Film Career
A short film Lester made with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1960), was a favourite of The Beatles, and in particular John Lennon. When the band members were contracted to make a film in 1964, they chose Lester from a list of possible directors. A Hard Day's Night showed an exaggerated and simplified version of The Beatles' characters, and proved to be an effective marketing tool. Many of its stylistic innovations survive today as the conventions of music videos, in particular the multi-angle filming of a live performance. Lester was sent an award from MTV as "Father of the Music Video."
Lester directed the second Beatles film Help! in 1965. Between the two Beatles films, Lester directed the first of several quintessential 'swinging' films, the sex comedy The Knack …and How to Get It, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Petulia (also with a score by John Barry), as well as the darkly surreal anti-war movie How I Won the War co-starring John Lennon, which he referred to as an "anti-anti-war movie"; Lester noted that anti-war movies still took the concept of war seriously, contrasting "bad" war crimes with wars fought for "good" causes like the liberation from Nazism or, at that time, Communism, whereas he set out to deconstruct it to show war as fundamentally opposed to humanity. Although set in World War II, the movie is indeed an oblique reference to the Vietnam War and at one point, breaking the fourth wall, references this directly.
In the 1970s, Lester directed a wide variety of films, including the disaster film Juggernaut, Robin and Marian, starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn and the period romance Cuba, also starring Connery. However his biggest commercial successes in this period were The Three Musketeers and its sequel The Four Musketeers. The films were somewhat controversial at the time because the producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, decided to split the first film into two after principal photography was completed. Many of the cast principals sued the Salkinds as a result, stating that they were only contracted to make one film.
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