It was in 1957 that I made my second film in Greece, which was again with Cacoyannis, which was called A Matter of Dignity in English, in Greek it was called The Last Lie. And it was again with Ellie Lambetti and some of the actors were in both films, but mainly it was Ellie who was in both films... oh, and the mother, Eleni Zafiriou plays the mother in the one film and the maid in the other film. And the subject of that film was a household of a man who owns a factory, a woodworking factory, and he gets into money difficulties and they don't pay the maid and the maid's child has an accident and they need money. And she keeps asking for her money, which they owe her and they always make... they keep making excuses, but at the same time they go on with their dinner parties and their card parties, and so on. So eventually there's a bit of an explosion. And Ellie the daughter, is sort of in the middle, sympathising very much with the maid, but also not wanting to betray her family. Now that film involved my first major studio shoot in Greece. Because the family home in which quite a bit of the action takes place, was a studio set built in the very primitive Finos studio on the outskirts of Athens. I've got a picture. It looks like a sort of converted barn, or just a barn, not converted, not particularly converted, which was just outside Athens. And... it was adequately equipped, but there were certain... there were certain things missing, like the lamps didn't have any barn doors on them. They were old- they were mostly made by a company called Cremer in France. They were French lamps and some of the older ones had brass contacts on the outside, which the cable was actually connected to with a thumbscrew. So, if you weren't careful and... they had a handle at the back, but if you weren't careful you could touch those contacts, there wasn't even a casing over them, so you could get, you could get a shock. And I did, several times, because I'm very much a hands-on man. I want to adjust the lights myself, which of course, didn't cause any union problems, at least, in Greece, but it had that particular problem. But it was very interesting for me because it was a major studio shoot with limited, but adequate, means, and that worked out extremely well. And then there was a very interesting dawn scene, there was a very interesting dusk scene. The thing about the dawn scene, which takes place at the foot of the Acropolis, was that we had to do some 15 or 18 shots. It was divided into 15 or 18 shots, and they all had to be done in one dawn, if possible. If it's extremely well prepared it is possible. So you prepare. You see the sun's going to come up there, that place is going to be in shade, and later it's going to be in sunshine, so if you wanted it in shade, we filmed that first, and afterwards we move over there, because over there we still have shade. And if you prepare it very carefully, and the actors are well rehearsed, you can do a shot every two minutes. It's perfectly possible. But, it needs very good preparation. So that worked out extremely well. I often use it as an example when I show things to students, and how... what you can do in the space of about an hour and a quarter, until the sun really hits the whole area, by careful preparation.
