[Q] And were you by now, what would you be called at that time?
I was an Associate Art Director. And in Ischia I really did… I mean my boss was Paul Sheriff, who was a Russian Count Shuvalov, who used to make beautiful oil paintings, which were sent to Hollywood, but they're really quite impractical. I always used to call – I had the office next to him – he used to call me, 'What do you think of this?' So, I said, 'Paul, it's beautiful, but what is it?'
And, he said, 'You see, that's what I want, because when Jack Warner and the other guys are standing around, they're such snobs, and nobody is going to ask what is it', you know. Yeah, he had a terrible sense of humour, mind, but he also was very lucky that he had very, very, very good assistants. And he became very close in more than one way with a famous English production designer called Carmen Dillon, I don't know if you remember her, and Carmen did a lot of Paul's work.
But, he had a... a great sense of humour, and his instructions to me in Ischia were, 'I leave that to you, and please don't try and contact me, or wake me up between the hours of two and five o'clock in the afternoon'. He was so Russian at that... you know, and I could never take him seriously.
And I was very sad when he died because he left, you know, his wife and other people without sufficient means, and we had to get money together, and so on, but he was a fantastic character and very artistic. These were all people brought over by the Kordas from Europe, you know.