The Beatles wanted to do something different and were fortunate in being introduced to the director Dick Lester, whose fast cuts and imaginative camera work captured the excitement and freshness of pop. Negotiations over the film had begun in October 1963 and in November the Liverpool-born writer Alun Owen, who had an ear for the Beatles' natural speech patterns, accompanied the group to Dublin and Belfast to observe them at work and catch the flavour of Beatlemania.

Without having seen the script, the Beatles had to write seven songs for the film. Two of these were written in Paris during January 1964, four were written the next month in Miami during a single two hour burst, and the title track was written in London. "All of the songs, except for A Hard Day's Night, were written independently of what I was writing," says Alun Owen. "Paul and John wrote them and they were woven into the script as things came up. None of them bear any relation to the story. They were just numbers."

The Beatles didn't have a title for the film, having already rejected On the Move, Let's Go and Beatlemania. A Hard Day's Night was the last song written and it eventually became the title to both the album and the film. The phrase was attributed to Ringo Starr who said in 1964: "I came up with the phrase 'a hard day's night'. It just came out. We went to do a job and we worked all day and then we happened to work all night. I came out, still thinking it was day and said, 'It's been a hard day ... looked around, saw that it was dark and added ... 's night.'"

If Ringo did invent the phrase, he must have done so in 1963, and not on the set of the film as has been reported, because John included it in his book In His Own Write which was written that year. However it came about, Dick Lester liked it as a title because it summed up the frenetic pace of the film as well as the humour of the Beatles and, as he was driving him home one night, he told John that he planned to use it. The next morning John brought in a song to go with it.

Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard, who had been one of the first London journalists to write about the Beatles, can recall John coming into the studio on April 16, 1964, with the lyrics written on the back of a card to his son Julian, who had just had his first birthday. Initially the song ran: "But when I get home to you, I find my tiredness is through, And I feel all right". Cleave told him that she thought "my tiredness is through" was a weak line. John took out a pen, crossed through the line, and wrote; "I find the things that you do, They make me feel all right". Maureen has said that: "The song seemed to materialize as if by magic. It consisted of John humming to the others, then they would all put their heads together and hum and three hours later they had this record."

Although Paul hadn't written the lyric, when promoting the film in America he was asked to explain how it was put together. "It seemed a bit ridiculous writing a song called A Hard Day's Night," he said, "because it sounded a funny phrase at the time, but the idea came of saying that it had been a hard day's night and we'd been working all day, and you get back to a girl, and everything's fine. So it was turned into one of those songs."