JS: The songs for the movie were already done, and of course, the older, classic songs —

HE: There were five songs which I think were leftovers which somehow wouldn’t fit into any record, like Northern Song, which they just left for the film.

The Beatles didn’t care about the project. They had a three picture deal with whoever, and they wanted to get out of it so they got Yellow Submarine counted as one of them.

JS: With United Artists, the first two movies were live action.

HE: They wanted to get rid of that obligation, and this is why they consented to appear at the end.

JS: To make it one of their contractually obligated films? That always struck me as sort of an add-on, that little thing.

HE: During the production they were mostly tied up with Magical Mystery Tour. I saw part of it in the cutting room. I did realize this wasn’t gong to be as successful. They were bright boys but — you simply don’t make a movie like that, you don’t go into another profession.

JS: They were sort of, “Let’s do this, let’s have fun, and we’ll film it while we’re having fun.”

HE: It didn’t quite work out.

JS: Are there any specific influences on the movie, things that you remember putting in there because they were in your head?

Some posters Edelmann designed for Nachtmusik im WDR, a series of late night concerts in Germany in the 1990s.

HE: There was no time really to think about it. Lately I’ve been credited with looking there and there and there, and there wasn’t even time for that. I just had to do with what I remembered, or “let’s try this,” but in the end it had to be right.

I said “There is no time for inspiration or logic.” I don’t really work by inspiration, I work by logical elimination. If that is taken away from me, I become very uncomfortable. I do want to know where I stand, what’s possible, and the things that are desirable, not the things that aren’t desirable for the situation. I like to think, “Well, this is I can do, this is I can learn to do, and this is something I’ll never learn to do.’

So by necessity I might then make my choice which way to go. On this one I just had to sit down and whatever was in there was just coming out. This is contrary to my nature and this didn’t make me extremely happy, but there was no other choice.

Again, nobody took me seriously any more when I put my foot down and said, “I quit.”

JS: They just said, ‘sure, sure.’

HE: You only can quit about 10 times. I said I would have wished I could develop that kind of feature film for the sort of ideas and things set to music, which is not quite — well history has taken another course, and after 35 years it would be very silly to keep on grouching about that.

JS: They just re-released Submarine a few years ago with restored footage that had been taken out.

HE: Which I got taken out.

JS: You took out the Bulldog song? Why?

HE: First of all, it held up the action. Secondly, it was all conventional animation jokes, which we had gone to a lot of pains to avoid. Thirdly, it was done by a unit that hadn’t been on the feature before, but had done these Beatles [Saturday morning TV] shorts, so they lost the characters, and on the Bulldog they almost looked like the Beatles from the short films. And it did hold up the action. At that point you want to get it over with.

JS: What happened after you finished work on Yellow Submarine?

HE: Afterwards Charlie Jenkins, myself and our business partner tried to set up our own studio doing features. I wrote a couple of scripts, one of which we almost sold. This was sheer bad luck. There was a point when a representative of a major American company was going to sign a development contract on one of my scripts. This was scheduled for a Wednesday in Paris. On the preceding Monday there was a sort of shareholders’ revolution in Hollywood and they fired the company’s entire management.