'George was by far the best actor of the four of them'
Richard Lester, veteran director of Help! talks to Steven Soderbergh, director of sex, lies and videotape, about working with the Beatles
Friday October 22, 1999
The Guardian
Steven Soderbergh: When you shot Help!, you had to shoot the Bahamas first, right?
Richard Lester: Shot the Bahamas first. That's it.
SS: That's scary. I can't imagine shooting the end of the movie first.
RL: Well, there were some practical points of view. One, you couldn't easily get a long enough shooting day in the snow, for the snow scenes. Two, you couldn't get the hotel rooms easily. So that put it to the very end of the ski season. And then the Bahamas worked because it was February/ March, so it was between the big Christmas time and the Easter holidays. We had our own plane; we chartered a plane to take the crew and cast and all. I'm so used to it. It never bothered me. I've never shot anything in any order.
SS: It just seems difficult - especially for a movie which feels so free-form - to lock down your ending first.
RL: One of the things that had to be locked was that bloody great statue of Kahili, which was suppose to rise from the water and it came out and fell on its nose.
SS: I think it was fine just sitting there. Now talk a little bit about the transition from Marc Behm's draft to Charles Wood's draft.
RL: Marc had no feeling for any English dialogue at all. Never lived in this country, never worked here. He was an American who worked in Paris, so it needed Anglicising.
SS: Were any of Charles's contributions structural?
RL: No. No. Marc's structure was more or less there, but I suppose I should try to find Marc's original screenplay.
SS: I love all the Patrick Cargill/Scotland Yard stuff. The juxtaposition of that type against the Beatles is fun.
RL: Well, it certainly made A Hard Day's Night work, and I think it was what appealed to the non-screamers. "I fought the war for your type", "Bet you're sorry you won," etc.
SS: Now I happen to think that George was the best actor of the four of them by far. I don't think there's any question.
RL: I don't think that there's any question either, but I'm sure if you went around and asked people who saw the films that they would feel that necessarily. Ringo, because his was the showy part, he was always the odd one out, so he was given characteristics that were more sympathetic. John, I don't think was interested and didn't bother. Paul was too interested and tried too hard and George was always the one that was forgotten. So he just did it and got on with it.
SS: It's amazing, there's not a line he doesn't nail.
RL: No, that's right.
SS: On Help!, how out of it were they, do you know?
RL: I have no way of knowing the consumption of marijuana during the days of shooting Help!, except to say that A Hard Day's Night was a film by and large that wasn't performed under the continuous influence of dope.
SS: How long did you shoot on Help!?
RL: Overall, it was about nine weeks and something. But probably just under eight weeks actual shooting. Five-day week in the studio. I seem to remember about 10 days in the Bahamas, about five days in Austria and then the rest in studios and out and about.
SS: In talking about Help!, you've mentioned Jasper Johns as a specific influence. Would that be just in that movie or is he somebody you like in general?
RL: No, it was just a means to explain it. Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, as photographed by. My real interest, from a visual point of view, would always have been the 20s to 40s European surrealists. If I had to choose for that sort of field, I'd rather put my finger on a Magritte look than a Jasper Johns look.
SS: One colour over another idea is what I was assuming you were talking about. It's well documented that Help! was sort of defined by what couldn't be.
RL: What it shouldn't be. That's right. And then the fact that the first idea turned out to be The Chinese Gentleman from China.
SS: I don't know what that is.
RL: The first idea I came up with when we started playing around with it was that Ringo was getting edgy at the constrictions of fame. And when drunk in a bar, he says to a stranger he has befriended that he wishes he could end it all - just not wake up - because he just can't take any more of this. And the man said, "I have a friend who does that sort of thing. You'd never know it, he's highly professional. You just leave us the money, he's a master of disguises, and you'll never know." And Ringo wakes up the next morning and remembers this and than panics and calls the boys. That was the thing. And it turned out that Philippe de Broca had made a film called The Man from Rio, and their sequel was called The Chinese Gentleman from China. It's that exact idea and they were shooting it at that time.
SS: It was a good idea. Too bad.
RL: It was based more on Ringo getting antsy and edgy. So it at least it started as a continuation of A Hard Day's Night.
SS: One of the things that stands out in Help! - which is interesting because you'd be making a war film two years later - is the convincing chaos of the Salisbury Plain sequence once the explosions begin. The footage has quite a realistic feeling. Although in How I Won the War, except for when you were duplicating newsreel footage, you weren't really recreating a war scene.
RL: In How I Won the War, we felt that most of the battle sequences - the one that we took seriously, which is the last one with John Lennon getting shot - needed that sense that out of nowhere it happens: unprepared and suddenly "pop" and your guts are blown out. Which to me was much more interesting and much more horrific. Farm boys on one side taking pot shots at other farm boys. And in between, the Dutch, who were giving their fruit and vegetables both to the Germans to say good bye and to the other English coming in. Farmers will always survive.
SS: Getting back to Help! - for something like the Salisbury Plain sequence, you showed up with what, three cameras?
RL: We always carried three cameras with us. Two complete camera crews and me as the third operator, or whatever.
SS: And you would just go?
RL: Yes. That's it.
SS: So, for instance, when the explosion happens and everything starts falling apart, you would just sort of pick an area and say, "All right, let's all get over here, and we're going to do it here, and then we are going to do it there," and just do it a half-dozen times?
RL: Yes. Do it two times. (Chuckles.)
SS: The airport scene when they're all wearing disguises is funny. Was that cut down?
RL: No, I think that's all there was. What's lovely is they looked like they ended up looking.
SS: Three years later, right. It's one of the few scenes where everybody is good, not just George.
RL: Maybe the disguises freed them up. The did seem very loose.
SS: How did the end-credit sequence come about?
RL: I just wanted to do that music. Bob Freeman got a beer mug, they shot it through a beer mug. I left it to him. He got all of them together, got the actors together in their costumes, and did it near the end of shooting. And then, I think it was almost by accident that we had the Beatles there while I played them the soundtrack of the Rossini, and we recorded them sending it up.
SS: It's very funny. And the opening-credit sequence, was that done the way I imagine it was done? Did you shoot them and then actually project them so you could throw those darts on to the screen?
RL: Yes. It was back projection. And that was all a kick, fall and scramble, because the film wasn't going to be called Help! until that time. There was a legal problem. Our original title was called Help, Help and the lawyer said it had already been registered and you mustn't use it so we had Beatles Two and then Eight Arms to Hold You. Finally, the group said, "We can't write a song for Eight Arms to Hold You," and I said, "What happens if we just ignore the lawyers?" And everybody went, "Oh no." Then I asked was there an exclamation point with Help, Help and there wasn't. So I said, '"If I put an exclamation point, haven't I changed the title?" And they said, "Yes." So we said, "OK" - bang. And then we told the boys, "You've got to write a song right away," and in the car going back from the studio, having made that decision, by the time they got back to the centre of town 25 minutes later, they'd written Help!
SS: Jesus.
RL: And the next night, after shooting, they recorded it. The day after we got it, we filmed them singing and it was cut and within a week we shot the dart-throwing overlay for the back projection of the song.
SS: I'll make a bold statement here and say that Help! is, to me, the birth of what I consider to be modern colour cinematography. The basic principles that are at play in that film - particularly in the You're Gonna Lose That Girl sequence - are still being used by the people today who are considered to be the top cameramen in the world. It's all there. Especially the hard, overexposed back light and the reflective fill light, which Watkin is a master of.
RL: I think it was the first serious attempt to make diffused lighting positive. In other words, I think people like Raoul Coutard were working with natural light and doing it effectively, but David was making it into a dominant factor in the way that he photographed people's faces. It was stunning and he was brilliant. Totally extraordinary.
SS: Knowing that your metabolism is high, did you find Watkin worked quickly enough for you?
RL: David was one that never kept fiddling. There are a lot of cameramen who will keep going even if you are about to turn over; they are still moving and saying, "Just let me hold that." He's not like that. The overall thought he put in - or didn't, as the case may be - ensured it would look interesting, no matter what he did. If you said, "Make this look like Freddie Young," he couldn't do it. Nic Roeg could. Nic was brought up through the system, was a clapper-loader, went right through the business and learned at the feet of the masters, the Bob Kraskers and the Freddie Youngs.
SS: He seems to be an interesting character.
RL: Oh yes. As he said to Audrey Hepburn, "You'll have to take your chances with the rest of them, luv." (laughter.)
SS: God, I'm sure she loved hearing that.
• This is an edited extract from Getting Away With It, by Steven Soderbergh, published by Faber on November 1, price £12.99. Soderbergh talks to Richard Lester in a Guardian interview on November 5 at the NFT, London SE1. Box office: 0171-928 3232.
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