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- [00:03]
Robert Rodriguez
When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof like Skims or Allbirds, sure you think about a great product, a cool brand and great marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually
- [00:15]
Samira Ahmed
the businesses behind the business making, selling
- [00:18]
Robert Rodriguez
and for shoppers buying.
- [00:20]
Samira Ahmed
Simple for millions of businesses.
- [00:22]
Robert Rodriguez
That business is Shopify, it's home of Shop Pay, the number one checkout in the world. You can use it to boost conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going through. To checkout, upgrade your business and get the same checkout Allbirds uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com income all lowercase go to shopify.com income to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com income
- [01:01]
Samira Ahmed
this episode is brought to you by State Farm Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling Smart Move. Another smart move getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state, coverage options are selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
- [01:27]
Paul McCartney
You don't be soft. We just finished making our first feature film for United Artists. It's called A Hard Day's Night. Hey Paul. What? Tell them about the songs and that and that there's eight songs in it. Eight I don't even see for you. It'll be soft. It'll be coming to your theater. It'll be coming to theater.
- [02:00]
Samira Ahmed
Something about the Beatles
- [02:06]
Robert Rodriguez
hello and welcome to episode 329 of Something about the Beatles podcast. And this episode reaches you for the first time on July 6, 2026, which is the 62nd anniversary of the premiere of the Beatles debut film A Hard Day's Night as it was shown publicly for the first time in London on this date. It was their first project with director Richard Lester. My guest today Samira Ahmed, a UK based journalist and lifelong Beatle fan who has produced her first book on the Beatles for the BFI British Film Institute book series On A Hard Day's Night. Something that probably should have been written a long time ago, but I think it worked out because the right person wrote it at the right time with the right skill set, insights and passion for the project as this was one of her gateway drugs into beetle fandom as a second gen fan growing up in Britain and it is really a deep, scholarly, insightful work. I can't put it any other way but being a lifelong fan of this film myself and having read everything and interviewed a number of people through the years on Sat B about the film. There's a ton to learn in this book, which is not very long, but it is packed over the course of its chapters. And it's also a smallish book. It's not some encyclopedic tome easy enough to read, but super smart. For anybody who's a fan of this film and wants to get so much more out of it, I guarantee you I've been saying this elsewhere and in the newsletter and everywhere else. You will not see this film the same way again after reading this book, because you're going to pick up so much more that there is to know about the craftsmanship, about the context and the culture and the times that this film was made, and really what they were putting across in 1964 that makes this film so timeless and evergreen to this day. So there you go. I don't have much more to say other than if you're not already a subscriber to the newsletter, you should be. So shoot me an email at satb2010mail to get on board and it's that simple. Comes out every Monday and filled with Beetle news and history and stuff about the show, upcoming guests, et cetera. It's your pipeline to connect with me as well as to get on the Sat B Discord, the online community of smart Beatle fans who want to get together and have discussions and hash things out, et cetera, et cetera. You got Beetle Project to promote. That's the place to do it. So I will get out of the way and enjoy this episode, which is sponsored by distrokid. Go to distrokid.com VIP satb to get 30% off your first year's annual subscription.
- [05:13]
Paul McCartney
You know, Ringo was an Aborigine. We found him. He was a bald Aborigine and he was cycling. We made him. Yeah, he was cycling around the Eclipse of Wales, wasn't he, with a bone through his tooth. And we saw him sort of passing percussive persuasions through the bongos, hiding behind a smoke screen of. So we found him there and he. He fitted into the group, you see. But since then we've cleaned him up a bit and growed his hair. Changed the basic rugged concept of my personality. Now that's another. We're doing lines from the film, you see. Let's see. What a boring film. That's going to be rubbish in it. At the moment we're flicking our ash on Brian Epstein's carpet That's our manager. We don't care at the moment. We bought it.
- [06:09]
Samira Ahmed
Hey, tell me, kids, have they written the script for you?
- [06:12]
Paul McCartney
All right, Brian? No, wrote the script. I don't know. In a fellow that writes plays about Liverpool and Ireland tonight, he writes many plays and musical. That's a loose. A bit, you know, we change a lot. Did you hear that? We've got a basic thing. Did you hear that, listener? Oh, George got a joke. Go on. He writes many plagues and music halls. Oh, there's an English joke for you. We run out of states.
- [06:33]
Robert Rodriguez
You know, it just seems like what you probably obviously realized is that this film is overdue for a detailed, scholarly, cinematic treatment. And I love the fact that you contextualize it. You give this greatly detailed, in depth, practically shot by shot analysis. And I love the film. I knew plenty about it going into this, but it's like there's a million little things. It's almost intimidatingly artful, how this film was constructed. It's like, my God, this man was a genius. Dick Lester. So it just. It leads to plenty more questions, for sure. But I guess for the sake of the listeners, a good place to start would be your best.
- [07:15]
Samira Ahmed
Are we definitely underway now?
- [07:17]
Robert Rodriguez
We are underway now. Yeah, Yeah. I didn't want to squander any of your time, but.
- [07:21]
Samira Ahmed
No, no, no, it's fine. I've got all the time you need.
- [07:23]
Robert Rodriguez
Your perspective's unique and so thoughtful, and that's like the bread and butter of this show. This isn't about a bunch of guys sitting around. Weren't the Beatles great? Isn't this a great album? No, no, no. That's some waste of people's time. This is serious, thoughtful stuff is what we're about here.
- [07:38]
Samira Ahmed
Definitely. No, it's a huge, huge honor to be on your podcast, Robert. Thank you so much.
- [07:42]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, thank you. So for the sake of the listeners who are coming to you as Americans and not aware of your career as a journalist and your background and your familiarity in Britain, how do you come to this subject? Your fandom, number one. And also something as incredibly challenging as taking on a detailed examination of A Hard Day's Night.
- [08:05]
Samira Ahmed
So I have been a lifelong Beatles fan. I stumbled across their films when my brother taped them off television in 1979 when they were all shown on BBC2. And we had a Betamax player in those days. So I watched these films, particularly Hard Day's Night and Help and Yellow Submarine, every week for years. So I think I have a good case to have watched them. Perhaps Possibly more than even a lot of Beatles fans listening to this. And I grew up to be a
- [08:30]
Robert Rodriguez
journalist through the films before you got to the music or was.
- [08:33]
Samira Ahmed
Yes, and I think that's really significant. I mean my brother, I had an elder brother who introduced me to their music and he had the Red and the Blue albums. He was five years old, he made me mixtapes. And one of the earliest albums I bought was the soundtrack album to Hard Day's Night as a result of watching the films. But I fell in love with them through the films and I think that's really significant. And one of the things I look at in my book is why I think television in particular is essential to understanding their appeal because that's how they connected with multiple generations.
- [08:59]
Robert Rodriguez
Yes. And that was a very unique aspect of your scholarship in this book. Even coming down to the COVID design, the television screen images of the Beatles, it's like I hadn't thought about that through that lens before. This is a very television centric film. A Hard Day's Night. It's a film, but it takes place in a TV studio.
- [09:16]
Samira Ahmed
That's right. And can I just mention that cover, the COVID designed by Mark Swan. He and I had a conversation about the ideas in the book and I said it's all about the idea of the Beatles being transmitted to the world, that they are a kind of benign contagion. And he came up with three different ideas. But that one of them divided as like a four headed creature through the television screen, instantly recognizable and also instantly transported into your life. I think that's essential because TV was at its peak in 1964 all over the world, I mean in America and Britain. And so that was the thesis of the book. But just going back to kind of my. The reason I wrote it was I've been a journalist my whole life. And although I mainly worked in hard news, the last 10 years I've been doing cultural journalism. I present a radio show called Front Row and I had actually discovered the earliest complete Beatles concert recording in the uk, which was at Stowe, this exclus boys boarding school where a student had rigged up a very good tape recorder and taped the whole concert because it was all boys. You can hear them singing. It's an amazing document of an era that we talk about, you know, like it's a myth, but it's actually recorded on tape. I. From when he told me about that, that was three years ago, you know, I did a whole sort of feature about it and it became this global news story. And I Realized that for some of the emails I got from people who'd heard was they said, I didn't particularly care about the Beatles. But listening to this story, I really enjoyed it because it's about why the Beatles were the phenomenon. They were what they were changing in Britain and that whole bigger picture. And I felt no one had really done that thing where they look at the Beatles as a band, look at their music. They might look at their films separately, but no one had looked at them through the lens of that intersection, which is all my works, social history, popular culture and social change and politics. And the fact that that moment in time represents an amazing collision of political tensions, youth, cultural changes and what's going on in their music, of course. And of course it changed them and it changed cinema. And that was the other thing is, of course, things like the monkeys become possible future. Things like the pop video are invented in this film. So all of that, the idea of it as a cinematic Big bang, which is a phrase I use to describe this film and the fact that it was made immigrants, you know, American immigrants who made Britain their home, captured these essentially British men and, you know, rebroadcast them to the whole world. And I loved that. That whole story deserved a proper examination,
- [12:40]
Robert Rodriguez
I thought, to go down that line a little bit deeper, that's a really interesting perspective. Do you think it was only possible to capture the Beatles in this way for this film, from an outsider perspective? If it was an entirely British made film, British director, British producer, would it have been the same and would it have had the same magic? Or did it require that sort of detachment of or relating to the other, as these guys did in a country that was not their own, to have the vision to recognize the Beatles for what they were and present them in the light that showed what they picked up on.
- [13:18]
Samira Ahmed
The funny thing is that most films about pop bands at the time in Britain were made to an American Hollywood formula. So it's interesting that Americans actually defy that formula with the confidence perhaps of being outsiders to their own country. And Richard Lester was very much influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague. Those films of Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, where they're using new lightweight cameras, they're sort of playing along with doing things on location, making things up on the hoof a bit. If you've seen that lovely Richard Linklater film, Nouvelle Vague, funnily enough, there's another American making a film about a uniquely European phenomenon beautifully. And I think it's just. It's fun, isn't it that Americans defied the American system. But there were British film stars like Cliff Richard, who I write about. I mean, it's probably not well known to you, Robert, or your listeners, but he was a huge star in Britain, a couple of years older than the Beatles, and they very much admired his early music and his band the Shadows was a big influence on the guitar playing. You know, Hank Marvin and his guitar playing to this day is really, really regarded very highly. But the films he made were made to American formula, and they didn't succeed in what they were designed to do, which was to help Cliff Richard break through in America. So the Beatles learnt two things from that. It was one, they wanted to have a hit record in America before they went there, which they did, you know, because they I want to hold you'd hand, I think hit number one before they went on the Ed Sullivan Show. But also by the time the film came out, they were already a hit there, so people wanted to see them rather than being introduced to them. And the Hollywood formula goes back to those Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney films. You know, let's put on the show right here. There's some old curmudgeon trying to spoil things, which actually, ironically, there is an element of that in A Hard Days like this, your grandfather character who disrupts things for a while. But they also had a romance, those American formula films, particularly the Cliff Richard ones. And it was often an American romance, they'd bring in an American girl. So in Summer Holiday, which is the year before A Hard Day's Night, there's an American actress who's a singer, and there's a whole convoluted plot about how she's running away from fame. A TV show of her own, 10 weeks top money, and what does she do? She runs out of here someplace without even signing a contract. Children these days don't know how to spell gratitude. You did say she could have a holiday. She's a star. A star can't just loaf around for 10 weeks. A star must work and work and work. She's worked all her life, supported the three of us since she was four years old. She had a childhood that any other child would envy. While other girls were filling their heads with algebra and geometry, she was learning practical things, like how to slip past the hotel clerk. Oh, we traveled everywhere. Running away from creditors. So she got to see the country, didn't she? And the film is actually quite fun. It's often shown on British television in the way that Hard Day's Night is too. But it's sort of cute and quaint. And I think the biggest thing about Harday's Night is it defies all those rules.
- [16:07]
Paul McCartney
It.
- [16:08]
Samira Ahmed
It does things in this different way and it doesn't try to be exotic, it doesn't try to take the Beatles to the south of France like Cliff Richard films did. It says, Britain is the most exciting place to be in the world, even in black and white. And that's what I think is fascinating about the film, that it makes Britain look exciting and it told Britain to look at itself in a different way, as well as making Americans and people around the world look at Britain in a different way, made us look at ourselves differently.
- [16:32]
Robert Rodriguez
One of the many things I love about your book is the deep contextualization where you point out the day of this shoot happened to be right after this happened. It would have been something familiar to people watching the films would have resonated as something fresh, like the mods and the rockers in Brighton occurring right before they filmed the press conference scene. So are you a mod or a rocker? The little details like that that inform the content of the film, it's just. It's fantastic to have it all laid out so that anybody reading this book will not see A Hard Day's Night the same way again, no matter how many times they've seen it. Because there's so much information you put out there that informs what you are seeing on the screen. It's just tremendous. So thank you.
- [17:12]
Samira Ahmed
Can I just say Tim Rice, as in Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, read the book and he said, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the period. And he was a young, you know, probably a young child at the time the film came out. And he said he learned so much because I looked at lots of different sources. So there's obviously loads of interviews the Beatles have done. Richard Lester himself has given many, many interviews over the years, although he's pretty much. I think he's quite frail now, so he hasn't. I didn't speak to him afresh for this, but he'd done so many interviews, including, up until the last 10 years, I did a fresh interview with David Janssen, who played the young boy in the scene with Ringo. And then I looked at all the newspaper cuttings and I spoke to some of the girls from the concert sequence and I looked at the plot of the dates because, of course, the shoot is very well documented. You know, we know exactly where they were filming on what day, and it's general election year in the UK, so there's going to be a big change. 18 year olds are able to vote for the first time because the voting age has been dropped from 21 to 18. So all these facts actually they all feed into and they all are relevant to the impact the film had when it came out. And of course you've also got them rehearsing amazingly other things and they're writing their songs while they're doing that residency in Paris. I mean, we all know that the Beatles lived sort of seven years in one year. But this year, I think arguably late 63 to 64 is the absolute epicenter of the speed at which they're doing things. Traveling the world and going on American television and recording arguably one of their greatest albums, In A Hard Day's Night, half of whose songs, a whole side of that album isn't even on the soundtrack. And they were only commissioned to write the songs because ultimately we talked about how the film is a great film. It wasn't supposed to be. It didn't matter to the producers. They just wanted a quick film to cash in on this band and lots of songs and they sold a million copies of that album on pre order. So the film was in profit before it opened. That was the only goal. The fact that it also turned out to be a really good film was kind of incidental. They're lucky they. But that's because the Beatles said no to lots of bad offers first. They said no to at least five offers. They knew Richard Lester's work and I'm sure we could talk about this. I know you've talked about it before on the podcast. They knew British comedy, they knew British film culture and they, they worked with people that they already admired and that was very unusual for pop stars usually just did what they were told, you know, by their bullying management. That was not the relationship that Brian Epstein had with the Beatles as we know. It was a very different, very much more open and positive relationship, which is
- [19:37]
Robert Rodriguez
no accident facilitated the creation of this. And you're actually leading into some of the questions I've got. So to start at one point, Western culture. We've been Beatle crazy for 60 plus years. I know, but is Beatles the reason we're still discussing this film? In other words, Beatles aside, what is the cinematic merit to still be giving this film this much attention?
- [19:59]
Samira Ahmed
That's a really good question. I think you can't take the Beatles out of the success of this film because the film is built around them. They're playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves, so they are personae but it's all down to the fact that they can deliver that jargon. They are with each other, the way that they look at each other. There's something authentic about that. And I was, you know, I make a big comparison in the book to the John Boorman debut feature film, Catch Us if youf Can. Now that was written as a very interesting film, there's lots of great ideas in it, but it's got a terribly uncharismatic band at the heart, near the Dave Clark 5. Now if Elvis had been in that film and Elvis contacted John Boorman, as I write in my book, to make a film with him as a result of seeing that film, that's a film which it's not the central band in it that matters, it's the film and the filmmaker. That's John Boorman's vision. With the Hard Days Night, I don't think you can separate them off. I think Richard Lester, Alan Owen, the cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, who'd worked on Dr. Strangelove, the editor, John Jimson, who had worked on Zulu and went on to edit Star Wars. It's an amazing combination of talent and you can't take the Beatles out of that.
- [21:04]
Robert Rodriguez
And to follow on to a point you were making earlier, I was going to ask you, did any of these films makers set out to create a classic or do films of this caliber sometimes get made in spite of the original creator's intent?
- [21:16]
Samira Ahmed
You know, I think because a hard disknight was so unexpectedly good, lots of people thought they could make one like it because it had been made so quickly. I mean, one of the amazing things is it's shot over, it's shot in a few weeks, it's edited in a few weeks. You know, they started shooting at some point in early March and it's in cinemas on July 6th. You know, that's just insane. And so I think people didn't realize just how much talent had gone into making it. And so you get a lot of cheap cash ins which aren't, I suppose, trying to be classics, you know, years later, something like Spice World, I think they thought it would be regarded as a great film. And it's very self consciously playing on ideas. In A Hard Day's Night, you know, they're touring and there's lots of surreal jokes and there's even got a Victor Spinetti like character who's a dance teacher played by Michael Barrymore. But it just wasn't that great. I mean, there was care and there was talent. And one of the biggest things, and one of my favorite Chapters in the book is about television. And Richard Lester had spent 10 years. He was only 32 when he started making art design. He'd already spent 10 years as a TV director, some of it in the States, where he made up to 200, 300 shows, live shows, in a single year. And so he had this amazing amount of experience, and he called it like hitting backhands against a wall as preparation for a tournament. And so when you made a film, or when you made all the commercials he made, she did for British television, you know, you had a much better budget to experiment with different techniques and editing and so on. And so he put all that skill, basically. I think he'd been waiting for a project like this to unleash himself on. And of course, the year after he makes this, he wins the Palme d' or at Cannes for the Knack and How to Get It. Ironically, a film which is dated very badly for its rape jokes, but actually, stylistically, you can see it comes from the same man who made A Hard Day's Night.
- [23:03]
Robert Rodriguez
And for anybody who has seen it's Trad dad, which proceeded A Hard Day's Night, you definitely could see elements. I watched it just out of curiosity one time on Turner, and it's like, oh, there are some hard days night isms in it.
- [23:16]
Samira Ahmed
Just, if you're looking, that's it at the end.
- [23:19]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. Huh.
- [23:19]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah. Well, they just. I mean, the film is quite formulaic, you know, it's two young people trying to stop curmudgeons at the local authority turning off the music in their local coffee bar. It's a very British plot. The coffee bar cult was this big thing. It's where the jukeboxes were and where bands used to play, and lots of artists were discovered there. But it culminates in getting all these acts to perform at a street concert. And it's shot in the same technique he used for A Hard Day's Night, which was multi cameras, which is how you shot live television. You had loads of cameras. You let everyone shoot and shoot and shoot. And then you compose a film and you edit from the best shots. And, of course, you have shots of people looking at each other. And the dance sequence of It's Trad dad is so exhilarating to watch. And so that's one of the big techniques that Richard Lester used so effectively, which I think changed the way that people shot pop acts ever after. Rather than shooting them on one camera from repeatedly in different angles, you just captured the energy and the frenzy by shooting all in one Go. You know? Yeah.
- [24:13]
Robert Rodriguez
And it gives it this unbelievable energy. Now, that's in the service of a pretty hackneyed plot. Here you've got something where you're purposely evidently setting out to break all the rules. And anytime you see one of these tropes come up like, you know, john, let's do the show here on the TV set for I'm Happy to Dance with youh. It comes off like a deliberate. Like they're self aware enough to know of everything that came before them. And we're gonna play with this. It's like a wink to the audience.
- [24:40]
Samira Ahmed
Exactly, exactly. And also all those moments when they're rehearsing. You know, Rich Dilless absolutely revels in the joy of the TV craft. You know, you see them through the viewfinder, the camera pulls out at the end of. And I love her to reveal the whole artifice of the lights and the multiple cameras and the monitors and the wires and the cables and the director in the booth watching them on different screens. And so there's something very Sir John Burger wrote that book about the medium is the message. The medium is massage. I can't remember what the book was called, but that whole idea of understanding how they're transmitted to the world is part of understanding them. And they're just so beautiful. I mean, I think the camera is constantly just reminding you why we're looking at them. There's mops of hair. I mean, I did speak to Olivia Harrison, who was A teenage girl, 64, when she saw the film, not knowing she was one day gonna marry George. And she said she'd never seen men's hair like it. It wasn't how men were at school. Boys at school had the kind of jock cut. Sorry, you're an American, not me. But you know, even I know from watching of high school movies, the jock and the kind of the preppy look and the idea of this relatively long, feminized hair freaked people out. And it was thrilling for girls and obviously thrilling for a lot of young boys who then tried to emulate it. But all that I think you see in the screen and I make the comparison to. We have this show here called ABBA Voyage, which is like an immersive show with ABBA avatars. And you go to a big arena and it's like being at a concert and they've got lights and projection. A Hard Day's Night in its day was kind of that experience for an audience who might never have a chance to get into a concert. And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to hear them sing. And here you got the experience of being at a concert. You got to see them up close and big. Their faces are dripping with sweat. Through that concert sequence. It makes you feel like I've had a concert experience. And apparently at screenings, you know, girls would go up and touch the screen. And obviously in Britain, I don't know if you could do it in the States. You could buy one ticket, get into the cinema and you'd stay all day, you know, watch it multiple times.
- [26:35]
Robert Rodriguez
You're touching on the hair in Olivia's impression. And it's something that I remember picking up on the timing of this as something where in film you had something out of Britain. Village of the Damned, Children of the Damned, those haircuts. And also 1960, you've got George Pell, the Time Machine and the Human Race.
- [26:56]
Paul McCartney
Many, many.
- [26:58]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:58]
Robert Rodriguez
The Elon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This sort of unisex hair. And how that would have been received circa 63, 64. Here it is in real life on these guys who are so different, there's no precedent for. And boy, are the girls reacting to it. So, again, sort of seeing things in the context. It's like sometimes the best way of understanding something historical is just look at a chronology and see when things happen in what order. And that's what you do throughout the book. It's just a circular way of saying. You've pointed out Dick Lester's apprenticeship in television and how much a love of being on the set informs what draws us into this film and makes it feel like an intimate experience. It's like seeing a Beatles concert, like you say, but being able to hear their music and see their faces close up, like getting the best out of what would never happen in an actual concert situation. But this film coming along at the time it did. And one of the things that I've heard you describe elsewhere, this is peak Beatles before they become cynical and tired of the whole thing. They're at the top of the wave at this point. They've just done the Sullivan shows. They've just conquered the new world, as it were. Timing. How much do you think timing has to do with why this film is so timeless?
- [28:14]
Samira Ahmed
I think it does partly because it captures them. As you were just saying, they're most joyful. You know, they are really having fun. They are enjoying each other's company. By 1965, a year later, when help is made, they are stoned and they are, you know. And even though I didn't know it at the time, I Love that film. I do love that film still, you know, it does affect, I think, the fact that you don't see them with any fans. It's much more of a fantasy adventure. They're on their own, they have to be kept away from people. And I think there is just a serendipitous sense of it's timeless. Partly because this is black and white and because it doesn't try to be more than it is, which is a documentary style, fictionalized. I've called it a fantasy documentary. It's a phrase I've come up with since I wrote the books. I'm now using it in interviews. But it looks like a documentary in many ways. There's documentary aspects to it. When the sound is allowed to run and you just hear the screaming as the girls swarm around the car like a swarm of bees. I make the comparison to a nature documentary. When you just watch the Beatles like they're in a jar and they've been emptied out and they walk into a theater and they're all long legged insects wandering all over the place and you just have a camera wanting to follow them. But I think the timelessness is partly because it just captures all that. But if you think about what they did after the film came out, they go on this world tour and they go to Australia and Denmark and stuff. And I think Ringo has his tonsils out, so he's replaced by Jimmy Nichols for a couple of weeks. And the toll suddenly starts to show on them. I think by the end of this year. And the COVID of Beatles for Sale, where they famously look exhausted, you know, you realize actually it's a very small window in which the film manages to capture them at their absolute joyful peak. It's not that they're not. They're peaking musically. Obviously they're going to do all this amazing stuff. But I think the happiness, the perfection of being was enough just to be the Beatles and be adored is what gets lost after this. And the fans, although the fan screaming is quite wild. And the cinematographer famously refused to work on the follow up film because he was so horrified at the effect he felt the cameras were having on these girls. There is still a sense that they don't mind the fans. The fans are part of their fame, you know, they are part of their journey. Whereas I think by the end of the year I think they were getting much closer than they realized to say, we can't keep doing this, no one can hear us. And it became much more aggressive. And then of course, by 1966, you have the whole controversy in America with those comments that John made, taken out of context, that caused record burnings. And suddenly it starts to look a lot darker for them.
- [30:34]
Paul McCartney
And now it's all this.
- [30:35]
Samira Ahmed
This story never fails to astound us, does it? I mean, that's the other weird thing is the film is like a documentary, but their story is like folklore, it's like mythology. And I was saying to someone the other day, you know, we know the Rolling Stones wrote some amazing music, but it's just the Rolling Stones don't inspire the same kind of folkloric fascination about their origin story and how they changed and they encounter the Walton fate and, you know, all that.
- [31:04]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, all the natural, genuine mythology to this story arc of the Beatles. It just resonates because we've grown up on stories that follow very similar arcs. And here it is in real life and everything they ever delivered to us was of the highest quality. It's not something like, well, we tune out this crap, you know, this is
- [31:26]
Samira Ahmed
where Magical Mystery Tour. I do look at their later films. It looks better the older I get, let's put it that way. But as a child, I remember being really disappointed by the scene with the stripper. I thought, no, this is not what I want to see the Beatles leering at. But I would say as well, going back to your point about the timelessness, the thing is, you didn't need to know who the Beatles were if you just went into the cinema. If you were just some person who'd never heard of the Beatles, remarkably enough, in 1964 and went into the cinema to see this film, assuming that it wasn't full of screaming girls and you could actually hear the film, you would just be drawn into the story. And of course, you know, although the word Beatles appears on the drum kit and it lights up at the end of the constant scene, no one ever talks about the Beatles. They're never named. So you're just captivated by the characters and the story and all the contemporary newspaper reviews. All these middle aged, middle class, you know, Southern journalists from the south of England, you know, discussing these northern boys when they're telling there's a big country divide about the north, which is considered lower class and ignorant. They fall in love with the Beatles through this film and they say, I can tell them all apart and they've all got different characters, you know, and they're genuinely surprised. But that's one of the reasons the film is timeless, because you didn't need to know who they were. You didn't need to know about their music. The film engaged you on its own terms because they, as personalities and performers were enthralling and charismatic.
- [32:49]
Robert Rodriguez
Hence why it couldn't work with the day of Clark 5 and having a wild Weekend to build that kind of film around guys without charisma. I would suppose that you saw some of the other films at some point that were made in the wake of Hard Days Night similarly trying to sort of like, oh, if the Beatles can do it, I guess that's what we need to do too. Jerry and the Pacemaker's Fairy Cross the Mersey.
- [33:11]
Samira Ahmed
Terrible film. Do not inflict it on yourself without being prepared. It's got. It's just so awful. Have you watched it, Robert?
- [33:17]
Robert Rodriguez
I watched it once out of curiosity because I like the song and it's like, that's an hour and a half I'm never getting back.
- [33:23]
Samira Ahmed
And I also. I need to be done Gloria Estefan. And of course you told me that, you know, Ferry across the Mersey is a bolero and she heard it on the radio one day and she just thought, that's my music. That's a Bellairo. I can sing, you know, and it. So I love that Jerry and the Pacemaker's connected Gloria Estefan to her musical future.
- [33:41]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah.
- [33:41]
Samira Ahmed
But apart from that, there is no reason to see. I mean, it's got some locations. The Cavern Club is captured. Of course, it was demolished a few years later. Same cinematographer, Ironically, it just shows you it wasn't enough to have a great cinematographer. It wasn't enough to have Brian Epstein backing it because all his acts are in it. I've even had Margaret Nolan, who plays the casino girl in A Hard Day's Night. But it's just. It's like. It just shows you how within a few months everything can be reversed to be awful.
- [34:08]
Robert Rodriguez
Did you see Seaside Swingers?
- [34:10]
Samira Ahmed
Oh, God, no. I realized how many films there are out there. I haven't. Is it that Freddy and the Dreamers one? Which one? Is that one?
- [34:16]
Robert Rodriguez
Correct? Yeah. 1964, written and directed by James Hill. And that was. I was a little bit curious about that one just because it seemed like it's not a star vehicle for Freddy and the Dreamers as such, they play cooks at resort and perform a few musical numbers. I was thinking maybe that might be worth checking out, just out of pure curiosity. But what I found most interesting to your point about Rolling Stones having made great music is nobody shoved them into a film studio to craft some contrived scripted film in the mid-60s.
- [34:48]
Samira Ahmed
But if you've read my book, Robert. You might remember that there was what was supposed to be the third Beatles feature, which was the Joe Orton scripted up against it was far too outrageous for them. Richard Lester was going to make with Ian McKellen and Mick Jagger. Right.
- [35:04]
Robert Rodriguez
And there's a quote from Paul where when he first read the script, he's like, this film's too gay or something. He said, this is not us. Maybe the Stones could do a good job with or something like that. Or Mick, I can't remember. But it seemed to align much more with.
- [35:20]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, even for the time. I know Camino, Joe Wharton, if you. I mean, I love Joe Wharton's work, but it's really deliberately provocative and often very much plays with. With homosexuality at a time when it was a criminal offense in this country until 1967. It was criminal for. To be gay if you were under 21. It's just shocking. Yeah, he. I think it also. The original script had something like they're all four of them in bed together with one woman or something. So it was like. Yeah, I think it was also quite misogynistic. I think Joe Orton, you know, could write some pretty dodgy things. He was having fun with it.
- [35:54]
Robert Rodriguez
But anyway, they were having meetings. It nearly happened. And what's interesting is just that if they were ever gonna do something so incredibly outre, that might have been the period when they were really shattering the entire paradigm to that point of being Beatles and what it meant. Which means going into the studio, the photo studio, Robert Whitaker, to take what becomes known as the Butcher cover butcher sessions, and giving the kind of interviews they did with Maureen Cleave, which are so incredibly frank at the beginning of 66, just on the eve of going to make Revolver. So it's like they're shattering everything to that point. And if they were gonna make another film, it certainly wouldn't have been Son of Help.
- [36:34]
Samira Ahmed
No. Although I do think Yellow Submarine. I know it doesn't have their voices in it, but it's such a good film and I think it is a really. It's like the film. It is the third film. It is the right Son of Hell, but in a really good way captured their personalities. It plays with all the ideas in popular culture going back to the 30s, which they've played within their own music. Paul and John often played with old musical numbers and styles and imagery, and that's all in that film. So I think it really holds up Yellow Submarine as a Beatles film. That sort of wasn't quite the real life one that they might have made if it had the technology.
- [37:09]
Robert Rodriguez
I'm glad to hear you say that, because that's one that, for me as a fan, I watched it as a kid. I know it's a gateway drug for a lot of kids, like, you know, Sean and Danny Harrison. I guess that's how they figured out their dads were Beatles, was from childhood viewings of that film. But I know that there's people that push back and it's like, oh, it's dated. It's just a 60s time capsule with this Peter Max look and just all hippie dippy. It's like, no, see it as an adult. It's a wonderfully deep movie. I was having this conversation with somebody the other day about the song Yellow Submarine, even pre the film, how it got picked up on by people protesting out in Berkeley and things like that, because it is describing this utopian ideal of a place, this egalitarian place where everybody gets along and there's music, you know, sort of the Willoughby of Twilight Zone, as it were.
- [38:01]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, well, I love the fact that it's a genuine fantasy adventure. And, you know, the writings of Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland is a theme that crops up a lot in John Lennon's writings in particular. But also I think the way that he and Paul wrote and thought, that kind of sense of playing with nonsense words and imagery. Nowhere man is a song that could have come out of Lewis Carroll, I think, in some ways, certainly the imagery of the character of the Nowhere man in Yellow Submarine. So I think that's all part of it. And also I love this sort of the science fiction elements. And there's one in Hard Day's Night and one in Yellow Submarine. And Yellow Submarine is when they're in the Sea of Time and they see another yellow submarine going the opposite direction, and they realize it's themselves going backwards in time. There's something really poignant about, you know, how fast they're moving and actually how far back in time it would seem if you looked at yourself two years ago. And of course, in A Hard Day's Night, Ringo's encounter with the little truant boy, David Janssen's character. It's like an episode of Doctor who, he's encountered his childhood self, because in real life, Ringo used to play truant on the shores of the River Mersey at the Cast Iron Shaw. It's referred to in the lyrics of the song Glass Onion. And so here he is actually meeting essentially his childhood self. And of course, his childhood self. The boy has a gang of four and each of them, if you remember, he describes his mates and fans of. As I put in my book, you know, they've ascribed. But who is Ginger and who is which character? You can match them to Beatles. So there's like this miniature version back in time of the Beatles that encounters. So I love all those poetic elements. That's why the Hard Day Tonight is also good, because it does have elements that. Of this wistful fantasy. It has elements of the British social realism films like A Taste of Honey. When he encounters this young boy who might be running away from a. Is he running away from something troubling him at home? You never know. You know, it's comedy, but it's also. There's moments of real melancholy. I love those changes of mood.
- [39:53]
Robert Rodriguez
It's a tremendously standout scene and it's put together so perfectly, starting with the. This boy. Instrumental, wistful sort of melody informing the whole thing.
- [40:04]
Samira Ahmed
Oscar nominated. Of course, ironically, it was George Martin's arrangement rather than the Beatles songs that were nominated for an Oscar, as was the screenplay. Neither of the rhythm won, but that was something. But you knew David Jansen, the boy in that film, had never seen it in the cinema until he came to my book launch. We had a screening at the British Film Institute, our equivalent of the American cinema tech, I guess it is.
- [40:25]
Robert Rodriguez
Did he purposely avoid it?
- [40:27]
Samira Ahmed
No, he was never invited to the premiere. Can you believe that? I mean, he was 10 or 11 years old. He just said. He said he'd seen it on television over the years, but he'd never seen it in the cinema. And so he sat in the cinema in a packed cinema with a third of the audience had been there in 64 and seen it. A third of the audience had never seen it before. Young people under 30 just curious to see the film on the big screen as it's meant to be seen. And of course, It's a beautiful 4K restoration. I really recommend seeing it in the cinema, if you can. And a third of them are people like me who'd grown up watching it on television or video or dvd. And I had seen it in the cinema. Ironically, I saw it in the cinema in the US When I lived in Los Angeles, there was a screening at a revival house on Wilshire Boulevard. And I love, I think, particularly in America and particularly in Germany, there has always been a love of A Hard Day's Night. And it's always cropped up regularly in revival houses and I think that's great. And of course, there's my whole story about the German version of A Hard Day's Night, which is dubbed in a completely wild and Germanic way, which is kind of a great story in its own right, you know.
- [41:29]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, I was totally unaware of that, but that was funny. You're describing the German cut of the bathroom scene where John's in the tub.
- [41:37]
Samira Ahmed
Well, the whole film is dubbed in its own way, so the film isn't cut differently. It's just that to make the film culturally coherent, a lot of those jokes and references just didn't really make sense to post war Germans. And I think in the bathroom, where John is doing his cod U boat German wartime voice, which, let's face it, all schoolboys did in the 60s and 70s, it's not like they take all the references to World War II out, but they take out nearly all of them and they turn it into a conversation, like pretending you'd have a phone call. But a lot of the film, when they're talking about Shazam or reciting bits of Hamlet or they're talking about things, they just replaced it with references to Ingmar Bergman and Gunther Grass and German poetry. I've watched sections of it. I haven't watched the whole film in German. I wasn't that diligent. But it's culturally coherent. And of course, it invented a whole new form of dubbing, where in Germany they dub everything, they don't use subtitles. And it's called Bledelsinkre, which is comedy synchronisation, where the actors wrote their own dialogue and they made it sort of like work on German terms. And I actually had evil correspondence with the daughter of the guy who played John Lennon, who was one of Germany's most famous dubbing actors. And he had pioneered writing the script this way. And they did it for other films that came from abroad. They made them German.
- [42:47]
Robert Rodriguez
That's an amazing thing. It's not simply translating it, it's rewriting it to fit the culture that it's going to be shown in and to make it work, that's a high skill set to have.
- [43:00]
Samira Ahmed
Well, it's. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because of course, in itself, speaking Scouse, you know, Liverpudlian English was quite a controversial choice at the time. I mean, the first American viewers of it in the studio who saw, I think they screened it at Billy Wilder's house, said, well, great, but you're gonna have to dub their voices. And, you know, they went, no. And they had planned for this, but, you know, you can imagine a scenario in which another band would have been forced to be dubbed and you wouldn't even hear them properly. That was very common. I mean people like Ursula Andress was dubbed in. Dr. No. You know, all these actresses and actors that you think have these great voices and they don't. They were dubbed because their English speaking voices were deemed not good enough and the Beatles were able to be themselves. And that's. I mean, I didn't understand every word of that dialogue and I speak English, but it didn't matter because you get carried along, don't you, just by the charm of it. You know, it's sort of like I describe it as having an incantatory effect sometimes. I didn't know what the word comed meant. I'd never heard that before. It means, you know, come on, they use it all the time. But you sort of start to get into the vibe, don't you? Even you don't pick up every word. You're sort of in their world with them. And again, that's part of the authenticity of this film. When most other people, they spoke in Mid Atlantic or they'd be dubbed, right?
- [44:11]
Robert Rodriguez
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- [45:22]
Samira Ahmed
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- [45:52]
Robert Rodriguez
And I do remember my first impression. This was after getting into the Beatles through the Red and the Blue albums and trying to catch up on their individual albums. I'd seen the Beetle cartoon in America, which is a whole other animal.
- [46:05]
Samira Ahmed
Can I just say, I deliberately didn't. I want to ask you about this, Robert, because it's never been shown in Britain, to my understanding. I've seen clips of it, brief extracts on YouTube. It looks so terrible and cheap and I thought I'm not going to touch it because it just feels like it's not connected to the Beatles in any meaningful way. They didn't have anything really to do with it, it was just licensed. What was it like? Was it off?
- [46:25]
Robert Rodriguez
It's definitely on the lower echelon of cartooning. It's assembly line stuff using some of the same cartoon voice actors used in other things that would've been familiar to Americans. I guess the way to look at it is, and George Harrison had the quote, it's so bad, it's good. So that's one way to look at it, is it was a gateway drug for a lot of kids who were too young to really get into it and it sold you on the Beatles. This is the thing that I always found an interesting point that between A Hard Day's Night and then you've got a year later Beatle cartoon coming along, September of 65, is that both properties enforce the same Beatle stereotypes of them individually. And it's like the cartoon amplifies the archetypes that were established in Hard Day's Night. John, the leader that gets deferred to Paul, the cute one. George, the laconic one. Ringo, the little man child that has to be mothered that you feel sympathetic toward, but he's clearly not operating on the same level. And so I just found it kind of interesting because through the years there's plenty of people that will assert Ringo was a terrible drummer, he's the luckiest guy on earth, et cetera, et cetera.
- [47:40]
Paul McCartney
Don't feel bad, George. Remember April Showers, Bring me flowers.
- [47:47]
Robert Rodriguez
See, there's a Black Eyed Susan already and that's nonsense. And most of the people that say that are non musicians, number one. But I always wondered, was this diminishing of Ringo something that got sort of force fed into them because of the type of roles he played in the Beatles films and the Beatles cartoon? Yes, it's a cartoon, but it makes it really easy to believe. Well, Ringo, what good Is he? He's just your pet.
- [48:13]
Samira Ahmed
I never saw it that way. I mean, the line about O Ring is not even the best drummer in the Beatles was actually a line from a comedy radio show. It's been pinned down. It never was said by anyone who knew them. It was a joke from a comedy show made decades after they split up. So I know from listening to the Stowe tape made in April 1963 that the boys in that school were screaming Ringo more than any other name. You know, he was adored. And the energy of him as the drummer and having, you know, focus on him, he wasn't just in the background. They were all equal in that sense. So I never had that feeling. I know that there's a thing in A Hard Day's Night about, you know, the grandfather goes about your nose, people have funny thing about your nose. And then I guess in the cartoon it's exaggerated And I know in Help there's a scene where he's grabbed by his nose and pulled off when they're trying to kidnap him for his ring. But I mean, that seemed pretty minor. And the thing was, he was such a great comedy actor. I mean, everyone singled out his acting as the best of them all. So I don't think. I think it's a complete later invention that there was ever this sense that Ringo wasn't integral and valued. I just think at the time the Beatles existed, I just don't think that was true.
- [49:20]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, I don't know about the 60s being a first gen fan, how it would have been received, but very much in the decades after, especially in the advent of John Bonham, now that's a drummer, Neil Peart, that's what a drummer sounds like. And Ringo is simple in comparison. But if you are a musician, you get it. What he did was groundbreaking. It was essential to their music. He played to the song, which was innovative at the time. And legions of drummers ever after, especially session drummers, played this like Ringo, that was this magic that the Beatles figured out with him. And he had the versatility that a Pete Best, say, didn't have. Unfortunately for Pete and the charisma and Persona besides, he's the one that gets along with everybody. He's the one that everybody is protective toward. But yeah, so I don't get the diminishing of Ringo. I think it's stupid. But my point being the cartoons do them no favors.
- [50:18]
Samira Ahmed
No, they don't. I mean, I will say, and I was very careful not to go too much into the musicology in my book because I just thought that's the stuff that people poured over the. I will tell you what the chord is in the opening of that song. You know, the title track, it's named and sourced. Everything's got a citation. Cause this book is academically rigorous. Everything is sourced. But I would single out the playing on something like Ticket to Ride and also youo Won't See Me, which is my favorite Beatles track. And I did a podcast called My Favorite Beatles Song where the presenter took everything away and just. We just had listened to the drumming for the Isolation. The isolation. Oh my God, it's so innovative. And that whole thing about him being a left handed drummer on a right handed kit. I mean, I just think all these things explain why he's so special. And the other thing which is relevant to the film is I look at it as a sitcom. Sitcoms are very big. Much part of the formula of the film in a way. And Ringo was essential to the formula of the Beatles. They weren't Ringo, they weren't the Beatles till they had Ringo, who was their clown. If John is the patriarch, Paul is the matriarch, George is the craftsman, Ringo is the clown. Joel Morris wrote a great book called Be Funny or Die and he gave me that thesis. And it really holds up. Once you realize the Beatles are a comedy, sitcom, family, all makes sense musically as well as personality wise.
- [51:33]
Robert Rodriguez
And we know that Alan Oller.
- [51:35]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah.
- [51:36]
Robert Rodriguez
Spent time with him on tour in Ireland and got to pick up on the Personas before he wrote the script. So do you think that that trope there, the sitcom dynamic of a comedic family, do you think all these things were conscious choices they made when writing the script, when shooting this, the way they depicted it or did it work out that way because that's the way the Beatles natural Personas happen to be?
- [51:58]
Samira Ahmed
Well, I think Richard Lester's work in comedy, which was a huge part of his TV work in this country, notably with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers on two shows, a show called Fred and Son of Fred, which are being re released in the UK on DVD this September and are really worth digging out. I've watched some of them online on the BFI Cinematheque, but they broke the fourth wall. You know, they played with the idea of being in a studio and suddenly not in a studio. And all those surreal touches in the film come out of that which the Beatles had watched. They loved his work. So I think it's not so much that, you know, it's just their personalities. It's that they and the director are in sync in terms of how they think about what makes them laugh. You know, they made each other laugh, Robert. And now you can tell they genuinely enjoy each other's company. That's not fake. It's not them pretending to joke with each other. And one of the nice things I learned about Ringo was he said that because they were so used to ad libbing, the way that they're so quick witted and sharp with each other in conversation. If you watch all those news conferences like that very famous one at, was it JFK by then, where they did the Pan Am suite when they arrived in America the first time, and American press didn't know what to make of them. That quick wit meant that they were always used to ad libbing and going off. And so even though they had script that they could learn in little burst and the film is shot more or less in chronological order, they would sometimes continue ad libbing when they were rehearsing or shooting. And Wilfred Bramble, who played the grandfather, was a professional actor and he would recite his lines and when his lines finished, he would stop and he would cut dead a scene that might have actually developed. And Ringo expressed a bit of frustration that, you know, he didn't know how to ad lib along with her, whereas Victor Spinetti, who played the director, did. And so that was quite revealing too, you know, the Beatles way of working was quite special. And actually you needed an actor who had that same confidence and ad libbing ability to make the most of them and get the most out of their role in the film with them.
- [53:47]
Robert Rodriguez
And this is the Beatles acting for the first time on film, yet they intuit that. And it just speaks to, like you said, this aspect of their Personas, that they were all natural comedians, which they say is a Liverpool attribute.
- [53:59]
Samira Ahmed
I mean, I know George Harrison famously in the Anthology thing talks about how everyone was so quick witted and you know, people would undermine you very quickly if you got above yourself. So you always responding quite well to that. But even just the way they walk and through the train carriage near the start of A Hard Day's Night, and I write about it, you know, you look at the way they walk, they all walk differently. And Ringo in particular walks like Groucho Marx. He's almost doing the cigar move and you know, the sudden double take. I think the physicality of them is part of what the film captures. You know, it's not just them delivering lines in a witty way, they move in an amazing way. And it's something about the hair. I've got to come back to the hair. If you look at the hair, one of the joys of the film is the hair is really different. You can tell it's different shades, it's different colours. Paul's is a little bit curlier at times. I was allowed to put 60 photographs in the book and I made sure there are some great photographs of the hair. And there's one where they're lying down Busby Berkeley style during the Can't Buy Me Love sort of breakout sequence. And you can see just the contrast and what beautiful it looks. Suddenly they're all very distinctive physically as well as personality wise. And that was part of what the film gave the world. It's like they're not just those four boys making a lot of noise out of your child's record player that they're screaming about. Come and meet them, they're really interesting, you'll like them and you want to run your hands through their hair.
- [55:13]
Robert Rodriguez
One of the things I do remember, and this was probably 74, 75, the first time I saw Hard Days Night on TV. And again, my fandom to that point just exists of hearing the records in whatever books I think you might have been of age to have experienced more or less in real time. The Beatles Illustrated Record Book.
- [55:33]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, I have it. In fact, my brother bought it. The Roy Carr Book.
- [55:37]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Tony.
- [55:38]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, my brother bought that and I used to. I used to read it like the Bible page, you know, page after page in order, starting at Genesis in the beginning of the Beatles and right there to the end. And he. He said mean things about them too. I was quite shocked, you know, he.
- [55:51]
Robert Rodriguez
God, yeah.
- [55:52]
Samira Ahmed
People were so scathing about the Beatles. Oh, this is quite a mediocre record, they would say. I didn't say I believed it, but I was shocked at how people wrote about them so sniffly. But just that sense of. With every page turned on those photographs, you had this sense, as I say, of moving through time at some kind of supersonic speed. I couldn't believe how fast they change from the leathered, greasy Teddy boys to something much more mod and then they change again to something much more psychedelic and then they're hairy hippies. That all happens within about eight years. Yeah, six years. By the time you get to 68, they're pretty hairy.
- [56:28]
Robert Rodriguez
Just going through the book for the visuals, it sorts it all out and makes a meaningful chronology of them. And like you say, when you read some of the texts, especially the solo year stuff, where they're so unbelievably catty and scathing about some of their stuff toward George and Paul especially, and Rhaego,
- [56:44]
Samira Ahmed
I suppose I've got to say, I remember one line to where you said, it is not for the author to express an opinion about George Harrison's spiritual beliefs. I mean, that's how that review starts, you know, that's the tone of it.
- [56:56]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah. Except for conversation. But in any event, seeing the Beatles very early on, we were still sort of sorting out, trying to figure out and get a handle on them as people. And you're a young kid watching A Hard Day's Night, it's full of music and it's them being called John, Paul, George and Ringo. So it's a version of themselves at least. But I remember that first moment after the encounter with the businessman in the train car. Hey, mister, can we have our ball? Back on the bicycle outside the carriage. And you're like, what kind of movie is this? The real stuff.
- [57:29]
Samira Ahmed
So happy to hear you say that's exactly what he was hoping for. So that's the moment you realize this is not conventional film and that you're going to be surprised and get a jump. But I love the fact that that moment in the train carriage when that man is telling them to turn the music down and shutting the window, that had really happened to them. So there were elements from their real life that Alan spoke to them about and then put them into the script and gave them a resolution that they never had in real life. In real life, I don't think they came up with a clever put down. They certainly didn't magically appear outside the window of the train carriage. But so again, I didn't realize, I didn't expect to find, how many elements in the film did have some kind of connection to their real life. And then of course, the fact that. That John Lennon's real dad suddenly turned up during the middle of filming and demanded to be let in. John did not want to speak to him. You couldn't make it up, could you?
- [58:15]
Robert Rodriguez
No, it's amazing. And the true life stuff that does appear in the film has such resonance. The line from the grandfather. So far, I'd been in a car, in a room and a train and a room and a room and a room, which was something that was actually.
- [58:27]
Samira Ahmed
That was the inspiration because that's what Alan Oan had seen when they were in Dublin, they were just under siege. And the only time they were ever free, and if you think about it in the film, the only time they're truly free is when they're playing music for each other. They're all looking at each other. They're all free in that moment.
- [58:42]
Robert Rodriguez
You've got a great chapter in the book about the women of A Hard Day's Night. And one of the things I love that you put in the book is like, you'd love to see a female Hard Day's Night of the actual Patty and Cynthia and Jane and Mo. What they had to deal with in the Beatles orbit. The sort of madcap plotting to get from one place to another and live on the fringes, not be seen, but still be with their men. How that would be a great film someday. But say more about your examination of the women throughout the film.
- [59:14]
Samira Ahmed
Well, so much of the way that the Beatles are now seen is there's the early screaming years and of course, so many male critics. They kind of always want to not talk about those years. I think it's very interesting with David Bowie and Duran Duran. It's like when the girls are screaming. It's like that's not as good of the music they make later on when they become more serious. But. But although I think that's wrong, I also thought there is much more to this film than the screaming girls, who are. They're sort of the constant. It's like, if you see it as a war film, the screaming girls are this sort of enemy fire. Although they're not enemies, but, you know, they have to constantly be on the road from them. But when they're moving through the world of the train or into the TV studios, they're constantly encountering professional working women. You know, the secretaries, the director's assistant, the makeup artist, and the mysterious theatrical figure played by Anna Quayle. You know, you are, you are. I know you are. And I just thought there's so much that's revealed by the presence of these women in this film. Partly because I've worked with makeup artists, I've worked in television my whole career. And I've met makeup artists who started their career in the mid-60s when they were teenagers. And we were discussing earlier how TV was kind of at its peak. It was this huge industry. It was massive audiences and makeup artists and young directors like Verity Lambert, who went on to be the first director of. Of Dr. Who, they were all sort of breaking out and making an impact and having a say. And so by analyzing what they're doing in the film, you're both recognizing how society is changing. Women are having more career opportunities, some of which is reflected in the Beatles more mature songwriting. You know, you Won't see me. The song Norwegian would I once had a girl? Or should I say she once had me day trip or so on. But it's also. They're not quite got the status that they should have. So I make the comparison between the assistant to Victor Disponetti's director, who gives him a head massage after the hysteria of the concert. She's probably just paid to be his assistant, but I could see her as like Verity Lambert was in that role and then one day got to direct. The secretary in the advertising agency is probably paid as a secretary. But Simon, the executive was always referring to her judgment, trusts her and she says, no, I think you ought to see him. And I just thought it was worth analyzing how that was changing. And then this is little things like I've done neuro linguistic programming, nlp, which is this business technique that was invented in the 70s. But you see it in action in the film when she looks at George Harrison sitting there and she doesn't look away and he looks embarrassed and looks down. And if you hold someone's gaze, it's quite a powerful thing to do. And I was taught this as a technique on a course I was sent on when I worked at Channel four, which was how to negotiate better. You know, how to negotiate better pay and negotiate better work deals. And then suddenly I realized this is what she's doing in this film in 1964, before it's even been invented as a business training thing. She's holding his gaze and she' embarrassing him. And I thought all that was worth exploring and having some fun with. So that was one of the first chapters I wrote. And of course, all the women in the nightclub who are a big contrast to the teenage fans, they're more. They're sophisticated. I identified one of them is actually quite a famous British fashion designer called Adina Rone, who's the one talking to John. She's blonde, she's holding a glass of wine. Drinking in the 60s was not associated with going out the way it is now. It was quite a middle class, posh thing to do. So you're suddenly seeing young women going out and having their own career and their own entertainment and their boyfriends. I mean, the pill isn't quite universal, but that edge of sexual liberation is all captured in this film, I think.
- [62:37]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, that scene is interesting. I love how you contrast it with even the dolly birds, the paddy boy types in their school uniforms.
- [62:45]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, schoolgirls, yeah, that's a bit more problematic, as they say.
- [62:48]
Robert Rodriguez
Right. But that club sequence where you imagine them, the people that are around the Beatles in that orb at that moment, being kind of like the exies that they found in Hamburg, the Astrid and Jurgen and Klaus, the sophisticated people on their sort of artsy level that they can have a conversation with that aren't in awe of them, but respect them because they can relate. Is Charlotte Rampling in that scene?
- [63:10]
Samira Ahmed
I'm not aware of her being in that scene. There's lots of people who said to be in scenes, but I didn't see her. I think the thing is, although there is some of what you describe, you know, they're having intelligent conversations which of course we can't hear because the music's playing too loud. There's also a sense, I think, of Richard Lester of constantly earthing them in comedy so that their sexual charge is slightly muted. So there's the dancing where there's the tall, silly posh chap who's actually quite a famous TV sitcom script writer, Jeremy Lord. And you know, he's. Yes, that's right. And he's jumping up and down next to Ringo and, you know, it sort of. It becomes. It becomes comic rather than sexually charged. And I think, you know, it's. It's very clever, that film because you can watch it with your parents in the 60s. And I know so many people are coming up to you at book signings and at film screenings. Because I often try and do a film screening with the book signing, which is always such a lovely way for people to experience the film. And people said, my parents took me to see this film when I was, you know, 5 or 6 or 11, and it was fine because there wasn't a love interest, there wasn't a big romantic thing going on. And because there's so much comedy in the film, if you're not looking, it's easy to sort of ignore just how sexually attractive these men are. I think that's quite a cunning thing that the film does and it's a very rich laughter thing, you know, to make it silly. I mean, all those high speed Buster Keaton style slapstick chase, you know, that's comic and you don't associate that with being sex. I mean, you can't imagine the Rolling Stones would ever have agreed to be in a high speed slapstick chase, would you? But it works for the Beatles without mocking them or undermining them because they have so much charisma and sexual energy that they can take it being slightly. You're slightly distracted by the comedy. So it means people who. People who don't want to be disturbed by their sexual charge, can be distracted by the comedy. And those who know how sexually attractive they are can just enjoy it at the same time.
- [64:59]
Robert Rodriguez
She said, smiling, stopping well short of Satyricon on tour.
- [65:03]
Samira Ahmed
Oh, God, yes. Oh, good reference.
- [65:05]
Robert Rodriguez
That's funny. When are you talking about the silent film sort of stylistic stuff? And you point out in the book that the. There was. I think it was the field sequence, the Can't Buy Me Love sequence, where the batteries were running down and therefore was, like, under cranked, giving it to unexpected.
- [65:21]
Samira Ahmed
And that's why I think they then shot other stuff that way. Because if you think about the Can't Buy Me Love sequence, when they break out in the field, it's three distinct locations. The fire escape is the Hammersmith Odeon in London. The helicopter sequence was actually Gilbert Hader went up in a helicopter, which he'd done as an RAF cameraman during the war. And that's when he realizes, oh, God, the camera's undercranked because the battery's down. And so when they play the footage back, they realize it's gonna run at sort of a playful speed. And then some weeks later, they mock up the helipad at Thornbury Playing Fields in Isleworth in West London, near Heathrow Airport. And they film a whole other set of sequences there on ground level. And they intercut them all. So they played with the speed a bit, just to make it all match. But actually it jumps very pleasantly, doesn't it, between different speeds. And that's part of the charm of the film that it sort of, again, sort of jumps into being a silent film with music, obviously, but like a Laurel and Hardy or a Buster Keaton chase, you know?
- [66:17]
Robert Rodriguez
Right, right, right. Yeah. And weren't there contemporary reviews that compared Ringo's performance to Chaplin?
- [66:24]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, well, especially when he's walking along the riverside looking mournful, you know, he's sort of like the Little Tramp kind of Persona, isn't he? Yeah. Although Buster Keaton, as you point out the book. Sorry, but Buster Keaton was the real inspiration because Richard Lester, he names him Spike Milligan and John Lennon as three most influential people in his career. And of course, he worked with Buster Keaton on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum a couple of years later.
- [66:49]
Paul McCartney
Ringo was very good. He's a good lad. They're saying he's in. He was right. He's an old man.
- [66:56]
Samira Ahmed
Okay.
- [66:56]
Paul McCartney
Ring. Beginning to look like it.
- [66:58]
Samira Ahmed
And then 1922, cops. That's the film that the chase Sequence at the end with the policeman of A Hard Day's Night is directly inspired by. And we're thinking of doing a screening. One of the screenings we're doing in Bristol in the autumn. We're going to try and do a double bill with Cops and A Hard Day's Night.
- [67:13]
Robert Rodriguez
Oh, that'd be outstanding.
- [67:14]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah. So that's. You can make your own double bill. All the films, I mean if you read the book. I did try to make comparisons to all the films that you can see. You know, there's all these spin off films, there's dystopian science fiction like Peter Watkins's Privilege those films to come like Slade in Flame or Stardust or that'll Be the Day, which also has Ringo in it. And I cast Forward all the Way to Kneecap. But you could construct your own double bill, you know, with that. The heart is not in any of them. And just see where the echoes lie. Even Catch Us if youf can is Worth the watch. I saw it in the cinema and. And there's some really beautiful ideas in that film. It's just unfortunately it's a Dave Clark 5.
- [67:52]
Robert Rodriguez
Right. And not Elvis.
- [67:54]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, not Elvis or the Beatles.
- [67:55]
Paul McCartney
Uh huh.
- [67:56]
Robert Rodriguez
You know who wrote that'll Be the Day.
- [67:57]
Samira Ahmed
Right, Remind me.
- [67:58]
Robert Rodriguez
Ray Connolly.
- [67:59]
Samira Ahmed
God, of course. Who wrote a biography of John Lennon, didn't he?
- [68:03]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, uh huh. And knew the Beatles quite well.
- [68:05]
Samira Ahmed
Well, it was inspired by his story to some extent, wasn't it?
- [68:08]
Robert Rodriguez
Yes, in 1941, which is Harry Nilsson's story which parallels John's of being abandoned by the fathers at a young age.
- [68:16]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, so many were. And if they weren't abandoned then they lost their fathers. I mean Roger Waters father, I think he was a war baby. Eric Idle, I know he's a comedian, but of course he was very good friend of George Harrison's. His father was killed in the Second World War and there's a whole generation of these. So many of these men were essentially fatherless. And you think about the Beatles themselves. Only George grew up with his natural parents. Ringo had a loving stepfather when his mother remarried. But it is amazing how many of them lost a parent. A useful reminder as well because you know, so often over the years in all our countries we're lectured about importance of traditional families. Well actually it's about being from a loving family. You don't always have a choice about who survived. And I love that the Beatles in their own way have all proved that it's not about coming from a certain kind of background that makes you an Important, talented person. It's kind of the love you have
- [69:07]
Robert Rodriguez
and the families you create around you.
- [69:08]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, and the families you create around
- [69:09]
Robert Rodriguez
you, whether by blood or not.
- [69:10]
Samira Ahmed
The one thing I do feel really sad about, I've tried to hint at it, is I really feel Cynthia and Julian Lennon have been hard done by over the years. And there's obviously a whole issue about, you know, since in the last couple of decades as well. But I think particularly at the time when, you know, Julian was one year old, when Hard Days Night was being filmed. And the lyrics to the song Hard Days Night were written on the back of a birthday card for him. And it's, ironically enough, it's a picture of a little boy on a train. But I just feel there's something incredibly sad about the fact that this film captured so much joy. But Julian didn't have the presence of his father in a meaningful way for so much of his life. And I just wanted to put that on record. Cynthia would have had an amazing career in her own right, potentially deal with the book, the fact that she fell pregnant. And in those days, people think everyone could get the pill. In 1963, you couldn't. You could only get it if you were married. Until 1967, no single woman could get the pill on the National Health Service. So, you know, it was getting married or risking an illegal abortion. And so, you know, a lot of women's choices were really restricted. And I just think all that side of it is going on behind that joy of the film. And I just wanted to acknowledge all of that. I'm not saying you can't enjoy watching Hard Days Night, but I just feel for the hidden side of the lives that you do see on the screen.
- [70:27]
Robert Rodriguez
That would be a fascinating thing for you to explore book length at some point, because it's obviously something you feel strongly about and there's a story to be explored there. And it would be a further enrichment of Beatle history. We have the Christine Feldman Barrett Folk Women's History of the Beatles, which is a big, long overdue step in that direction. But Beatles didn't happen in a vacuum. And there's a lot of family issues and women issues to be explored. I think that.
- [70:56]
Samira Ahmed
I guess I'm. I feel a little bit cautious, though. I mean, you know, Jane Asher, who I've met, I admire her so much, and she's always chosen to keep her dignity and her silence, and I respect that. And I just feel any attempt to explore that bigger picture risks intruding on it. I don't know, But I agree, I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it, if she
- [71:16]
Robert Rodriguez
drops her memoir tomorrow. As much as we admire her dignity in silence, at this point, who among us would not be rushing out to buy.
- [71:24]
Samira Ahmed
But she won't. She will never talk about it.
- [71:26]
Robert Rodriguez
And that seems to be. It's a very McCartney esque trait because Michael McCartney, who was there every step of the journey, even see him turning up and get back in the studio, good friends with John and with them all, just what he witnessed. Not because we're looking for tabloidy, salacious stuff, but we just want an understanding of the personal dynamics of the Beatles story. And Neil Aspinall didn't write a book. We want to know more because we're just addicted to all the data we can get about these guys that have given us so much joy for so long.
- [72:00]
Samira Ahmed
You see, I know I've just written another book about the Beatles, Robert, but I'm not sure I'm addicted to more and more information for the sake of. I like the idea of what should we know that we don't know? That would be good to know. And I. That's what. So my book, although there's a little bit of personal stuff about how I connect to the film, most of it is its facts, you know, and it's an analysis based on what everyone can see. You can watch the film, you can see the women characters in it, and maybe I'll help you see things in the film that you didn't notice before, but it's all there. Whereas I know Mike McCartney, I've met him a few times. What's so interesting about him is he has his own career and presence because he was in the scaffold. So he did all this kind of comedy and television, you know, again, very self aware, very artful, very much playing like Spike Milligan and the Goons with the idea of fame and the idea of pop stardom, you know, becoming Mike McGear. And he regularly goes to the Slapstick Film Festival in Bristol where we had a screening of Dr. Strangelove and he was on the panel I interviewed afterwards about the impact of that film, which of course was a film that the cinematographer had worked on immediately before going on to A Hard Day's Night. And there's another connection to that film, which is this unused footage from Dr. Strangelove, aerial footage which they used in Magical Mystery Tour, of course, which you'll know for the flying song sequence, so instrumental sequence. So there's all kinds of connections. But I think everyone who wants To Speak has spoken in a way that works for them. And Mike's career of the Scaffold, I don't know how well known it is in America, but it's a really well known. They're kind of performance poets and they played a lot with satire. They had their own TV show. There's a really strong cultural footprint of his own. Right. Mike McCartney has. And of course, there's amazing photographs.
- [73:36]
Robert Rodriguez
Right, right, right, right. I had him on the show when we were discussing the reissue of the McGeer album, which is sort of a Ghost Wings album, really, with the Personas involved. But Roger McGuff from Scaffold, we know that he wrote a lot of the dialogue for Yellow Submarine.
- [73:51]
Samira Ahmed
That's right.
- [73:52]
Robert Rodriguez
Giving it that Liverpool flavor as well as appearing in the Ruddles. All you need is cats.
- [73:57]
Samira Ahmed
I have to say, you know, if you needed one film that wasn't a Beatles film to teach you about the Beatles, I think the Ruttles all youl Need Is Cash is the best film. And there's something particularly poignant about it because, of course, it was made in 1978, so it ends two years before John Lennon was murdered. And there's something so poignant about when it catches up with them years later. And the John. What is his name? It's Nasty Ron. Nasty Ron Nasty. Sort of, you know, a sort of recluse in a wheelchair with a long beard. And I know there's something so sad about. I really want we had got to see John get older and wise about.
- [74:33]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, for sure. You saw Yesterday. I'm sure.
- [74:36]
Samira Ahmed
No, the Richard Curtis film. No, I have never seen it. Why would I see that? Robert?
- [74:40]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, you must know.
- [74:42]
Samira Ahmed
I know of it and I know there's real controversy about how it changed from the original script submission that the writer.
- [74:48]
Robert Rodriguez
Oh, I don't know that.
- [74:49]
Samira Ahmed
Oh. So my understanding is that the original script was written by someone and in it it was. I think it was much more poignant that, you know, he realizes he's the only person who remembers all these songs and he starts forming them and no one cares about them and his life ends miserably. Which, of course, is the reality. I mean, you know, it wouldn't have been enough just to have those songs. I've heard a million terrible covers of those songs. There are very few covers of the Beatles songs that are worth, I think, genuinely listening to in their own right. And I call you'd name by the Mamas and Papas is one of the great ones, I will give you that. So, no, I Just. I wouldn't object to watching it, but I have definitely not sorted out, probably kind of subconsciously, deliberately not sort it out.
- [75:27]
Robert Rodriguez
Okay.
- [75:28]
Samira Ahmed
And I'm very wary of all the biopics because I think the other thing is the Beatles are so embedded. We know exactly what they look like in a way that even our Queen, who was with us for, you know, nearly 100 years, there was a very famous impersonator used to play her in comedy films, and she was called Jeanette Charles. And we all knew it was Jeanette Charles and not the Queen, but she looks not like the Queen. We didn't mind. Whenever I've seen people playing the beetles, it's just been wrong. And I'm, you know, I obviously, I hope the films will be good, the Sam Mendes films, but I'm so nervous about how I'm gonna feel about them. How are you gonna feel about them?
- [76:02]
Robert Rodriguez
I suspect, given Sam's pedigree and the actors involved so far, that if they do their job well, and I have no reason to think that they won't. Five minutes in, you'll forget you're not looking at John, Paul, Georgia, Ringo, because the writing will be so good in the performances. That's what I'm hoping for.
- [76:19]
Samira Ahmed
The best John Lennon I've ever seen was Ian Hart. Do you ever see a film called the Hours and Times? Yeah, I mean, as you may know, there's a whole Brian Epstein thing going on right now. There's a new Philip Norman biography, Brian Epstein, that's coming out. Brian Epstein, Sorry, coming out next week, I think in the UK. It's called Mr. Moonlight. There was. There was a film last year which I didn't see, called Midas man, which apparently wasn't very good. But there's also a new. A play by Tom Wright called Please Please Me, which is looking at John, Brian Epstein's life over the course of. Of a few years, and very much focused on his homosexuality. And I don't know where I'm going with this, but where was I going with this? The Hours and Times, which was based on what happened on that holiday when he and John went off to Spain. And it's an art house film, interesting enough, it's a black and white art house film like A Hard Day's Night, but that's the most intriguing film I've ever seen and I thought it was worth watching in its own right. And Ian Hart was so wonderful as John Lanishan. So, you know, it can be done, but. But very rarely done.
- [77:13]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, do you think that this is the film that Dick Lester's gonna be remembered for. Or did he ever surpass this?
- [77:18]
Samira Ahmed
That's such a question. So one thing I'm gonna say is that he was always Richard Lester. It's only Britain. People called him Dick. So I always call him Richard Lester for that reason, just by the by. But I'm not saying it's like an albatross around his neck. But I think he probably feels rightly a bit mystified and probably a little bit frustrated that this is the film that everyone. I mean, he said famously, didn't he, that you know, when I die they'll say, you know, Beatles director dies in road crash or bus collision or something. And you think of all the other films he's made. I mean, I'm particularly fond of things like Superman ii. I know that a lot of his films that played with heroism like Robin and Marian and the Three Musketeers films, they're very much loved. This one, I do think it is a masterpiece. I mean, that's frustration. It's his second, sorry, his third feature film and he made a masterpiece with it. So it's not his fault. But I read as much as I could about his films and I've seen most of them. But I do think whatever he may feel about his other work, and I know he made a lot of satires, I mean How He Won the War is a really powerful film. And I think he marks a line in his career. He made a film called the Bed Sitting Room which was about a post apocalyptic world powered entirely by delusion. And that one was a failure. And I think after that he took a bit of a reset and. And started making those more sort of historical films that were sort of more like big jolly comedy epics. And although there was a lot of subversion in them, they subverted ideas of heroism. And Superman II did that very powerfully. I just think maybe he just felt that what he really wanted to do he'd been frustrated in. I think he always had this very strong sense of satire. He was very, very anti deferential. And he marks the Suez crisis as this big moment in his life for a lot of people, I hear, where you just thought, who are these people running our governments, the craziness of what they're doing? And so he was always in opposition to authority. And I think those are the films he wanted to make. You know, the anti war satterhow and the war and so on. And I think those films never got the critical acclaim in his life. Well, he's still with us. They never got the critical acclaim in release that he would have hoped for, you know, and maybe that's why he feels frustrated is my guess.
- [79:23]
Robert Rodriguez
You've seen the Bedturning Room.
- [79:24]
Samira Ahmed
I haven't watched all of that. I've seen bits of. Have you?
- [79:26]
Robert Rodriguez
Okay, no, no, I. I'm aware of it, but that's the first time somebody told me what it's about. I had no idea, but now I'm going to try to track it down.
- [79:34]
Samira Ahmed
It's really surreal and, you know, sort of, you know, I mean, it's set and you can see why it would have depressed people. If it's set after the. An apocalypse, I think it was written by. Was it written by John Antrobus or Spike Milligan? But, you know, it's got a lot of those kind of comedy actors that he. He'd worked with. But How I Won the War, which I watched in preparation for this, it's a really dark film. And that moment where John Lennon looks at the camera, you know, just before his character dies, it's. I mean, obviously it's haunting for two reasons now, but there's also that whole sense of the Vietnam War, which is to come, you know, and there are all these references to, you know, the next war, and you just seeing it without hindsight is just horrifying. Was Vietnam Warren underway by 67? So sort of was, wasn't it?
- [80:18]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, it was well underway. The ted offensive was January 68, and that was like a real bloody high point, as it were. Yeah, yeah. Horrible stuff. I have seen where you talk about going to all the locales that you could.
- [80:32]
Samira Ahmed
Yes.
- [80:33]
Robert Rodriguez
That Hard Days Night was filmed at. Do you want to talk about that a bit? Because I've had friends have gone down Boston street where the. The stumble happens, so.
- [80:41]
Samira Ahmed
Well, I used to live. I used to live very close to Marylebone Station. So the whole thing with the train station is it's the train. Same train station that they run into to get on the train to London. And it's the same station that they come out when they've arrived in London. It was all shot on two consecutive Sundays because trains didn't used to run there. And it's a beautiful train station in central London near Baker Street. So there's lots of locations around the Apple Store, which, of course you may know is now being turned into a museum. The location of that. The Beatles had a bit of an epicenter around there. And there's something right mad about how they were able to film on the streets in Central London. And admittedly, fans would turn up, but you can't imagine how they managed to do that, given how famous they were. They were the most famous band in the world by the point they started filming. And then a lot of the stuff around Tookenham Studios, where they shot lots of interiors. It's very suburban, it's not far from where I live. And when the first Beatles London book came out, which was a guidebook to all the locations associated with their career, including places they'd recorded and lived and so on, I took that book and I went on a day trip down to Twickenham and I went around the house. You know, the four houses in Help. Where they go in the front door and you. Inside. It's obviously inside. It's all in the studio. It was all one giant apartment that was very close to a lot of the locations for A Hard Day's Night. The pub that Ringo walks into the high street, where he walks along and Help. I love the idea that these two films are in conversation with each other and the streets are pretty much unchanged. So I think that's, again, something that makes film a bit timeless. If you think of the sequence where Ringo goes off on his own and he's chased down the street by some girls and goes into a shop and puts on her hat and coat. I mean, although that's sort of near Notting Hill, it's not exactly suburbia. It looks like sort of ordinary London city streets. And there's a sense of timelessness the moment you go into something which isn't a recognisable landmark, don't you think?
- [82:24]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah.
- [82:25]
Samira Ahmed
And of course, walking along the riverside, which is pretty much unchanged by Q, where he shot Ringus, shot the sequence with the boy. And of course, you know, you go. You put the soundtrack on, you listen to this boy, and it's just lovely. I mean, London. They talk about the term psychogeography, don't they? Which is the idea that. That a location has the echoes of everything that's taken place there before. And when you go there, you know, you do have this sense of Ringo could have just been here five minutes ago. They might have just filmed it and then moved on. Because they filmed very quickly and moved on. I like that London still can be like that.
- [82:57]
Robert Rodriguez
That's so cool. I remember in my early viewings of A Hard Day's Night. I think it's during the second Can't Buy Me Love sequence, the chase, the Buster Keaton sequence, if you will, where John Bluthal trying to steal the car that's right. And there was that smoldering thing in the background. And having no frame of reference for England, this is pretty much my first exposure to it is watching A Hard Day's Night and thinking, it's a very different place from here, isn't it?
- [83:26]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the funny thing was I had always assumed it would be a bomb site because London in the 60s was still full of bomb sites. I mean, there were bomb sites in Marylebone well into the early 2000s. I used to live near one around the back of Marylebone High street. And I assume that it's the remains of a Victorian Gothic church, and I assumed it was bomb site that hadn't yet been repaired. It was in Notting Hill, which was an area that was quite poor still at the time, but actually it was, believe it or not, being demolished because the demographics were changing very quickly in Britain at the time. Churchgoing was absolutely falling very dramatically and traditional churches weren't in demand in the same way. And in that part of London, the new communities moving in from the Caribbean and from the Commonwealth, they weren't religious, but they didn't worship in these kinds of churches. So people were quite cavalier in the 1960s about demolishing Victorian buildings. I think they wouldn't do it now. But that's all part of what you capture in that film, this London, which is quite careless about its architectural heritage. I've got another role as president of the 20th Century Society, which sounds very grand, but it's an architectural charity that sort of preserves modern design. And I'm going to be giving a tour for the Christmas lecture this year about the architecture of the Beatles, like the buildings that they occupied on their album covers. If you think about. Please, Please Me, album cover. You know, they're looking down over the balcony of that EMI building on Manchester Square again in Marylebone. And just then, things like these churches which, you know, just part of the landscape that they're moving through. Britain's changing very fast.
- [84:54]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. Well, it's interesting what you just said about the church being torn down and why it was torn down. Exactly. Reinforcing John Lennon's point that he said to Maureen Cleave that he got pilloried for, about the declining attendance in churches at that time in Britain. I know.
- [85:10]
Samira Ahmed
And America is different about religion, I've got to say, Robert. And, you know, it's so interesting that there was such a delay between that interview being done and published in the uk and then when it appears in America, it's interpreted in this completely different way. And you know, it's like a slow burn social media pylon, isn't it? That.
- [85:27]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. And the incendiary comment from Paul alongside his face on the COVID of Datebrook. Nobody touched that.
- [85:35]
Samira Ahmed
What was the thing that Paul said?
- [85:36]
Robert Rodriguez
I forgot he was talking about racism in America. And it said, and I quote, it's a lousy country where a black person can be called a dirty nigger.
- [85:45]
Samira Ahmed
That's.
- [85:45]
Robert Rodriguez
And that's right on the front. Yeah. And it's like racism, we're okay with that. We get. But don't you dare go after Christianity.
- [85:52]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, I know, I know. You know, that whole row, I mean, that's another thing about the Beatles story, isn't it? That resonates because they had their equivalent of that social media pile on then. And you know, if you look at interviews, and I did, because I interviewed Paul McCartney a few years ago and I watched every interview I could find and I found this news interview when they were in America and the row was still raging. Paul was very protective of John. He always steps in to say, you know, it'd be fine, you know, we're still touring, it's not, it's all blown over. And that sense of them, you could tell that they don't really know how this might end up, but they've got to keep going. And that's when you suddenly start to see them looking vulnerable. It's very touching, actually. They stick up for each other.
- [86:34]
Robert Rodriguez
Oh, yeah, yeah. Encircle the wagons.
- [86:36]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. Yes. Most of the concern and oversimplification of what you said came from what we
- [86:44]
Paul McCartney
call the Bible, though notorious or Christian attitude. The thing is that, yeah, they seem to think that by saying that, you know, John's getting at them, but he isn't at all, you know, it's just a straight comment on something which may be right, maybe wrong, you know, but he's got to answer as he feels honestly, you know, and if they think that for him to say that, you know, is wrong, then they don't believe in free speech, you know, And I thought everyone here did a word about
- [87:15]
Robert Rodriguez
help, which I enjoy the hell out of.
- [87:17]
Samira Ahmed
I do too. I do too. I don't think a help will ever be classed as a classic because someone has said, people have come up to me and said, when are you going to write the next book about help? And I said, well, I've kind of tried to write about it in here because I can't see it justifying a full length book of its own. But what help does brilliantly is so one. And I think it was Richard Lest who said this. It's like a Wilkie Collins story, you know, the Moonstone, that kind of great Victorian novel of adventure and Indian death cults and things and, you know, through the eyes of Jasper Johns. So it's a pop art take on a kind of Victorian imperial adventure. And it subverts all kinds of things. There's all kinds of jokes about Buckingham palace and Grenadier Guards and the army. I mean, that whole sequence on Salisbury Plain where, you know, it's basically an extended battle sequence with the real task. And in fact it looks a lot like. If you do see the bed sitting room, you know, there's a whole deconstructed studio where they're recording an album with no walls in a studio which is just instruments and it's just a mixing desk in the middle of Salisbury Plain. So things like that. It is a beautiful looking film and it is wildly wacky. And John Lennon said, I think some years afterwards he was reflecting in the 70s that actually it looks like, you know, pop art. It's. If you see it that way, it's actually an incredibly groundbreaking and exciting film. But what allegedly dates it, I don't have a problem with it myself, but I don't make decisions about these things is because there's technically brown face in it, because Eleanor Braun and what's his name, Liam McKern and John Boodle, they're all sort of, sort of browned up as this Indian death cult worshiping some weird God that's, you know, I mean, it seems a little culturally insensitive, but it's so. Well, it's so harmlessly meant. And Spike Milligan's humor. Milligan, who I think spent a lot of time in India, there was a lot of comedy of that generation who were mocking the British imperial adventure. They weren't mocking Indians, they were mocking the British.
- [89:11]
Robert Rodriguez
Yes, that's the thing, I think people who are so quick on the trigger to apply cancel culture. Oh, this is wrong. I look at it as like these were smart, savvy, artistic people. Of course they're setting it up. Particularly the scene with Patrick Cargill where he's landing in the Bahamas and there's that line of maybe four policemen there that keeps it like never ends because they keep getting out of place and then stepping down. So he's.
- [89:37]
Samira Ahmed
He can't tell them apart because that.
- [89:39]
Robert Rodriguez
He can't tell apart. Right. The audience is in on the joke. I felt it's like this.
- [89:44]
Samira Ahmed
Yeah. It's funny. I. I did talk about this with someone else and it's the one joke that I felt. I can see why it sat a little uneasy with me because I thought if I watch this person of colour and you're thinking, well, the joke is slightly at my expense, even though I saw it for what it was, which was it's a very Spike Milligan esque joke. It's the kind of joke which would have appeared in a lot of the TV shows he did. It's all about, as you say, it's about the British imperial attitude. But I also very flattered by the fact that Eleanor Brun, in some wildly costumed attempt at a sari, was love interest, you know, doing her cod Indian accent. And I did interview her a few years ago. I was kind of excused to talk to her about this. And Bedazzled, which the wonderful film she did of Peter Crooker and Dudley Martin. And you know, she was. It was also really interesting casting because she was such an established actress in her own right. She was a Cambridge graduate, she'd been in the establishment club. She was quite well known in her own right. So she could hold her own. So she would have been probably a couple of years older than them. And I'm sure she really enjoyed their company. But you never feel she's awestruck by them. I think they were probably a bit awestruck by her. And I thought that was quite lovely that they had an equal rather than a dolly bird.
- [90:53]
Robert Rodriguez
Right, right, right. Exactly right. I am not what I seem. Yeah, I love it.
- [90:58]
Samira Ahmed
I love that film too. And the music is so great. Yeah. Again, I can't help it. There are things that just. They just give you this little chill. And it's the moment when Victor Spinetti and Roy Kinnear break into the house and he has a gun and he tries to shoot John and it doesn't go off and John says, get out. And I just. Every time I see that, I just feel something very. A chill go through me.
- [91:23]
Robert Rodriguez
Sure. Yeah. I can remember the first time I saw Hard Day's Night. And I must have read the Hunter Davies book by then. Cause it was one of the first books I did get to read. But knowing that John and Paul were motherless children. And there's a couple lines, put her down. Letting her I'll tell your mother on you. Or my mother thought the trip would do him good.
- [91:44]
Samira Ahmed
Exactly. There and again I write about them in the book because. Because it is really striking, isn't it, that it's Sort of. They thought nothing about making them say these lines even though their mother's been dead for several years. There's a kind of. It's not callousness exactly, but there's sort of. I guess it was just partly at the times, people just would do that and not think about, well, maybe that's insensitive. People didn't think about being sensitive to these things. It is odd, isn't it?
- [92:07]
Robert Rodriguez
It is odd that somebody wouldn't have pulled them aside, said, hey, maybe you don't want to go with that mother line or give it to George or Ringo. It's instead of Paul and John.
- [92:14]
Samira Ahmed
I know. Well, the other thing I love is that they've still. I mentioned earlier, they're still doing other things around the filming. And so John has to go after that lunch at Foyles because his book's just been published. So there's only three of them for some of the sequels when they're shooting in the field. And that's why sometimes Richard Lester with, I think, a coat over his head or the camera pointing at his own shoes, pretending to be the fourth Beatle. And when they finally finish and that man's, you know, this field is private property. There's only three of them. And they just say, it's fine, we won't show all four of them because John's not here.
- [92:46]
Robert Rodriguez
I remember at some point in multiple viewings of the film where I picked up on in the dressing room sequence where Dougie Millings and the cutting the tape measure, seeing in his own right product placement in the background, oh, well done.
- [93:00]
Samira Ahmed
Even I didn't spot that. I will say, if you watch it on the big screen, I mean, I know you can do a certain amount with freeze framing, a good 4K DVD, but if you see it in the cinema, you can see everything. Because the beginning of the film when you first see Paul and the grandfather sitting reading papers and magazines on the bench, and the magazine that the granddad's reading is Men Only, which hadn't become a fully porn magazine in 1964, but it was by 1971 when Paul Raymond, this notorious British pornographer, relaunched it. But I remember saying to Mark Lewison, you know, he's reading Men Only. And Mark Lewis said, well, no one can see that. And it's like, well, the. Might not be able to read it on a tv, but you could definitely see it on the big screen. You can read all the magazine. And actually one of the joys was just reading all the magazine titles, like John's Reading a magazine which is a scientific analysis of the world's best pop groups. Lying on that sofa in the hotel, the old waiter is reading a copy of Fab 205 with Elvis on the COVID So you just have little. Again, just little moments that if you want to, you can date it, you can work out what year this would have been, but it doesn't really matter. You can't really date it. And it's sort of 60s, but who cares?
- [94:03]
Robert Rodriguez
Yeah. I remember being thrilled seeing Shake reading Son of Mad. Cause we had that book at my house. It's like, oh, that's cool.
- [94:11]
Samira Ahmed
I know. It's such a lovely touch, isn't it? Because it just gives you a sense of the mindset. And he's reading it really intently, like he's reading War and Peace. Just such a small moment. You get a sense of. This is Richard Lester's mindset. You know, he takes his comedy very seriously. And we don't really quite know how seriously we are speaking.
- [94:28]
Robert Rodriguez
That was the joke unto itself, the way he reacted to reading satire. I remember, I think it was maybe one of the first iterations of dvd, Blu Ray. The Ann Klune scene, the press conference. Do you have any hobbies? And he writes it down. Now, finally, it's revealed when her jaw drops what it was he wrote.
- [94:46]
Samira Ahmed
That's right, yeah. No, you have to follow the pen strokes. You can just about see the word. But again, I try to put all these facts in. It's not a word I would say out loud.
- [94:55]
Robert Rodriguez
Right.
- [94:56]
Samira Ahmed
I thought he'd written that. I thought he'd written sex, but it wasn't. It was. It was a more specific anatomical word.
- [95:02]
Robert Rodriguez
It's anatomical, yeah. You make the point throughout the book how forward thinking this film is in so many ways. And I think that's an added aspect of the fact that generations later, it still resonates. I can remember there was a big screen showing in Our town because we got a vintage and I took my kids to it and my son's all teenagey and. Yeah, okay, we'll humor you, dad. And goes to sit on the big screen with me and coming at him and saying it was better than I thought, which I thought was cool. And he loves the Beatles now. He's matured enough in his taste, but it seems like taking us, the hardcore fans, off the table. I think you already made the point that if you didn't know the Beatles, didn't know a thing about them, but watched it, there's still something compelling about it that makes you Root for them and stick to it all the way to the end.
- [95:50]
Samira Ahmed
Absolutely. And once you start watching it, especially if you watch it on the big screen, you start to notice so much. I watched it several times on the big screen over the last few weeks, you know, with the book tour. And the sound mix is really intriguing. So, you know, if you watch the concert sequence, the screaming girls are there throughout, but at some point during the concert, their volume is increased in the mix until they basically take over and suddenly, then it becomes the latter couple of songs. It's just. They dominate. And that's just such an interesting editorial choice. You don't even realise it's happening until you actually start listening for it. And the other thing you notice, in that theater where they filmed it, he didn't have the theatre packed to the rafters. He had a certain number of fans and he moved them around. So sometimes, if you look carefully, the stalls are completely empty and, you know, the camera's panning from behind the Beatles and you're looking up at the screaming girls in the balcony. And other times the balcony's completely empty and they're all downstairs. And of course, there's a great Hitchcockian moment where. Where Richard Lester walks through past the Beatles in the front of the stage and just is looking out at the audience, takes a moment to look at the Beatles and is smiling. And I love that. I mean, one of the things I say in the book is all the photographs I could find of him during the making of this. If he's not smiling, he's looking intensely engaged with getting something perfect. He had so much fun making this film. I hope that whatever he might think about it in the terms of its place in his oeuvre, I think he is proud of it. I think he knows he made something very special. That continues to captivate us, does it not, Robert? I mean, here we are, your child likes it. My children have seen it, you know, and people discover it. I've met young people at book signings who say that they stumbled across the film as a result of having discovered their music. And the film then just reinforces why they love the Beatles. Or they've done it the other way around, like I did, and found the film first, you know, and you want to know these guys. You want to be in the room with them.
- [97:34]
Robert Rodriguez
Absolutely. And you've given us, with this book, so much detail to understand the context of this thing being made and things to look for and understanding it as it would have been seen in its times. Like, who were the familiar faces to British audiences, besides the obvious one. Wilford Bramble, Patty Boyd as well, and other things that. Now you get it. Now you understand why it's in the film. Because it made complete sense in 1964, which is a huge thing. It's a great contextualization.
- [98:01]
Samira Ahmed
Oh, thank you. It means so much. And I think there's something really special, actually about American fans of the Beatles. I think you all have your own relationship. And actually, that's part of what I wanted to hint at, is that the Beatles made us see ourselves differently in Britain. But through the Beatles, we also realized how Britain was seen differently by Americans because of them. So I feel the Beatles bond us across the Atlantic, don't they?
- [98:24]
Robert Rodriguez
They sure did. Absolutely. Well, it's a terrific book, and I can't recommend it enough to anybody listening to this show that you think you know all the reasons about Hard Day's Night. No, you do not. Read this book, and you're going to learn a ton more and you will get a hell of a lot more of the movie. You're not going to see the movie the same way again, I guarantee you. It's wonderful. So thank you for writing it and thank you for coming on.
- [98:43]
Samira Ahmed
Oh, Robert, thank you. It's been a joy to talk about it with you and thank you so much for having me on.
- [98:48]
Paul McCartney
George. Yeah. How did you feel the premiere went last night? Great. I enjoyed it because we'd. We'd seen the film before Saturday and none of us were, you know, very excited until we saw it with the audience, and it was great. It's quite a scrum. Much better with all the people laughing and booing. John, what's the next big event then? Friday, the premiere in Liverpool, which we're looking forward to. That's the next big event. I don't know what happens after that.
- [99:15]
Robert Rodriguez
Well, thank you all very much.
- [99:16]
Paul McCartney
Best of luck.
- [99:17]
Samira Ahmed
Thank you.
- [99:17]
Paul McCartney
Thank you.
- [99:21]
Robert Rodriguez
Something about the Beatles. Created and hosted by Robert Rodriguez, executive producer Rick Way. Title song performed by the Corgis. Something about the Beatles is an evergreen podcast.
- [99:45]
Paul McCartney
Hob Days. Nice. Thank you very much. Hello, this is Paul speaking. Paul McCartney. This is Ringo Starr, George Harrison. Hey, Paul, Tell them about the songs. You know, the title song is one that we particularly like. John and I wrote this especially for the film because, I mean, with a title like that, you couldn't write it for anything else. I don't think that's not normally the way we work because John and I normally sit down and. And if we think of something, then we'll write A song around it, but we don't normally write to order like that. But the producer of the film, Walter Shenzen, who's a great fellow, All Americans Are Good Fellas. Well, he is, anyway, came up to John and I and he asked us if we'd do this song, especially for the opening and the closing credits. So we just thought about it and thought it seems a bit ridiculous writing a song called Hard Days Night because it sounded funny at the time. But after a bit, you know, we got the idea of saying that it had been Hard Days Night and we've been working all the day sort of thing. Get back to a girl and everything's fine, you know, and we sort of turned it into one of those songs. Yeah, I think it's fab. And I also like it because I thought of the title. Makes it interesting. Well, we did have a lot of offers beforehand to make films, and they wanted us to just be the group in the back or just pass through a film, just sing a couple of songs. But we didn't want that because we've never enjoyed that sort of film. So we waited until we. We had a reasonable offer and then Walter Shenzen, the producer, came along and with Dick Lester, the director, and we liked them immediately and they had good ideas and we all got together and they said they want a film that we'll enjoy making and we'll enjoy seeing in the end. And so we just waited until this offer came along and we did that. The most important thing I thought, was besides us liking it, you know, so that the film would be a hit and other people would like it because, you know, everybody's ready to jump to say, you know, well, they may make good records or so they've had hit records, but the film's crummy. And so that was the biggest thing. We wanted everybody to enjoy it as well. I think a lot of people expected it to be just one of the kinds of films you were talking about, the. The real Slap Dash kind of film because. Especially because it's our first film ever, you know, and they expected us to just go on and. And really be very wooden and sort of not be able to act. It's good fun. I think the. The next one we do make will be more fun because we sort of got the hang of things. And like on this one, when we first started, when we're not supposed to look at camera, you'd always sort of find yourself turning around and smiling at it. You just smile. Or the camera, you know. On this one, I don't know whether this happens on lots of films. We used to keep breaking up giggling. We had some great giggling bits, you know, we'd sort of say a line and I kept doing it a particular way. There was just this one thing where the grandfather goes off to a club and I was supposed to say to Ringo, you know, it's all your fault and things, because in the film, actually, although it's not true in real life, we sort of pick on Ringo a bit, you know, because it was obvious, really, because he's sort of smaller and it, you know, it looks funny in the film, but I'm supposed to be sort of picking on Ringo and saying it's all your fault and things. And as I was saying it on the bit, I kept flapping my arms up and down. I don't know why. I must have thought I was a good actor. And I was just sort of flapping around and saying, it's all your fault. Flapping my arms around. And he couldn't stand it, he was giggling away. So then I started laughing. We just collapsed and we took so many takes on that. Takes on that bit. Yeah, And I think they cut the bit in the end or something. They cut some of it. They cut half of it. Yeah, we had an exit. Exceptionally good director, Dick Lester. And, you know, he was. He was a good fella and he liked us, we liked him and we all got on well and he had good sense of humour, so it made it much easier for us. It's about two days and two nights of our life, really, where we leave Liverpool to come to London on a train. And it's all little things that happen on a train, you know, like we have an argument with a fella on the train and all different things that happen. Also Paul's grandfather, Wilfred Bramwell, well, Wilford Bramwell plays. But all his grandfather's on the train and he gets us up into ald's fix and he runs away. It was nice sort of getting out on tour again and the audiences were fantastic. Some of them. I mean, some of the crowds had turned out to see us. It was really heartwarming to see him, you know. It's marvellous. Well, I love it, you know, I love all the kids and all the teenagers and everyone, all waiting. It's funny when you sort of look at them and they think, well, they're waving at us, but we have a good time. Everyone else worries about us and we're having a good time, but we never seem to worry, you know. Believe me, we're having a good time. Yeah, that's right. Actually, all the press are always saying, you know, you must get fed up. You know, going around everywhere is part of our job and we've just got to get used to it and got to enjoy it. There's so many girls, but there's usually so many that you've got to dodge them all, otherwise you get battered. So we end up, you see, so you don't, you don't get any. You know, people seem to think that we have thousands of girls every night, but, you know, it's actually, it's wrong because we've got to, you know, the police take us off somewhere and shove us in the hotel and so we only get to see a few girls. I tried to take a thousand girls out the other night. It was too expensive. I tried to take a thousand police Never get used to.
- [104:55]
Samira Ahmed
To it.
- [104:55]
Paul McCartney
No, we'll never get used to it because it all never seems as though it's happening to us anyway. I mean, you know, we sort of pick up a newspaper and read about the Beatles and I just read about them, you know, as though I'm not one of them sort of thing. I just read, oh, the Beatles are doing good. We never think of it as a phenomenon or any phenomena. We just keep going. To me, it's just like in the old days when we were playing for sort of a couple of dollars a night, you know, just because we get more money, we still play the same. Yeah, well, we're still basically the same. It's just that we can afford things. But now as we got the money, there's not as many things that we can think of that we want to buy. I could think of hundreds of things when I didn't have any money, but now, you know, I don't. Well, thanks very much, you know. And this is Paul McCartney signing off. And me, I enjoyed it. George Harrison and me. Keep swinging, Ringo Star.
- [105:49]
Robert Rodriguez
I'm Glen Washington, host of Snap Judgment from kqed. Every week, Snapdraps you inside someone's biggest decision, the kind of decision you can only make once. With everything on the line, what do you believe? What do you want? And what would you risk to get it?
- [106:10]
Paul McCartney
Find out.
- [106:11]
Robert Rodriguez
Tap to Listen now to Snap Judgment from KQED on Spotify. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out. That's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [106:40]
Samira Ahmed
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms.