There was a blue lamp on the table. Mr Mamoulian placed an orange against it for contrast. He shoved a green chair in front of a red curtain. He made… - Rouben Mamoulian

To accompany the transformations I wanted a completely unrealistic sound. First I tried rhythmic beats, like a heartbeat. We tried every sort of drum, but they all sounded like drums. Then I recorded my own heart beating, and it was perfect, marvellous. Then we recorded a gong, took off the actual impact noise, and reversed the reverberations. Finally we painted on the sound track; and I think that was the first time anyone had used synthetic sound like that, working from light to sound.

I lifted the sound-proofed camera off its feet and set it in motion on pneumatic tires. Scenes moved out of one room and into others without halt. I tried to introduce what I call counterpoint of [a]ction and dialogue. The camera flew, jerked, floated and rolled, discarding its stubborn tripod-legs for a set odfwired wheels that raced over the studio floors.
"The camera here becomes descriuptive in a new sort of way. Where a break in the ordinary film to allow for a close-up has been the modus-operandi, I now guide my lens along a strraight and continuous line, without breaks in continuity, without needless exolanatory speeches and also sans the printed subtitle.

As soon as you use an element on the screen it becomes subject to dramatic laws. This is as true of colour as of everything else. So I wanted to shoot everything from the start. I took four or five weeks to prepare my plans. My idea was to build up the colour dramatically. I wanted to start with black, white, grey; then ooze into colour. And I wanted the dramatic climax of the film to coincide with the colour climax, which would be predominantly red, because that is the nature of red.