I had worked with actors before, and I had myself been an actor, you know, on the school play level. I’d never been an actor in the movies. That’s one thing – I did play a little part in the picture, and I always thought that movie actors pampered themselves, but I think it’s a good idea to play a little role some time when it doesn’t count in a picture, because it gives you a very fine appreciation of their problems, not in a very sophisticated way but just of how terrifying it is to be in front of a camera, in some sort of primitive way you can’t figure it out.

I know I went to do this scene – I made a mistake casting on location; we never made it clear enough to the people that they had to show up on time, because they thought it was like going down to get their car washed or their picture taken or something like that, and they would show up in the afternoon when they were supposed to be there in the morning, and this happened with somebody, and I decided to just get into their costume and that I’d do the thing myself and that it would be a lead pipe cinch. It was just, I mean I was paralyzed at first, and then I was just like a kid in a church, I couldn’t stop laughing after a while, and it really has a strange effect on you.

It’s really quite powerful, that camera sitting there whirring away and not rating you at all; you’re just rating yourself and there’s no appeal. And it’s just frightening. I wish I’d done that earlier too; I wish I’d had that experience. One thing, it makes you realize how scary the camera is and how important it is just to give an actor something to have in his hands, even if it’s just a paper clip or something like that, just so it’s something you can hang to. Maybe this was an idiosyncratic reaction but I don’t think so.