The Crimson Pirate was in... '51, I think. And I did another picture after that in Sicily for Warner Brothers called The Master of Ballantrae, with Errol Flynn – so I still had boats – and it was on that picture that I married Letitzia. And in fact I got her a job as a costume assistant with... she was with 160 male extras on one of the big ships and they're all-day out at sea. It suited her.

And then I returned to England for... on some small pictures and did also some work on Ben-Hur, because the American producer thought I was best suitable to see that not too much money was being spent and... you know, to oversee the building of the… what do you call it? …of the Circus Maximus and so on.

And, eventually – I still... being in... in Italy – got offered Helen of Troy, which Bob Wise was directing, and had had a Production Designer called Eddie Carrere from Hollywood. But... excuse me... in those days there were no film [draftsmen] working in Italy, so I finally ended up with about 12 qualified young architects, and I trained them into sort of film draftsmen, and we had a lot of fun, and it was quite a design picture.

We built the city gates of Troy at Cinecittà, and part of some of the palaces and so on, and it became so big that they took a second director, Raoul Walsh, who I'd worked with on Hornblower, he was sort of blood and guts director. And we had, at times, 3,000 extras with the first unit, and 3,000 extras with the second unit, one at Anzio, and one at the studio, you know, at Cinecittà. So it was a gigantic task to feed them all with props, and arms and so on. And... it really was fun picture.