'Billion Dollar Brain' was my first major picture and I didn't have an operator that I was really confident that I wanted to do this film with and- so I went to Bert Easy, who was head of the camera department at Pinewood and asked his advice and he said- well I think we- I've got someone that would be just right for you, and he introduced me to David Harcourt and he's a lovely man and we've been friends ever since then. Working with David I found that he was very easy, he was always contributing; it was a collaborative process and he wasn't ambitious, he didn't want to become a lighting cameraman; he was very content to stay where he was, an operator, and- but he'd worked with many of the leading cinematographers of the time, so he had a vast amount of experience; he'd worked with a lot of the top directors, and I relied on him a great deal, particularly in these early periods when I was coming in with really very little knowledge of shooting a major drama, and the rest of the crew were all top-flight and I had a wonderful gaffer too, who was on the Pinewood staff, called Johnny Swan, and the cast- we had an impressive cast; Michael Caine, Karl Malden, François Dorléac, who was the younger sister of Catherine Deneuve, and a character actor called Ed Begley, who has this idea of invading Russia, you know, because he's very anti-communist and he's a very wealthy Texan oil millionaire, and so he builds up an army intent on invading Russia across the frozen Baltic; rather like 'Alexsander Nevsky', the horsemen going across the ice.