When I was doing the Bond film, what was it, The Spy Who Loved Me, and the cameraman was a French cameraman. What was his name? A brilliant cameraman, but, like all cameramen, including Freddie, I mean, they were worried about these gigantic sets and nothing to compare them with, and I knew I had to give Claude, he was the grandson of… Renoir. Renoir, Claude Renoir, as much help as I could with source lighting, and then I rang up Stanley, and Stanley – remember, said all those things about sets and cameramen – 'Would you mind helping me with the source lighting on the tanker set at Pinewood?' so he said, 'Ken, you must be out of your mind', you know. 'I would like to help you, but, you know, if Claude finds out… anybody finds out, Stanley Kubrick, you know, my... my name will stink'. I said, 'Stanley, I will guarantee you, you will come in my car to Pinewood on a Sunday, there will be nobody there. I will have the key to the 007 stage. You don't have to worry about the security because they all know me and I'm, you know... and nobody will know that you are there… had been there', and he said, 'Well, let me think about it', and then he came back and he said 'Okay', provided I can guarantee that nobody is going to know about it, and we spent four hours together crawling through the super tanker, setting out, you know, source lighting and... and so on.

And of course I never talked about it while he was alive, and that was the story, because, you know, he was always… or very often made up as this monster of a person and so on, but that fascinated him, like I took him behind. When I did an opera at Covent Garden, I took him behind to see the stage sets, you see, and he was like a little boy because it's a completely different technique to what we use in film studios, but it showed that, you know, there was still a lot of feeling there. And it was of great help to me, but I wouldn't have worked with him again and I don't think he would have worked with me again, you know.

So it was… became too unhealthy a relationship I would say, and a very, very difficult man, and you know, I wasn't the only one who cracked up, of course. There were other people who cracked up – actors and so on – particularly when he started this repeating and repeating and repeating of a performance until he felt the performance was right. You have to be pretty tough to go through that, you know, it you are a creative person and so on.