Last October, in the oldest gothic abbey of Italy, Fossanova, John Huston completed filming A Walk with Love and Death, a novel of mine published in 1961. I was present from the beginning and worked with the director, which is non standard practice; and Huston is no standard director. Important to a writer were two qualities of Huston’s. The first one is his bitter aversion to shortcuts, clichés, mixed metaphors. No matter, for instance, how difficult it was to convey a passage of time, he would sooner work on it for a week than resort to the trees-in-leaf-and-then-bare type of film trick. This aversion to triteness made him even refuse to adhere to a development in the book – to me perfectly legitimate – of the heroine falling ill and having to interrupt a journey. Huston insisted on being provided with another reason for the interruption: “A sick heroine at this point is just too damn convenient,” he said. This utterance leads me to a second quality of his working ways. His artistry, I think, is under perpetual observation of his almost purely mathematical concept of film-reality, vastly different for him from book-reality and real-reality. Thus I had to explain every word and every action to him in precise terms in order to get away with them; no vagueness was admitted. And when some of the people around him, in terms so dear to show-business people, held forth about “love interest”, or “the reaction on today’s kids,” Huston would listen patiently and then continue as if nothing had been said (which was indeed usually the case).

Hans Koningsberger, Film Quarterly, Spring 1969