I got a cable from Elizabeth Taylor inviting Ann and I to attend her 40th birthday party, which was going to be in Budapest, and it was in Budapest because Richard was there shooting a film called Blue Beard, and so a whole group of people, a terribly diverse group from... people like Emlyn Williams and Frankie Howerd, Princess Grace, Ringo Starr, Michael Caine and Susanna York, and myself and a make-up man and a hairdresser, and we were all invited to this party in Budapest and had a wonderful time. And out of that came the next picture I did, which Elizabeth was going to do in Elstree called Night Watch, which was the same director that did Zee and Co., Brian Hutton, and it was a thriller and we shot the studio work in Elstree with just a few London exteriors. And it involved a lot of lightning effect and with storms, and the way we used to do lightning then was to... for the electrician to take the negative and positive carbons from an arc lamp and form a... a scissor arrangement, so that you started off with the... with the live carbons apart and then as you brought them together on a kind of scissor mechanism, you'd get this splash of light, which was absolutely brilliant, and looked quite like lightning. But, of course, it was... it was quite dangerous because, you... you know, if you looked at it, it... it was really dazzling and also the poor electrician that was standing underneath these scissor arcs, because he used... he was usually up on platform holding it up high and whenever he brought the arc... the arcs together, the carbons together, there'd be a big splash and sparks flying everywhere. So the poor chap used to have a difficult time; he had to wear gloves and goggles, and all that sort of thing. But it was... it was quite an effective way of... of doing lightening and continued for a while until somebody developed a system with a lighting box with a... with a xenon, which gave you... you know, a... a similar effect but was much safer to use. So that's how we produced lightning then. Later on I was to do a picture called The Manhattan Project, in which I'll tell you of... of how it was done further along the line. So it was another picture with Elizabeth Taylor, which was great fun.
