In the early part of that movie, like I said, it was shot in two flats, one overlooking the Thames and the other overlooking the East River, and Richard Donner had a... he had a number of obsessions. One of his obsessions was with boats, which had nothing to do with the film. Just... the flats just happened to overlook the river. So I got pretty pissed off, if I may use that phrase, when he said things like, right in the middle of something. We're right in the middle of something and then suddenly he says, 'Quick, work quick, Walter, there's a boat'. After a while I, sort of, said, 'Well, so what!' But he always did that.

And then he had this other habit. He wanted to... none of the scenes started straight, straightforwardly. He says, 'Right, we zoom in through the window into something on the outside, like the Brooklyn Bridge, in the case of the... and then we zoom back and we find ourselves in the flat'. Now why, why would you do that? Or where... There's a scene in a telephone box where he says, 'Right, we zoom through the telephone box onto a street... a traffic light. So the scene starts with a traffic light and then you zoom back and you find you're in a telephone box'. And I got pretty irritated with that and I said, 'This is really not a good idea'. But okay. I had an operator, Vernon Leyton, for that film, and I left it. I said, 'Okay, if you want to do that, you arrange it with Vernon, I couldn't care less'. I lit the scene and I, kind of, sat down and watched it all happen. Right at the beginning, of course, we had a long testing session, where... to find the schoolgirl. We tested dozens and dozens of girls, and finally ended up with Susan George, who did a very good job, although theoretically she's at least 10 years too old, but it was supposed to be a sort of Lolita, really. But she did a good job. She's a pretty believable schoolgirl, if you suspend disbelief just slightly.

And then there were some other things. There was an occasion when Charlie is sitting there; he's a writer, you see, so he's sitting there at his typewriter going, and then he said to me... it was quite warm, he said to us... the crew, at one point, he said, 'Can I take my shirt off?' I said, 'No, no, you mustn't do that'. If he's sitting there going like that, and he also has a hairy chest, he's sitting there with a hairy chest, nobody's going to believe that he's a writer. It's difficult enough in the first place. But he was a... he was a charming man, Charlie. He took us to lunch several times. It's just that I could never understand how people like Charlie Bronson, and Anthony Quinn can panic at some slight thing when they're asked to do something slightly out of the ordinary, or even something completely ordinary, like kissing your mother and father when you... when you arrive after seven years absence. But they just panic, they're 'oh, I don't know about that, you know'. Then they have to be comforted and talked into it and mollified. It's always struck me as very strange that somebody who's made as many movies as they have, that they should be so unsure of themselves, but they're not the only ones, by any means. It's a very common phenomenon with people... with stars who've done many pictures.