Eventually we... we heard that the huts had been duly erected. It took, I think, at least a fortnight. We were sitting there twiddling our thumbs for quite a while. I kept thinking how nice it would've been to spend Christmas in England, but that was past history. So eventually we got our gear together, and having made as many preparations as we could, inspected the laboratory and said, well, it's a bit primitive but it works, and it had processed stuff before, so it wasn't the first time. So we set off for the village. That always involved a very lengthy procedure.
Oh yes, before we actually set off for the first shooting trip, we tried to hire a second launch, in case something happened to the first one, and maybe for some parallel activity. And they did manage to find a second vehicle... a second launch, which was slightly smaller than the first launch. But this second launch always had severe problems. In order to start it, they had to... the cylinder heads were all open, and in order to start it, somebody went round with a little oil can full of petrol, and he just injected petrol into the top of the cylinder heads. I think there are eight of them. But by the time he got to the last one, the first one always died so that launch only went once in the entire film. It only worked once and that was on the... in the last week. And in the last week we used that launch to go some way, distant way, from the village down to an inlet of the river, a little branch of the river, to do something or other, I can't remember. We got quite a way down and then it died, and we had to row back. Anyway, we got on our main launch and then the... then the palaver started about something is always missing, either the oil for the lamps, or the wicks for the lamps, or some part of the food. And then the captain started agitating because, as time went by, knowing we had a three-hour trip, or something, ahead of us, he kept saying, 'If we don't start now, I'm not going because there's the pirates, you know about the pirates, the pirates operate on this river and there's no way that I will leave here knowing I'm going to arrive at the other end in darkness. No, no, we... we either go now or we don't go at all'. So eventually we made some kind of compromise. Okay, so we don't have all the candles we might need; and we go.
The trip itself was very pleasant, very relaxing. A huge river, you couldn't see the other side by the time you got to... by the time you got down this river to the village of Shaitnol, the river was over a mile wide. You couldn't actually see the other side, the other bank. And the huts had been duly erected and we moved in. And the director and the assistant director occupied one hut. Each hut was divided into two rooms, which had a partition between them. It had a primitive, very primitive toilet, bathroom facilities. Buckets of water, basically. The director and the assistant director occupied one hut and I and John, with his wife, occupied the other hut. We didn't get an awful lot of sleep because dawn was reasonably early, about four o'clock in the morning. And at dawn the crows used to dance on the metal roof of the hut, which made quite a lot of noise. That was usually our wake-up call.
