That was the only time I worked with Michael Redgrave, who is a lovely man. Super... he's a... he's one of those typical Englishman, you know, super polite and very... a very good actor, but very low-key, very low-key. And he was... I think he was perfectly cast in that... in that role as the... as the headmaster of the... of the Borstal. So the whole... and his assistant's very good too, I forget his name, the rather stout actor, very good.
[Q] Oswald Blocks.
It's also James Fox's first film, I think, I believe. Do you know one thing... something happened that is... is very interesting. That... having worked... having looked at John Thaw's work, throughout his career, particularly when he played... he played that detective, Inspector Morse. Wasn't that John Thaw? Yes, right. So, very much later on in... in my career I suddenly realised that John Thaw is in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He's one of the... he's one of the Borstal boys. I didn't realise that. I said, 'Oh, that's John Thaw'. Sometimes things like tha... things like that happened. And, it's an interesting comparison with... that film form... forms an interesting comparison with things that happened later to me in Germany where we had tremendous difficulty casting a... a gang of youths such as the Borstal boys in... in the... in Loneliness, who can mix effortlessly with... with the other actors, because there... there's no tradition of that in German acting. And they tend to be either useless or... or terribly theatrical. So we had a hell of a job casting the film called Iron Angel, Engel aus Eisen, which in England, it would have been a doddle. It would be terribly easy. Any number of people would be available that you could cast, but not in Germany.