Too Far to Go was based on a series of stories by John Updike dealing with the couple... Oh God, the name again escapes me. Maples, the Maples. There's a family that he often wrote about and they took a number of short stories and combined them into this film called Too Far to Go, which is a line which appears in the film. That was directed by Fielder Cook with whom I'd worked, by that time, twice before. No, once before. I'd worked with Fielder once before, then I worked with him again after Too Far to Go. I'd worked with Fielder on a film called Eagle in a Cage, which had... It had editing problems. It was a film about Napoleon and particularly Napoleon's exile on Elba... yes, wherever. When they were editing the film they discovered that there was a lot of stuff missing. That they could really do with some additional shooting, so I was approached if I could shoot some additional material, in England, and, of course, it was winter and this material had to be shot right away, and where can you shoot material in England in winter that would fit into a film which was shot in Yugoslavia in the summer. They said that we were going to go to Wales, and I said, 'I don't think I would do that if I were you, but you might just stand a chance in Cornwall'. Because in Cornwall, on the very tip of Cornwall, it hasn't snowed in living memory. So there, okay, sunshine, we have to see, but you stand a chance there. So we went to Cornwall and we had a very successful week's shooting with stuff which inter-cut beautifully with the stuff that was shot in Yugoslavia in July. That was a lesson to me too, that when people talk about the different qualities of light in different places, it's only half true. If you pay attention to certain things, like the quality of the air, if there's a lot of mist, if you're getting direct sunshine, or if there's unbroken blue sky, how blue it is, that all affects the contrast. So you have to match those conditions. But, as I've just said, you can match stuff shot in England in February, I think it was February, with stuff shot in Yugoslavia in July if you just pay attention to the nitty-gritty of it.

So I'd met Fielder there. So he was the one who asked me to photograph Too Far to Go, and it was a very pleasant shoot. A very nice experience, very good cast. Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner play a couple who have four children, and who want to separate. Well, at least he wants to separate. She doesn't really want to separate, but he wants to separate. There's a line somewhere in the film where he says to her, 'Would you agree that sex is the only problem, only real problem in our marriage?' And she says, 'Yes, yes'. Then he says, 'Maybe we should give it up'. And she says, 'Well, that's a novel idea, do you think that would work?' Anyway, they decide to give it up and that leads to all sorts of other consequences.

There's a wonderful scene where she goes to her psychiatrist; they all have a psychiatrist. She goes to her psychiatrist and she's lying there on her couch and he's sort of sitting there chewing his pencil or whatever, rather a stout man, a bit of a hangdog expression, and she tells him that she decided... they decided to give up sex for a period. And he says, 'In what sense did you agree to terminate sexual activity?' And she looks at him and says what can you say to a question like that, and she said, 'In the usual sense'. That's a lovely scene. If you have a script which is based on Updike then it becomes immediately obvious, after you've filmed some rather stupid scripts, it becomes very obvious that there's a brain working somewhere. There's a mind somewhere behind that dialogue. It's really rather good. And that was very obvious in that film. The dialogue, and not only the dialogue, but the dialogue is very apt and very precise.