practice. What’s known as thinking on your feet at 120 degrees. The last series was on Italy’s number one pop star, a boy named Massimo Ranieri, taking him into small towns in Tuscany, filming the setting up of a pop show in the main square. He sings at night, and then afterwards the commercial part is that they all sit down and have a meal with the mayor. It’s for a spaghetti.

Are the entertainment things always related to the product?

No; they mustn’t be, by law. There must be no discernible connection between the entertainment and the product. They are only shown once and then they’re destroyed. They’re shown in groups of about five at nine o’clock at night and they are the number one rated programme in Italy.

I’d find it depressing to do something and have to destroy it afterwards.

I don’t know why, in this case, because it is work which is a technical exercise. It’s like doing sketches for a painting which you eventually hope to do. I don’t think anyone would feel very upset if the sketches were burned, provided in the final analysis that you were able to do the painting. If you’re a tennis player, you hit backhands against a wall. It’s a marvellous way of sharpening up your backhand, a means of developing and controlling your technique. It doesn’t do you as much good as actually going out on the Centre Court at Wimbledon and playing, but it is useful. You couldn’t have a three-year lay-off and just walk out on to the Centre Court and expect your backhand to work. By the same token, you couldn’t spend the rest of your life hitting backhands against a wall. Or at least I couldn’t.

The Bed Sitting Room didn’t play around much in America…

It didn’t play around much anywhere except in Scandinavia, where it played fairly successfully. It has never played in Italy, or in France. United Artists decided, I suppose, that the film wasn’t going to have a commercial success, and it would be spending good money after bad, or whatever the expression is. It showed two weeks in one cinema in New York and got some extraordinarily good reviews and some extraordinarily bad ones, and that was it. That’s the end of it, I think.

Was that part of the problem you have had since then?

Oh, I should think so, yes. It’s part of everyone’s problem. If you make a film that is not commercially successful, it is infinitely harder to make other films… especially if those films don’t fit into established formulas of film-making and are expensive.

It’s a shame, because in the old days a director could afford a commercial failure or two and he would always have a next film.

Not only is it a shame, but I think it’s very dangerous from everyone’s point of view. I’m very pleased to have commercials, so that I don’t need to make a film just for the sake of making it. Apart from it being emotionally impossible for me – l wouldn’t have the strength and stamina to get up every morning for three months and to physically go out and shoot something that I didn’t really care about. My legs would fall off.

In the last three years, then, you have been offered a lot of projects that just didn’t interest you?

Quite a lot, yes. One doesn’t want to sound arrogant, but there have been films to do. A problem is that I prefer not to work in America, and some of the nicest and most interesting projects would have involved working there. Petulia was my response to going back there for the first time in fifteen years, more or less, and I’ve done it and I wouldn’t want to do it again. Also, I’m not really able to make a film if I feel that there is someone else who could make it infinitely better than I could.

You can probably gather from this that I’m not really a professional, a craftsman, in the aesthetic sense of film-making. I could never be a contract director. I’d like to consider myself reasonably craftsmanlike in the actual technique of it; I know and care about that. But I can only make films if I feel that I can contribute something. In this best of all possible worlds, you don’t make films for yourself or for the audience; you make them for the sake of the film, for the sake of the subject.

Do you have plans for any other films?

There’s a film which I hope to do after Three Musketeers, something I’ve been messing about with for a number of years, which is just a traveller going to a very strange country. That is the only one I have more than the vaguest plans about.

The tone of The Bed Sitting Room struck me as very curious. It seemed an almost enjoyable life the people were leading – rather jolly. I found the film very funny, but I had a hard time taking some of the satire seriously. The tone seemed so flippant.

I would never use the word flippant. I agree that it was trying to use comedy in as serious a way as possible, as I think I have tried all along to do, but I wasn’t attempting to be flippant. I think the film is in many ways a failure. I don’t think that finally it had enough … enough, if I can use enough as a noun, to carry through the limited resources of a desolate landscape. That’s a bit clumsy, but it’s a film which started with the premise that there was nothing, because everything had been destroyed, and I found it very difficult to create a sustained visual and emotional interest, to produce a sense of tension and of time, to produce constantly new images and new outlooks. You couldn’t suddenly think of something to do with a telephone, because there were no telephones.

I felt that the first third of the film worked, it set up the premises quite nicely, but the second third sagged very badly. I knew this at the time and was rather helpless. In fact, I wasn’t clever enough to get enough going, to make you constantly care for these people who were, after all, not behaving in a rational way. I think it’s a very sad film; it was intended to be a very sad film. I wanted to use slapstick devices to parallel the unmentionable or the unshowable. I just didn’t have the intellectual strength to sustain it.

It was an irrational, illogical life they were leading, and one of the theories behind it was that if you try to explode the Establishment, to stick a bomb under it, what breaks? What is left? Pieces of Doric and Ionic columns. They are perfectly formed fragments which behave exactly as little pieces of that structure. Just blowing it up doesn’t produce a transformation. And those people, those twenty tiny fragments of that civilisation, were behaving precisely as if there had never been the destruction. The same prejudices, the same flippancy on their part, the same lack of thought, the same banality – if that gave a flippant tone, that was intentional. I wouldn’t want to make a comedy which was just funny, just for its own sake, because I think comedy is the strongest possible weapon in trying to produce a hoped for sense of involvement with an audience.

Could you tell me about Flashman?

Flashman was one of the more successful abortive projects. It’s a very complicated situation, but Flashman came about at the time when the film industry began to collapse within itself. A sort of implosion. It’s a very expensive project, a period film where at one point 13,000 of the British Army have to retreat in January from Kabul into India, being attacked by hordes of Afghans. It’s not the sort of thing that you can do on a shoestring. I mean, apart from the logistical problem of how do you get, let’s say, 5,000 people under the snow so that the next morning they appear on cue as the bugle arises in this empty snowfield, blows a few notes, and then slowly 5,000 heads appear… To do it properly it would be a very expensive film; and I don’t think one should do it improperly.

What attracted you to the subject?

It was an extraordinary period of British history and it was a marvellously interesting premise: Flashman, the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was the only fictional character in a piece of really rather clever historical research by George Macdonald Fraser. Almost every other character was taken from the diaries of the time. Flashman became the survivor of the English retreat of 1842, where in fact out of 11,000 or 13,000 people, only one survived. There were lots of things in it that made sense to me – about soldiering, about the military, about the economics of military politics. And I also had various notions about the Victorian ethic and the Protestant, John Foster Dulles ethic and the relationship of one to the other…

Have you seen any films about war since you made How I Won the War which you found interesting?

Well, M*A*S*H, because I thought it was an extraordinarily pro-war film, and very funny and technically very interesting. What else ? Oh! What a Lovely War I felt was so full of nostalgia that in effect it had the haunting wish-fulfilment of Genevieve with guns. I didn’t feel desperate in any way, although I did at the play.

What about The Charge of the Light Brigade?

I liked it a great deal. I loved the inconsequential, boring, pedantic anti-climax of the actual charge. And the characters, like Gielgud’s Raglan – you realise, if you’ve done a reasonable amount of research on that period, that they behaved exactly like that. Flashman is based a lot on that sort of character. They behaved in ways that you wouldn’t believe.

One general was in a fort in Kabul with one of his aides when an earthquake struck. The aide asked, ‘What should we do?’ and the general said, ‘I think we’d better leave.’ They both ran down the stairs, and as they got to the bottom the building collapsed. Twenty minutes later, when they’d recovered, the general put the other man on court-martial because he’d run down the stairs in front of him. When you examine these people, they were cardboard. First quality British cardboard.

You said something a few years ago which I’d like to throw back at you: ‘I don’t really have any desire for any of my films to go into time capsules. And I expect A Hard Day’s Night, which I haven’t seen for a year, to be absolutely dreadful now, because it was of that period, of the pop explosion.’ Do you really mean that something is dreadful because it is dated? I think films are actually better when they strongly reflect the time in which they were made.

I don’t believe people should take films all that seriously. I know that’s a terrible attitude, because it puts you out of part of your job, but I think films are to be made and to be seen and not to be taken quite so much as objects to be cherished. I think they are disposable objects. They are as valuable because of their craftsmanship as pieces of period furniture, and they should be taken with as much seriousness or lack of seriousness. I think there is a danger if we expect so much of films. It’s awful because it’s all I can do, and I would hate to think that when I went through my life the only things I can leave behind are the bad manners of my children and these tins of film which represent my deep feelings and my shallow thoughts.

There is a danger in even concerning ourselves with whether a film is or is not dated. Of course it’s dated. A Hard Day’s Night was a film which set out to mirror a point in time, a fictionalised documentary representing an enormous change in the social structure of this country. How I Won the War was made about my feelings towards the Vietnam war, and the nostalgia about war and war films in 1965 or 1966. It means totally different things now because look what we’ve learned. Look how the world has moved on in its cynical or nonsensical way to make that not valuable, that type of film. The Beatles picture is dated, if you like, by its naive optimism. But that is precisely because one felt naively optimistic at that time, despite the fact that it happened a year before the Kennedy assassination, not long after the Bay of Pigs. In hindsight, I suppose there was nothing to be optimistic about. But people were.

Do you think that people today have less of a sense of humour?

I don’t think there is any change in the amount of humour available to us. I think there is a sense of overall optimism or pessimism in the world, and that it runs in cycles. From the early 1960s there was perhaps a sense of optimism, which was totally dashed by around 1967. We are still in that trench of pessimism; it’s now been numbed to apathy. Most of Western civilisation is totally apathetic and is waiting for some upsurge to lift it out. When you think that just on the lowest levels, there’s been no new change in appearance in five years, in clothing, in drama, in music, in art, nothing as far as I can see has happened. We’ve just been marking time in a rather sad way, sinking into various little bomb craters of depression, waiting for the future to kick us out again.

Are there any actors or actresses you’d like to work with?

It’s very important not to go around looking for a vehicle for a person. I’d admired George Scott from the time I saw him in The Andersonville Trial, and thought it would be nice to work with him. When Petulia came up there was a part, and I thought he would be the best person for that part. But my decision, before I thought of George Scott, was to take Petulia and turn it upside down, because the book was quite the reverse of what the film was. I think it’s very important to concentrate on why you want to make a particular subject, then find a vehicle which suits that feeling, then find the people that are best to work with.

Could I ask about some actors and how you’ve worked with them? Michael Hordern…

If I could make a film with a Michael Hordern part in it every year I’d be a very happy man. He is an amazingly talented actor, one of the best of the English school of acting, who understands insanity wondrously well and who plays with great conviction against terrible odds. He was thrown into Forum; he had never really sung, danced or played that kind of comedy before in his life, and yet came out I think the best. But especially I think he understood The Bed Sitting Room very, very well. He understood the madness of Grapple in How I Won the War wonderfully.

How is Ralph Richardson to work with?

He has moments where if things go slightly wrong at the beginning of a take he finds it hard to rise above them. But when everything builds correctly he just gives staggering performances.

George Scott?

Every moment he was a delight to work with. Wonderfully inventive. A very interesting man; a withdrawn man, not given to over-enthusiasm, but a man whom I admire more than any actor. I think he was well cast for Petulia, against a lot of people’s opinion, because you need a strong man to play a certain kind of weakness and indecision on the screen.

Julie Christie?

I found her marvellously hard-working. She would always be letter-perfect when she came to work; thought a great deal about it. And ravishingly beautiful, very nice to photograph. I don’t think she’s a natural actor. Whatever you see on the screen is darn hard work. She’s a nice girl.

It’s been remarked that directors who came from television don’t tend to fill the frame, that they have a hard time using the space around the actors, but your films are very dense. There’s something going on all the time.

It’s a great mess, isn’t it? I suppose that I do make films work to my own metabolic rate. And I like to fill the frame, there’s no doubt, and fill the soundtrack. I’m rather greedy. When I see other people’s films that are dense, I prefer them, I admire them. I think Persona is a dense film, although most of the time there is only a single person in frame. I would like to make films which have that density, whether it be that there are four different overlapping conversations or whether it’s just the complexity of one person.

How much of the activity in your films is really improvised? Maybe we could take the Stonehenge concert in Help!  – how pre-planned were the set-ups?

Nothing was planned there, but that seems to me what I call directing, not improvisation. That’s just the job. You go there and the elements are there because they have been listed on a callsheet and those people are going to turn up, and they know that in the script it says, ‘The boys play a number in a field, and then in the end they’re attacked.’ But once you’re there, one is always at the whims and mercies of the military. In that case, I couldn’t guarantee whether I was going to have one tank, three tanks, a halftrack, a platoon of infantry, or what. You hope for the best, and on that day they turned up. I took the precaution of having a helicopter there and having a few spot effects ready. I would have done it one way had it been raining, another way had it been a force eight gale.

What I think of as improvisation is where only a very broad outline has ever been produced for the actors and director, and they must shape the scenes as they go along. My scripts are much more formal than that, but they have great holes in them by nature. In How I Won the War, for instance, we knew that there were four battles which the platoon would fight which had to represent, tactically, Montgomery’s four classic battles, or blunders, or whatever begins with a b. I had studied or looked vaguely at the plans of the campaigns and what went wrong with them, but I didn’t know what I was going to do until the actual filming began.

Do you ever storyboard a sequence?

No, nothing at all. I don’t think it’s restricting, but it requires an ability to draw. I can draw stick figures, but they’re not much of a guide or help to anybody. I’m not organised enough to plan things in advance, and I mistrust people who only work well when it’s all laid out for them in triplicate. I like the feeling that I have to work off nerves. I like to get things in the first take.

But you wouldn’t improvise dialogue?

No, because I like rather formalised dialogue or none at all. If dialogue is to serve the purpose of being a parallel to the action, then certainly it shouldn’t be left to the vagaries of last-minute intervention by the director or the actors. If you’re doing a straightforward naturalistic film of two people making love in a bed, by all means I’d tell them to say whatever they felt like saying. But if the dialogue is a rather poetic monologue on the part of the milkman who happens to be passing at the time, laid over that scene, then you shouldn’t say to the milkman, ‘Look, there are a couple of people in bed next door, what would you say ?’ I don’t think I could easily have stuck bits of dialogue into How I Won the War: that was all written down very clearly in advance.

Do you admire discipline in a director?

I envy it as well as admire it. The only really favourite director I have is Buster Keaton. He was an absolute master. We can learn a great deal about the economies that he employed, the cutting and the positioning of the camera. He had that wonderful gift of using the space around the performer for comic effect. That’s very rare. It seemed effortless, that’s what was lovely. With Chaplin, you could always feel the fourth wall, you would get the feeling that he would be putting his camera in front of an imaginary series of footlights. Keaton didn’t; he was totally involved in finding a place that worked and using what was around him. In Go West, the single frame of the cow and the bucket is physically so beautiful. Right there, in one frame, is perfection.

Did you learn much from talking to Keaton when you directed him in Forum?

A fair amount, yes. He wasn’t very well, and he wasn’t able to do very much in the film technically, but he used to tell me how he would make films and how he would preview them. How when a scene wouldn’t quite work, it wasn’t a question of going back and recutting it, but of throwing the whole thing out and shooting a complete new sequence. He didn’t fiddle about, which is in many ways very correct. It was possible in his day because everyone was under a 52-week contract and all it cost was the raw stock and the petrol for the cars. He wasn’t the kind of man who gave advice. He was a very modest, relaxed man who loved the craftsmanship of his work.

Have you any particular favourites among his films?

Our Hospitality and The General, I think, and Cops. The General is closest to being technically perfect: it isn’t the most uniformly funny, but I find it a masterpiece in terms of economy. The Navigator is wondrously good. I sit and watch, thinking, ‘Christ! How did he manage that?’ For hysterical laughter it’s hard to beat Laurel and Hardy, who are just throwing 87 pies or just trying to get that car to come apart, but with Keaton the ingenuity of a gag or a device was wondrous. It was the sense of achievement that I find amazing in his films. You can’t fool an audience, ever. Any audience in the world smells when something is real.

Your editing is so fragmented in comparison with his…

Only because he did his better. I believe that the best possible gag happens in one. If you can’t do it in one because the actor isn’t an acrobat or you can’t rig the gag or don’t have the money to rig it, then you start putting in cut-aways to allow it to happen. In many ways, what is known as a frenetic editing style is due to expediency. I remember in Forum, when Keaton was running along through a forest and chariots were passing and I was using a fast-cutting technique, it wasn’t by choice. It was because physically he couldn’t run very far, couldn’t see the chariots well enough to keep out of their way, so I had to use a double for him and a stunt man was doing the actual running.

So instead of having a shot where you could see clearly both Keaton and the chariots in one – which was practicable, it was only a question of timing – I had to do the long shot with a double, then the close-up to remind you it’s really Keaton, then the mid-shot where the chariots run past, then back to the long-shot with the double doing a bit more, then back to Keaton. So you have six cuts where you didn’t want any of them.

If you had known that before you started production, would you have thrown out that scene and substituted something different?

I think that if I had had time, I would have tried to put him more into the film in ways that he could still serve. I would certainly not have recast him.

Do you like watching your films?

I don’t like seeing them. They hurt; they hurt like bloody hell. At Christmas Help! was shown on television, and I got terribly upset, really desperately, stupidly so, because my wife was pouring coffee during the film. I mean, it’s eight years old; I’ve been through all the agonies, the making it, the reviews, the opening, people going to it and liking it or not liking it, remembering the hard times, the good times, all that. But I still couldn’t bear the fact that now after all this time, when it’s just in the corner on the box – ‘If we’re going to watch the bloody thing, we’ve got to watch it.’ One knows how awful each error is, how far wrong you’ve got, and it’s very painful to have your nose rubbed in it. I don’t find filmmaking fun at all.

Not even the actual shooting?

Especially not, because there is the element of time and financial responsibility. The most pleasure is the editing and the mixing and the musical recording; I find that the most relaxing and the most exciting.

Even though you don’t enjoy watching your films, is there one scene that you’d like to see again ?

There are certain scenes that worked better than others… I think the opening titles worked quite well in The Knack, and there’s a sequence of dialogue I like where everyone is saying ‘What about the cases?’, each meaning a different thing by it, while they are running up and down the stairs not knowing what to do. I think the field sequence in A Hard Day’s Night worked pretty well as it was, and the snow sequence in Help!.

I loved the ending of Forum, with Keaton’s running figure freezing into the tableau.

Yes, that was nice, that was very nice. And I sort of liked ‘Bring Me My Bride’, the entrance scene, and I quite liked the gladiator sequence, maybe because it was just all mine. How I Won the War… well, there’s a lot I like. I’m still most proud of that film because I think it’s the most personal. It’s hard to separate pieces in that; it’s hard to separate pieces in Petulia.

The only film of yours I haven’t seen is It’s Trad, Dad!. Philip French’s article in Movie made it sound really tantalising.

It was a three-week pop quickie. It makes A Hard Day’s Night seem like a work of Jean-Paul Sartre. During the shooting the twist came into fashion, and the producer said to me, ‘If you pay your own way across to America, I will let you shoot some twist numbers.’ So I paid the £200, we came to New York and shot two and a half days with Chubby Checker, Gary (U.S.) Bonds, and a man named Gene McDaniels singing I think Burt Bacharach’s first song, and went racing back and stuck it into the film anywhere. Just opened the tin and threw it in.

To go back to the very beginning, what about The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film? Do you ever run it?

Yes, from time to time. A piece of nostalgia. I think it’s the only film that I can say I don’t feel too embarrassed by. Maybe because it only took a day and a half to shoot and I didn’t even know what I was doing. I can’t say that things didn’t come off well, because I didn’t think about anything. We just had a great time in a field.