[Q] Okay, now having said that you weren't going to... you thought you wouldn't... weren't going to work with Stanley Kubrick again, that turned out not to be right.

No, it... it turned out not to be right, and also I've got some letters of Stanley, in which he said – because I managed to, you know, get out of the other films – and he said, 'You're behaving like a star but a star can go...' It's quoted in one of these books here. And, but if Stanley wanted you he always found you, and I was working on a picture in the South of France and suddenly there's a phone call from Stanley. That he's doing this picture, Barry Lyndon, 'Very economically', he said, you know. 'I'm shooting it all on location and I think it would be just right for you, because you've done too many studio pictures', and so on. But, he said, 'I can't pay you your money'. And I wasn't making a lot of money, at the time. So I said, 'Stanley, be my guest', you know, and he said, 'Well, I'm... I'm afraid I'll have to take the next best production designer', you know, and I said, 'Okay'.

I went back to where we were staying in the South of France and said to Letitzia, 'My God, thank God I got out of this', you know, because I was really frightened. And then four weeks or five weeks passed, another phone call from Stanley, and now it's a quite different Stanley. He could... could be like a little boy, on the phone, you see, and he said, 'Ken, for some reason or another, the second best production designer didn't seem to know what I want and you really have to do this picture, and your fee is no problem', and all this and all this and all this, and all that. And then in the end, he talked me into it, you know.