I thought it would be a rather interesting... I worked with this man called Leo Aylen, who was a classicist, and we thought it would be quite a nice idea to set it, as it were, as if it was a mid-summer reunion in an English public school.  And we went to Stowe and found these Greek temples which they had built at Stowe, and I thought it be quite a nice idea to have these dinner-jacketed gentlemen doing what in fact people had done for nearly 1000 years, which is celebrating Plato's birthday by having a dinner of that sort and rereading the Symposium.  And so I got together people like John Fortune and Alan Bennett and Michael Gough and Leo McKern, and we set it in this rather chaotic mid-summer dinner out on the...

That did very well, that was very well reviewed, people liked it... and that was where I first learned how to make film. I did that before I did any film at all, and I was taught how to make film in the ten days that we did it.

Charles Parnall, who was the cameraman, told me what I could and what I couldn’t shoot.  And I kept on looking through the camera and saying I'd like it much more this way, and then he'd say, well, you can’t cut from that to this, and I would say, well, tell me where I would have to do the next shot in order for it to cut together.  And, actually, in the course of a week I learned the principles.  And it was... I think it was rather a good film, and I think people did like it.  It was funny and at the same time rather serious. And that was, those were all the films I made for the BBC and then I went off and started directing plays.