I learned why Jack Ford surrounded himself with roughnecks when he made a film. You can ask them to do anything or to cause anything you might dream of to be done. It uninhibits you; you stop worrying about the actors’ comfort or even their safety. Remember in The Sea of Grass how the property man, awed by his star, flicked a little water on the fine-cut coat of the “lord of the prairie” who was supposed to have just come in out of a blizzard? In Panic in the Streets, we had to fish a man out of the river for a scene, a dead man, presumably, who’d been in the water overnight. How did we do it? There was only one way; throw someone in. You can’t throw Spencer Tracy into a river. “Who’ll do the bit in the ‘drink’ for me?” I asked. I had volunteers. When our man was good and wet, his clothes soaked through, and when the camera was ready, we photographed him floating in the garbage and the dead fish along the edge of the dock, and he looked dead. The actor got an extra check. I got my shot.