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   CLUB SANDWICH 59

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LESTER THINKABOUT

Film director Richard Lester projects some thoughts about Get Back to Mark Lewisohn

            "No matter what films I make or what service I do for the community, when I die the placards will read 'Beatles Director In Death Drama'." So acknowledged Richard Lester in 1970, simultaneously underlining the sense of realism, and at the same time surrealism, that has so distinguished his cinematic work over 32 years, whether The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film or It's Trad, Dad, whether A Hard Day's Night, Help! or The Knack, whether The Three Musketeers or Superman II. Richard Lester makes damn good films. Club Sandwich 59
            His latest, as we all know, is Get Back, the motion picture (and now video) of the World Tour, and it was the natural successor to his (literally) widely applauded triple-screen film that preceded the band on stage at each concert. Speaking to CS in his office at Twickenham Film Studios, the west of London complex where he has kept an office since 1963, Lester began by remembering how that brief film came about.
            "Paul called up and said that he wanted something to act as a warm-up, ten minutes of 'First there was the Beatles, then there was Wings and now there's now', and said that they had this great screen that's 20x80 [feet] to project onto. And then he went away for a month and I was left, more or less, to my own devices, choosing the songs, based on a chronological thing. It was only when I put the phone down that I realised that we were in terrible trouble because 20x80 is only half of Cinemascope. But in drawing it - I got my daughter, who is a good draughtsman, to do it - it came out that it's three TV sizes of 20x27. In this way we could make the shape fill up with images, so the three-screen idea came out of that."
            The film was universally well-received, except, perhaps, for some criticism that it pondered too long on bloody images from the Vietnam War, at odds with the joyous environment of a McCartney concert. Lester would disagree. "I talked to as many people as possible and asked them what images they remembered from the past 25 years, and 90 per cent of what they chose were violent images: either disasters, images of war, images of confrontation or of people that were in the news because of some form of violence. So I thought it was fairly correctly balanced. Even in the 90-minutes of Get Back there's only six minutes of non-McCartney concert footage. That's a very, very small amount."
            At a private preview of the three-screen production, Paul himself felt the balance of material almost right. "He asked for two shots to be removed because they were personally disturbing to him, and said that I should have a few more jokes, which I then found and put in. That was all."
            Travelling around the world shooting Get Back enabled Lester to observe how the film was appreciated. "I loved seeing it with big audiences and getting a big reaction," he enthuses. "I normally see my films at the Richmond Odeon, and if there are five people there and one of them coughs I think I've had a wonderful response. But to look at the short film with almost 200,000 people in the Maracana Stadium, responding to one image after another, was an experience that most film directors could never have."
            Richard Lester never expected to work with any of the Beatles again. Having directed A Hard Day's Night in 1964, Help! in 1965 and How I Won The War in 1966/7 (in which John Lennon had a role), he considered himself as lucky as he was going to get, packaged up his memories and went about attaching other great movies to his credit. "When they set out to do Magical Mystery Tour I said that they had absolutely earned the right to make their own films, without the interference of other people," he recalls. "Working with the Beatles had been like Andy Warhol's 'Famous For 15 Minutes' statement: we were all the Fifth Beatle for 15 minutes...and I still cherish a letter I received at the time which said 'Dear Mr Lester. You're much sexier than those other four.'"
            Born in Philadelphia in 1932 - his family originates from Northern Ireland -Richard Lester was an exceedingly bright youngster who entered the University of Pennsylvania at 15 and graduated with a degree at 19. While there he joined a cool-jazz vocal group - called Vocal Group, "We thought we were very avant-garde, and I suppose for 1950 we probably were" - who that same year were hired by the local CBS TV station for a show. Though they were fired for incompetence after three performances, Lester so enjoyed the experience that, on graduation, he convinced CBS to take him on as a stage hand. "In those early days of US television one could progress quite quickly if one was aggressive enough, so I went from stage hand to floor manager to assistant director to director very quickly and ended up making a live TV western, half an hour a day, five days a week."
            Richard Lester left America in 1954 and travelled around Europe until landing in England in May 1955, just in time -coincidentally - for the launch of ITV. He soon landed a job at Associated-Rediffusion where he directed Downbeat, the first jazz show for commercial television, and quickly fell in with the Goons, making three live TV series with them (the word Goon was BBC copyright so they were called Idiot Weekly, Price 2d; A Show Called Fred; and Son Of Fred) and these led to The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film, Lester's cinematic debut. Just as record producer George Martin was an associate of the Goons, so then was Richard Lester, and anyone who'd worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan was AOK in the Beatles' eyes. "Running, Jumping made me acceptable to them," says Lester, "that and the fact that almost anything I had worked on had a kind of low-grade surrealism about it."
            Despite this, Get Back is played relatively straight. "I felt that Paul had had so much exposure in a documentary fashion that one didn't want any 'backstage with the band' sequences, chatting to the stagehands, getting on board the corporate jet, and the why-I-do-what-I-do interviews. Masses of ideas were thrown around: I spent a good year trying to think of all the possible ways of approaching this material, and certainly felt that the MTV style of fast-cutting, multi-layered images, shooting on High Definition would not hold up over a 90-minute period, but that really a straightforward, old-fashioned approach to film-making seemed to be the only way.
            "I chose instead to capture this sense of nostalgia - almost that feeling of 'Do you remember the first time we heard this song?' - and that it was a kind of inter-cut love affair with audiences throughout the world, and the band. I tried to show the emotional relationship that the band has for each other, the good spirit that's there, and the respect for the audience and the love that the audience has for Paul. It's an almost impossible task to make a concert film that satisfies everyone: the die-hard fans, the people that have been to the concerts and want a reminder, and also your straightforward cinemagoer who may not be a musical fan. Who do you please and how do you do it? That was the problem."
            Well, it was one of the problems, for the technical aspects of the film were a veritable nightmare. Not only was it compiled from video, 8mm, 16mm and 35mm but Lester and his team had to separately sync up the picture to every consonant sung in the soundtrack. Even with access to the full set of the 32-track concert recordings, it was a painstaking process. Cutting and syncing consequently took a full year to undertake. Paul was involved in the editing process frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot, Lester never passing anything into its final stage without putting it up on the screen with its alternatives and discussing them with Paul. It was a genuine collaboration.
            "We were inclined to use three cameras most of the time, sometimes four," says Lester, "and I used cameramen that I had known from over the years, some who'd even been involved in A Hard Day's Night and Help!, so they knew what I wanted. I wanted to get a sense that everything was changing, that the audience was sometimes Brazilian, sometimes Japanese, the sense that it was a continuing process. We were never on stage, and so couldn't get certain angles, because we were told that we couldn't ever be in the way of any punter who'd paid money to see the show. So sometimes we'd be right back at the sound console with very long lenses."
            Richard Lester makes no bones about having grabbed the Get Back opportunity before it went elsewhere. "Whether I was the right person or the wrong person to do it, I just wanted to be involved. Sixty years of age or not, I didn't want anybody else to get their hands on it. Every time the band came on and started to play I felt good, and the experience of wandering around in front of those speakers at all of those concerts in all of those countries was just marvellous."