team. A clapper loader was in hospital in intensive care. A car got out of control and pinned his legs to a wall. Unfortunately for the poor chap, the stunt driver went into the bushes in order to avoid the camera crew and he was not aware of the clapper boy hiding in the bush. 

Having heard that, I made sure that my walkie-talkie was in perfect working order. Jumping a cue could have cost lives. I was lucky on my first day, sending the stuntmen off on some static crackle, and getting it right.

Frame from Cinemascope print. The Minis high speed getaway over Milan rooftops. Note the heavily modulated mono variable area sound track

I soon developed a good relationship with Claude and the French stuntmen. They were very professional, and left nothing to chance. Most of what I remember was fun, shooting Mini stunts, sometimes with four cameras. We had no near misses or mishaps, everything always went to plan. There was one stunt, however, that worked out differently. The shot where the three Minis jump from one roof to another in formation was a particularly dangerous one - twenty metres plus. The stunt team practised the jump for a week on a disused airfield, and were well within the limit every time. While they were getting ready for the jump, the construction department built a ramp on one side and reinforced the flat factory roof on the other side, because the structure was not strong enough to take the force of the landing. Just in case the Minis overshot their mark, the roof was reinforced for an extra five metres. 

When the three Minis jumped across the gap the drivers added their own little extra for safety and all three Minis landed past their mark, and dented the roof. Nobody was hurt, though. Perhaps the most spectacular of the stunts was the Minis in the tunnel. That was filmed near Coventry, inside a newly built sewage pipe not then connected to the system. On one of the rehearsals, I think it was Remy Julien himself, the lead Mini did a complete spiral along the pipe. 

However, when we started filming, the lead Mini hit an overhanging ledge and crashed. Nobody knew the ledge existed, but once we found out, doing the spiral was out of the question. Such a pity that we never turned over on the rehearsal! 

Working with the Minis was real fun. We shot a sequence in a huge exhibition hall, which ended up on the cutting room floor. Hall way through the chase, the three Minis are followed by three Police Alfa Romeos. They enter a concert hall where an orchestra is rehearsing a waltz, and dance about the place in prefect sync with the music. It was a wonderful sequence, but it slowed the film down. In order to perform a perfect 180 degree turn, the ratchets of the handbrakes were removed. As the handbrakes apply to the rear wheels only, to do a turn about consists of a hard yank, on the steering wheel, followed by applying the handbrake, which turns the Mini round the other direction, then another hard yank on the steering wheel, followed by hard down on the accelerator. Try it for yourself. It is easy; all you need is some beautifully polished Carrara marble floor and a certain amount of courage. Had the sequence remained in the film, who knows, it could have started a fad of MiniCooper Formation Dancing. 

While all the dangerous things went smoothly, people not directly involved in the filming were injured on a regular basis. It was an unhappy and accident-prone picture in that way. There were some horrific road accidents maiming relatives of the crew. Then we lost our sound recordist; Dicky Bird, he could not take the oppressive heat of July in the Po valley with his asthma. 

The unit moved to Ireland to shoot the funeral sequence of Aunt Nelly. The morning mist was supplied by smoke pots from Ardmore Studios. Unluckily for me, the smoke pots were well past their sell by date, and one of them exploded in my hand. I still have a faint trace of the scars. As I got into a unit car on my way to the hospital I turned to the crew, and trying to assure them, I said: "It's only a burn." They tell me, Noel Coward waited till the car was out of ear shot, then said: "That's what Joan of Arc said." 

I was chauffeured for the next three months before my hand healed. Incidentally, I learned to write with my left hand in the meantime, so something useful has come out of it all. 

Looking back on all this, it only confirms that a happy picture is a crappy picture. I have only worked on one other unhappy film, and that made its money back on its opening weekend in America. But that is another story. 

ANTAL KOVACS