I was dressing a set at MGM, he comes on, says, 'Stop dressing, we're flying over to Paris, because the balloon you have to supervise'... or something. And, you know, there wasn't a London airport, you had to fly from Croydon, and he had his own plane, you know, which wasn't all that safe. In fact he was killed in a flying accident, you know, in America, in... in one of his planes.

And so I had to leave everything behind, fly with him to Paris, and then he said, 'You... you might just as well stay here, because…' We went to the studios at Belliancourt, because we did the whole... the balloon sequence – which was a balloon, probably, eight-foot diameter, or something, a model-balloon. And the Rue du Rivoli... I had to change all the shop fronts and everything else to make them look like 1880, or whatever it was.

And, so I was there for two weeks nearly, and then I said... rang up Todd, and said, 'Mike, you know, it's the second payday here, and nobody has been paid yet'. So, he said, 'Oh, you schmuck, why don't you go and see somebody, or something'! I said, 'Mike, I'm the production designer on this film, I'm not supposed to find the money'. So, in any case, he flew over the next day with a suitcase full of money – that was the sort of character he was – to settle, because otherwise the French unions, they're very tough, they would have been on strike.