We started in Bonn and we did the big villa there and the flat which... in the story the flat's been given to him by his dad, which is supposed to be in Bonn, was actually in Munich. For various reasons it was more convenient. The production company, I think, was based in Munich, something like that. So, we worked for a while in Bonn and then we worked... Cologne and Bonn and then we worked in Munich. And in Munich I was able to use the first HMI lights which the... my colleague and friend, Jost Vacano, who was a bit of a gadgeteer, he had developed them himself. He had adapted a flat-fronted quartz light to take an HMI bulb, because the actual bulb was quite small. I had worked with the forerunner of the HMI light, I already described this, I think, for on Blood of Hussain and on Something for Everyone, which I didn't describe at that point. But Something for Everyone we... the scenes in the... it's called the Sängersaal, the Singer's Hall, at the very top of the castle. That was actually lit entirely with these Arri Suns which was the precursor of the HMI. Because the HMI came out in about 74/75. And Jost Vacano had made his own. As soon as the bulbs were available he designed his own lamp by adapting one of these quartz lights, and they were the smallest HMIs I've ever worked with. Because when they were commercially produced all kinds of safety regulations were put in place. It had to have a thick glass in front and all sorts of other things. So I never had the chance, again, to work with such small, really small, HMIs, but they were very, very convenient because you could fix them up, say, on the curtain rail and shine them at the ceiling. Most of my work with HMIs has been using them in the reflective mode, nearly all the time. Usually a mixture, but nearly all the time. The principal lighting was used in the reflective mode and I used to use HMIs to light all my day interiors.

But, in that particular film, the things I did in Cologne, the lamps weren't available yet, to me. I hadn't heard about them. That was lit in the conventional way with orange filters on the windows and tungsten lights inside, or no orange filters on the windows and blue in front of the tungsten lights, which is not a very efficient way of going about it. Work with Vojtech was very pleasant. He's a lovely man. He's very gentle, very quiet. But very talented and very efficient. Well, efficient within that... I wouldn't say he was the most efficient director in terms of time, but he was perfectly, perfectly okay. The film was made in something like eight weeks. I think we had something like eight weeks which was perfectly adequate. Heinrich Böll came to visit the set a couple of times. And when Helmut Griem, who played the clown, asked him advice, Heinrich used to say, 'Look, don't ask me because this book, to me it's somewhere in the past, it's what you English call old hat', he said. In fact, that was painfully true because by the time that film was made, the subject was a bit old hat. The subject is about the Catholic community just after the war and the clash, possibly, between the Catholic aspect and other aspects in Helmut's character, where he goes back to his family who he's been separated from, really for some time. They don't approve of him at all. And it leads to the breakup of his relationship with his girlfriend. All very nicely done.