Then came... Darling came out, and I won the Oscar and John and Joe didn't. That was quite nice. They were fairly nice about it, and the first person to call me up and congratulate me was, of course, Leslie Bricusse. Leslie Bricusse and I, the authors of Lady at the Wheel, were actually the only two people of my generation who won Oscars. I won mine for screenplay of Darling, and he won his for a couple of hit songs which he had written, so it's quite comic really, but I never spoke to Leslie for... for many years. He did phone me up, as I say, to congratulate me, but I... I'd had enough of that.
And that went on for a bit, and I wrote... I wrote Far from the Madding Crowd, which went well, but it was a... it was a retro move, because Schlesinger and I got on very well with Darling, and it had many ingenious, doubtless dated, but lively things in it. Far from the Madding Crowd fell back on the great English habit of what one might call 'taxidermy as a form of cinema': lots of stuffed historical figures. It was quite fun and people keep telling me how good the screenplay is, as if I gave a shit, because I don't. And I... it was all right. And then John wanted to do a thing, which he did eventually do, which turned into, I think, A Midnight Cowboy, which I just couldn't do, about the gay world and all the rest of it, and he offered it to me and I said it's just not... I can't... I can't do that, I don't know how.
So we were sort of quite good friends actually and we all liked each other; whenever we saw him we got on really well, but I had finished with John, and Stanley made Two for the Road and it was... with Albert Finny, and it was wonderful. It was just I imagined it and just as he wished it to be for my sake. Stanley is like that. Stanley is one of the few people in the movies who loves working with very bright people, and he doesn't try to take their credit at the end like Janni and Schlesinger did. He likes being with people and he is okay, so. Stanley and I were trying to work out something else to do, which we unfortunately never ever did, not for want of trying.
