We had a very nice cast. Apart from Julie Christie and Greta Scacchi, we had Shashi Kapoor whose an old friend of the Merchant Ivory's, and... Of the Merchant Ivory's, yes, the Merchant and Ivory. And Madhur Jaffrey, of course, plays his mother and... Sue Fleetwood. And Susan Fleetwood plays one of the... she plays the... what do they call it? The memsahib, the town memsahib. Yes, a very nice cast collection. Of course... Nickolas Grace, of course, very good indeed. But there were problems.
There were times when the actors were not getting paid and the agents were sending telegrams, which sometimes arrived and sometimes didn't arrive, telexes. And when they did arrive, Ismail, with Kate's help, used to intercept them and tear them up in the basement, while he phoned frantically to see what he could do to get some more money flowing. Because Ismail usually operated by starting the shooting at the point when sufficient people had promised him the money. Not when it was in his hands. So, almost always, in the end of the first week of shooting, there was a tremendous crisis because all the money had run out. Same thing happened on The Bostonians. Anyway, we got through it and nobody left. Barry Foster and Nickolas Grace, there were a hairy moments when they realised they weren't getting paid.