Interview for paulmccartney.com

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Katy asks: Do you have a favourite film you’ve worked on? And are there any films you almost made, that didn’t happen for one reason or another?

Paul: I think the favourite one and the most memorable is A Hard Day’s Night, simply because it was the first one! We’d never been in a film before. 

Back then, if you were lucky, you could graduate from being a touring band to being a recording band, and then if you had success, you might be offered a film. So, we were always interested in that, and we asked our manager, Brian Epstein, if anyone had approached us with an offer – and they had! 

Originally there was something called The Yellow Teddy Bears. We said to Brian, ‘Yeah, OK, great!’ And then he came back to us after talking to the producers, and told us they wanted to write the songs themselves. So, we passed on that. 

Then there was this little film that we’d seen as a supporting film when we went to the cinema. It was called The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film and it starred The Goons, the old radio act which included Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine, and Harry Secombe. It was a very silly little film! It was black and white, and the silly scenes would be things like seeing someone in the distance across a field, walking towards the camera, and when he gets to the camera a boxing glove comes out and just hits him. We thought, ‘Wow, this is radical!’ We’d never seen anything as silly as that! 

We found out it was directed by a guy called Dick Lester, so we knew we wanted to work with him. Eventually, we got offered a film by United Artists, and we got a Welsh writer, Alun Owen, who he’d done a good Liverpool TV play called No Trams to Lime Street. It was what they called ‘kitchen sink theatre’ in those days, you know, it was the working class people were coming through, because until then it had been just posh people making films. Alun came and hung out with us; he joined us on a train journey and saw the things we did to mess around like playing with the little radio, and he put that in the film as a scene where there’s an old guy who comes and complains. He picked up the essence of The Beatles. 

So, he wrote the script for A Hard Day’s Night and we did it. We were very pleased to be in our movie, and it was a great experience. It had a big impact on us: it’s where George met Pattie Boyd, she was one of the schoolgirls in the sequence, and the film was a big success actually. Not bad for our first one!