When I was preparing that film I was in Hollywood to make... for a commercial, just for a few days. That's another story. There was a company in America that made commercials and they had planned a commercial with... which was the Pot-scrubber 3, which is a dishwasher. This commercial consisted of a dishwasher and a working surface and another white machine with a tabletop on top, and Debbie Reynolds dances on top of these three machines. In the background there's a huge velvet black background and there's a big electric sign with little light bulbs that says, 'Debbie Introduces the Pot-scrubber 3'. But I was making this commercial in Hollywood, and I was only there a few days. So one of those days I was still pretty jet-lagged. The phone rings at three o'clock in the morning and this voice says, 'The film that you sent us for testing, this black and white film for this... in preparation for Engel aus Eisen, the film you sent us will only run in Russian cameras'. I said, 'This is crazy'. You know, this man is crazy, ringing me up at three o'clock in the morning. They're never conscious of the time difference. Many, many times have I had a phone call and people say, 'Oh, is it three o'clock in the morning? Oh, I'm sorry'. So, I thought, this can't be true.

But it turned out to be true in a very strange way. In a hurry, in London, I had purchased a 50ft role of this particular Ilford negative that I wanted them to test. It turned out that it wasn't a movie roll, it was a bulk-loading stills film. And something else I didn't know, bulk-loading stills film negative has positive perforations. The shape of the perforation, there's a negative shape and a positive shape. This particular negative, for God knows what reason, has positive perforations, so it jammed in the Arriflex which wasn't able to handle it. But the Russian cameras had such huge tolerances they were able to... you could put anything in there. You could probably run sausages through it and it would still... So that turned out to be true. But at first I was... If you can imagine, getting a phone call like that in the middle of night, I was totally mystified.