Filming “Help!” at Twickenham • Day 25

After three days of cold, blustery filming on Salisbury Plain, the Beatles returned to Twickenham Film Studios on 7 May 1965 to shoot one of Help!‘s most visually inventive sequences. The day was devoted entirely to Paul McCartney’s principal solo scene in the film, in which his character is accidentally injected with reducing fluid and finds himself shrunk to a fraction of his normal size, navigating a world of everyday objects rendered enormous from his perspective. Stripped of his clothes and stranded on the floor while the rest of the group presses on with its battle to free Ringo’s ring from the Kaili cult, the scene gave McCartney a rare stretch of individual screen time in a film whose comic plotting tilted heavily toward Ringo Starr.

Going further

The Beatles Diary Volume 1: The Beatles Years

With greatly expanded text, this is the most revealing and frank personal 30-year chronicle of the group ever written. Insider Barry Miles covers the Beatles story from childhood to the break-up of the group.

Buy on Amazon