Heat and Dust was another one of those films where the lines of communication with the laboratory became extremely extended because, even phoning London was a quite adventure, in those days, from Hyderabad. You couldn't always get through and the line wasn't always very clear. And we used to get strange telexes which had explosions of stars and asterisks and commas and things in the middle. I once received a telegram which said, 'Ru he loo exelet', and that means: rushes look excellent. Only half the letters were there. But I managed to decipher that one. But sometimes it said quite a nasty... no they didn't use words like that, they said, 'Severe scratch left of frame on take ***', you know. So that called for a number of phone calls to London, which, again, were... took a long time getting through, but fortunately, the other end of the line was Les Ostinelli in Technicolor lab. And I've already said how important it is to have somebody at the other end of the line who can give you an opinion, who doesn't just say, 'Yes, there's a scratch and it's up to you if you think it's serious'. He was able to say, 'I don't think it's very serious, this is a cell scratch or this is an emulsion scratch'.

But by and large, we didn't have any severe problems, other than those caused by the lights failing and the big HMI failing. That caused severe problems, and it took a quite a long time to repair. Because India has a quota... Each film that you make in India has a quota of so much equipment that you can import, free of customs, and that quota we'd exceeded before we even started to shoot. So from that point onwards, any time we needed a spare part of any kind, somebody had to come from London with it in his pocket. That was the only way, and you can't exactly put an HMI in your pocket. We did get, though, imported in that way in somebody's suitcase, we got the starter unit which was actually the part that had failed, could be put into somebody's suitcase. But this isn't always the case. So the lines of communication got very, very stretched, both for equipment and for communication with the laboratory. But we made it through to the end.