I was in trouble, because I’d designed the bomb bay and suspended it at Shepperton from the rafters of the stage, and it wasn’t supposed to be practical. I mean... we never had Peter Sellers going to the bomb, but with Slim Pickens – and I did a lot of continuity sketches – Stanley came up with this idea of him riding the bomb like a cowboy into the Russian missile complex, and he said, ‘How long will it take you to make the bomb door practical?’ I said, ‘When do you want it by?’ He said, ‘The latest the day after tomorrow’. I said, ‘I can’t do it. That’s impossible’, I said, ‘even if I work shifts, day and night, day and night, I can’t do it’. ‘Well’, he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. Try and see what you can do’. And I had brought with me on the picture a brilliant special effects man called Wally Veevers. He was then already in his late 60s. I think he’d had one or two heart attacks, and so on. But Wally always got me out of trouble. On Sodom and Gomorrah, whatever it was, I went to Wally and I said, ‘Wally, I don’t know how to deal with that’, and he said, ‘Just give me 24 hours and tomorrow morning I’ll come up with a solution’.

And that’s exactly what he did, and we took a black and white still of the interior of the bomb bay, cut out the bomb door so that it gave us... it had blue backing behind, and did that sequence without any alteration to the set, and then cut to Peter... not Peter, Slim Pickens sitting on the bomb, and the Russian missile complex... I had a very good assistant who was a scenic artist, and we were debating whether we should use a model or a painting and he felt that you could do better with a painting, and he painted the Russian missile complex, possibly 8ft by 6ft, or something like that. And we strung up the full size missile on the large stage at Shepperton, with Slim Pickens sitting on it, and then tracked back and finally did the last bit optically of him. So he had saved my situation, and that became a fantastic shot.