The most amazing thing was that when it came to my being production designer the Hollywood Union said I can't do it. I said, ‘Why can't I do it, I'm a member of the New York Union? You have a... a deal with the union. I've done two or three pictures here. You never said I can't’. Well, we had a fight with the New York Union and ‘I'm sorry Ken, you cannot do it’. They got the head of MGM, they got Herb Ross to talk to them and they wouldn't, and finally they agreed that I would design the picture.

The head of the union said, ‘Why can't you be producer?’ I said, ‘I don't want to be the producer of it’, so he said, ‘All right, we'll give you Associate Producer credit in the front credit, and in the end credits we say Visual Consultant’, and I was so keen to do the picture, I said okay, and then when it came to the Academy Awards they said, ‘The film doesn't qualify for the Academy Awards because it was designed by Ken Adam’ and he had… and two art directors would get the Oscar, and so it wasn't… because it was… I... I don't know if it would have had the Oscar, but I think it stood a damn good chance of getting an Oscar. So then, about 20 years later, the same union gave me a... a Lifetime Achievement Award for the work I had done, the irony of it all, but that I would say was my happiest experience in terms of film in Los Angeles.