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agent met us early in the morning and took us out to lunch. When she asked what was the budget of the film, we said, ‘About £75,000.’ She presumed that that was Charles’s fee.” Then Rees and Rufus Isaacs met with Aznavour himself. “The agent made it quite apparent that she thought that Anthony and I were from Warner Brothers—serious film-type people, which we weren’t. Then she said, ‘What is the budget for this film?’ We said ‘£75,000,’ and she said, ‘I think you should leave.’ ” They were at the front door of Aznavour’s house, Rees says, when Aznavour assured them, “ ‘Don’t worry. I’ll do your film.’ In fact, he did it for seven grand. When we ran out of money during the film he never asked for it. He never pushed us at all. Peter, on the other hand, did.

“I got a call from Peter saying, ‘I’m not coming to your fucking rehearsal until I get my fucking money.’ Well, we didn’t have very much, so Anthony got on to my bank manager and said, ‘We’ve got Peter Sellers, we owe him ten grand, he wants it now, or he’s not going to continue.’ So he lent us twenty grand. When we got it, we asked Peter who we should pay it to, and he said, ‘Pay it to Hare Krishna in Geneva, Switzerland.’ That’s what happened, and I haven’t the faintest idea.”

• • •

The Blockhouse is about being buried alive and yet remaining alive. Stocked plentifully by the Gestapo, the bunker is a cavernous warehouse full of water, canned food, sacks of flour, wine, and candles, so the men can survive for quite some time, knowing all the while that they must die there. It’s a social drama, cerebral but raw—part Samuel Beckett, part Samuel Fuller. “I’ve been studying these candles,” Rouquet gently announces early in the film. “They last about five hours each. Since we have been in this room we have burned exactly twelve. My pulse rate is normally seventy-two beats per minute. If you multiply that by sixty it will give you four thousand three hundred twenty beats per hour. We had been down here about twenty-four hours before we came to this room. That makes three days in all, exactly. It seems a pretty reliable way of keeping time—provided we have candles and my heart doesn’t stop.”

Clive Rees describes another moment: “There’s a kind of ridiculous party scene. Rouquet thinks he’d like a drink, so he asks Visconti at the bar to give him some brandy, and being a typical kind of Nepalese rat, Visconti says, ‘Get it yourself.’ So Lund (Per Oscarsson) offers to get him something. Rouquet is so childishly grateful that he looks over, food falling out of his mouth, and tears are running down his face. That’s genuine—Peter just cried. He was an extraordinary man to work with.

“To me there’s a humanity in it. I don’t expect anybody else to see it, but I think there’s a kind of poetry. As I say, I’m very pretentious, but it starts off very conventionally, and gradually it gets more and more interior; there’s more and more silence, and people’s thoughts and feelings are expressed not by what they say but by what is registered in their faces. To me it was like a series of icons, and therefore there was a sort of beauty. Harry Crafton, the makeup person, contributed a great deal to that film because although they’re getting more and more wrecked, they’re actually getting rather beautiful. At least that was the idea.

“The whole film was shot underground. We were seventy feet down, and it was so incredibly quiet and depressive. And what with the nature of the story, it kind of got to people. Sellers could really feed on that. It enabled him, I think.

“It was filmed in Guernsey, a small island just off the French coast,” says Rees. “Peter would be standing on his head in the morning, eating his special macrobiotic food and all that,” and causing no difficulties. “The fact was,” Rees notes, “we were virtually trapped on an island. No one had anywhere to go, so we sort of lived it, in a way. There weren’t any night clubs to go off to; there weren’t any distractions.”

Still, there was the obligatory Sellers-as-bad-boy incident. One morning, Rees relates, “He told the makeup