It was filmed up in Lone Pine, halfway between the Valley and Mammoth Lake, about a three hour drive, so we stayed up there. We shot it in the Spring, or maybe the Fall, because the weather wasn’t too bad. You have the danger of rains when you shoot then, but in the summer, it would be too hot. The desert scenes were shot just beside Lone Pine…that area resembled a desert (the dunes near Olancha—ed.) Fortunately, we didn’t have to go to Death Valley.

Idaho we shot on location in Kernville. Roy Rogers was the star, and he was a nice man to work with. This was before Dale Evans, though. Roy was married to another girl who shortly thereafter passed on.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early June 1981, and Richard V. Allen, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, was taking it easy, sipping iced tea on the sundeck of his suburban Virginia home and shuffling through a week's worth of unread cables, many of them highly classified.

In these silences, something may rise.

We had forgotten the art of using silence to convey emotions in our films and that's what you seem to have mastered. You've used silence to great advantage in the film. It's brilliant.

“And what happened next?” “Silence happened next. God, it was beautiful.”

Oh, wait, that was Randal...nevermind...

And the enchanted silences converged there too from all realms. And each of the silences also had infinite possibilities and magnification without end. He could have lived in any of the silences for a millennium and not exhausted its mystery. Each of the silences, vast and serene, like a moment on the highest mountain, or a gentle breeze within a mirror, permeated the room, and dwelled at ease with all the others. The silences came from mountaintops covered with snow and the depths of unfathomed oceans, from the face of the moon and the forests at night, from the stalagmites of green caves and the axis of constellations, from human beings in their lonely places and beings in their higher spaces, from the dreams of a newborn babe and the first moments of emerging flowers, from angels and diamonds, from the heart of Time and the languid countrysides, from the hidden dimensions and the hidden heaven, from all the dead and all whose hearts quicken to the highest love, the silences came, and they passed through him, and they altered no spaces, and he noticed how real the room of meditations was for such dancing eternities.

[Robert] Hamer was an alcoholic. And Hal Chester, the little volatile American producer of School for Scoundrels, looked after him like a child. He picked him up in the morning and took him to the studio, he looked after him at lunchtime, he took him home at night. And everything was hunky dory. He was compos mentis and played well [until] the last fortnight of shooting. It was a night shoot outside the Camelia room ... [a]nd I got down there and he was stoned out of his mind. He was absolutely rolling around, couldn't do a thing. So I'm afraid he had to be removed, and the producer directed that night. Then after that, for the last three weeks, another director came in who never got a credit, a man called Cyril Frankel, who I was in the army with, strangely. He directed the last three weeks. Of course, you've always got to remember that everything is shot out of sequence so the last three weeks doesn't necessarily mean the last fifteen minutes of the film. You can't see the join.

I had a soft spot in my heart for Ronald Regan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth, and also because his wife gave the best head in Hollywood.

Relationships are built in the silences.

He'd fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams.

Become quietly effective.

The sound was essentially background sound, myself, and Carl, Dennis and Al Jardine, Mike was our lead singer. The four of us put our voices together. We had done it really beautifully. We had a beautiful blend. We really did.