Sleuth was offered to me by Joe Mankiewicz, who was one of the most fascinating directors and intellectuals I ever was lucky enough to work with, and Joe said to me, ‘Ken, I want you and Letitzia to come and stay in Bedford, New York, at my house for about six to 10 days, and I will explain to you exactly how I see the film, and you can argue with me, you can talk to me, but once that has been settled I'll leave you completely in peace and you will never hear any more from me’, and I think he... he was very sarcastic.

At one time he said ‘And you know, when the film is good I, as a director, get the credit, and... and when the set doesn't work, you get the blame’, he said. But there were only two actors, as you'll remember if you ever saw the film, Michael Caine and Lord Olivier, and they were quite a team.

And I had designed a sort of baronial hall type of country house. I had actually toured, with the help of the National Trust, about a third of England to try and find a place which could be the exterior, and I... though I found some of the most sensational stately homes I finally settled on a place called Athelhampton because it had the right sort of oriel window because Michael Caine has to climb through that, so I settled on that, and then designed the interiors for Pinewood, for one of the big stages at Pinewood, and the idea was that Joe and Ossy [Oswald] Morris, who was the cameraman, could move all the time without my having to strike part of the set and so on, so I built it in sections out of fibreglass and on pulleys so that all the flats would move very easily, and so that worked extremely well.

And Ossy Morris was one of… a brilliant cameraman and I'd worked with him before, and we had a great relationship, and when Joe came over here he... he said, ‘What I want you to… you and Ossy to do; to leave me alone for two... two days, sitting on the set. I may want a prop man, but that's all, and I want to think by myself how I'm going to shoot this and all that, and after two days I'm ready to shoot and we can go on shooting then’, and that's exactly what happened.