TSPDT

Key Production Countries: UK, USA, Spain
Key Genres: Comedy, Adventure, Action, Romance, Drama, Absurd Comedy, Musical, Swashbuckler, Music, Costume Adventure, Satire, Slapstick
Key Collaborators: John Victor Smith (Editor), David Watkin (Cinematographer), Ken Thorne (Composer), Roy Kinnear (Character Actor), John Lennon (Leading Actor), Michael Crawford (Leading Actor), Richard Chamberlain (Leading Actor), Charles Wood (Screenwriter), Antony Gibbs (Editor), John Barry (Composer), Spike Milligan (Character Actor), Rita Tushingham (Leading Actress)

"The director's early experience with live TV and commercials has had considerable infuence on his film work. He often uses several cameras to shoot action simultaneously from several angles and relies a great deal on bewildering and dazzling cutting techniques." - The Film Encyclopedia, 2012

"If any single director can encapsulate the popular image of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, then it is probably Richard Lester. With his use of flamboyant cinematic devices and liking for zany humour, he captured the vitality, and sometimes the triviality, of the period more vividly than any other director. This has been somewhat to the detriment of his later work which, whilst more conventional in style, has qualities which have been overshadowed by his fashionable earlier output." - Robert Shail (BFI Screen Online)

"American expatriate whose British films of the Swinging Sixties not only helped to define that puzzling era but marked a startling departure from conventional moviemaking technique. His use of multiple cameras (including handheld ones) and jarring editorial technique won him the approbation of the New Wave's cinematic cognoscenti while irritating the hell out of traditionalists… Curiously, with the end of the 1960s Lester's passion for "hip" subjects seemed to dissipate; since then he has occupied himself mostly with period pieces, many of them big-budget international productions." - Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia, 1995

"Richard Lester has been a major force in the world of cinema over the last half-century. The fact that he is not considered one of the great filmmakers of his time is one of those sad flukes of cinema history… He may be most famous as "The Man Who Framed The Beatles," as one biography described him, but as anyone who checks out some of his other films will quickly realize, he was much more than that." - Peter Sobczynski (Roger Ebert.com, 2015)

"Looking back on the career of Richard Lester is a little like receiving the rarest of glimpses of an all but unimaginable period in Hollywood history. Lester is a director who functioned fully within the mainstream of studio filmmaking. Though he rarely worked in America, preferring Europe as a home base, he made his films with studio money and received studio distribution—his career was screeching to an end just as the independent film movement as we know it today was taking hold. And yet Lester’s cinema stood for everything Hollywood traditionally does not. His work and mode of working involved challenging the status quo, questioning authority and accepted truths and feigning the canonical for the subversive, the disreputable. But there was a time when his interests and Hollywood’s pocketbook dovetailed and it was a marriage that resulted in some of the boldest and most gloriously discourteous films of the 1960s, ’70s and into the ’80s." - Peter Tonguette (Senses of Cinema, 2003)

"Lester's brand of slapstick and satire imbues even his most serious work. His eye for camera movement and editing is one of the best in current cinema." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)

"It is ironic that A Hard Day's Night , the one film guaranteed to ensure Richard Lester his place in cinema history, should in many ways reflect his weaknesses rather than his strengths. If the film successfully captures the socio-historical phenomenon that was the Beatles at the beginning of their superstardom, it is as much due to Alun Owen's "day in the life"-style script, which provides the ideal complement to (and restraint on) Lester's anarchic mixture of absurd/surreal humour, accelerated motion, and cinema verité, to name but a few ingredients. Lester made a mark on cinema through his innovative utilisation of the techniques of television advertisements and pop shows. His inability to entirely dispense with these methods, regardless of the subject matter to which they were applied, wrecked too many of his later projects." - Daniel O'Brien (Film Reference)

"I was hugely impressed by Truffaut’s films. I was also a great Jacques Tati fan - that’s hardly new wave - Hulot was a favourite film but 400 Blows, Shoot the Pianist and Jules et Jim are a marvellous trilogy of films and everyone was influenced by them. You’d be crazy not to. I was very influenced by them." - Richard Lester (BFI Interview/The Guardian, 1999)