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Shortly before How I Won the War opened in Germany, Director Richard Lester attended preview screenings before student audiences in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. Afterward, he debated the film on the stage with politicians and writers. The results, he remembers, were sometimes quite startling. "One politician began shouting that 'the film is an insult to my English comrades in arms who fought bravely against us, at which point the students in the audience began chanting 'Sieg Heil!' in unison." Such outbursts were the sweet sounds of success for Lester. "Getting these points of view out in the open," he says, "is exactly why we made the movie."
In theme and tone, How I Won the War represents something of a departure for Lester, who at 35 is critically regarded as one of the best comedy directors in the business, a camera master of the tour de farce. From his first cinematic success with a pair of Beatle capers, A Hard Day's Night and Help! through The Knack and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, he has operated with a cheerful disregard for time, reality, clarity or sequence. His films, in more ways than one, cut loose.
Although he now lives in a London suburb, Lester was born in Philadelphia, where he entered first grade at the age of three ("I was bright then, and it's been downhill since"). By 22, he had left a director's job at a local television station to tour Europe and Africa on $2 a day, coming to rest later at the BBC. There he was assigned to Peter Sellers' memorable madcap comedy series, The Goon Show, which in spirit at least resembled Lester's later movies. "We did sketches that had no beginnings and no endings," he recalls. "They would just evolve into totally unrelated situations. You would have a spiral staircase, for example, and down it would be coming a line of U-boat captains and a line of chorus girls."
Lester's first film (in 1959) was a much-praised Sellers' short called The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, which won an Oscar nomination. Lester was then given a couple of low-budget potboilers to direct, and moved out into daylight with the two Beatles' extravaganzas, which gave the impression of being acted on flying trapezes and established Lester's image as the blithe spirit of the surreal. They also made his fame. "When I lie dying," he says, "the Evening Standard will headline BEATLES' DIRECTOR IN DEATH DRAMA, but I don't mind."
Now that How I Won the War is finished, Lester has plans to film, of all things, a life of Jesus as seen through the eyes of Judas, John the Baptist and Doubting Thomas, based on the novel Salt of the Earth by Carlo Monterosso. His next movie is Petulia, starring Julie Christie, which he shot in San Francisco. In Lester's view it is a "sad, desperate, antiromantic picture" (and he would like to retitle it Romance).