With Beckett's Film (a very Beckettian, though confusing, title) we were luckier than with all the other scripts. Jason Epstein, the great editor at Random House, introduced me to an executive from a TV production company. Neither Jason nor I can remember his name, though it will surely turn up somewhere. The man knew Beckett's work well, and financed, as an Evergreen partner of some kind, the production of Film. Samuel Beckett came from Paris to New York for his one and only trip to the United States. He and Alan Schneider stayed with me and my wife in the Village in Manhattan during the film's making. In the end, there were no monetary receipts to show for these efforts, but we produced Beckett's film and met with at least moderate success in the opinions of film critics.

The production staff was a talented one. I prevailed upon an old acquaintance, Sydney Myers, not only a fine director but also a master of film editing, to be our editor. He and Sam quickly became friends. For cinematographer I chose Boris Kauffman, because of his work with Jean Vigo on two feature films, Zero for Conduct and L'Atalante. Though I did not know it then, Kauffman had become a famous cinematographer in this country – for his Oscar-winning work in On the Waterfront and many other big Hollywood films. Even stranger to me was the discovery that Boris's brother was Dziga Vertov, one of the great filmmakers during the Soviet Union's creative heyday.

The first person Beckett wanted for the only major role in Film was the Irish actor Jack McGowran. He was unavailable, as was Charlie Chaplin and also Zero Mostel, Alan's choice. Later, Mostel did a marvelous job with Burgess Meredith in a TV production of Waiting for Godot that Schneider directed. Finally, Alan suggested Buster Keaton. Sam liked the idea, so Alan flew out to Hollywood to try and sign Buster up. There he found Buster living in extremely modern circumstances. On arrival he had to wait in a separate room while Keaton finished up an imaginary poker game with, among others, the legendary (but long-dead) Hollywood mogul Irving Thalberg. Keaton took the job. During an interview, Beckett told Kevin Brownlow (a Keaton scholar) that "Buster Keaton was inaccessible. He had a poker mind as well as a poker face... He had great endurance, he was very tough, and, yes, reliable. And when you saw that face at the end...  Ah. At last."

As to what the film meant, what it was about, Beckett said:

It's about a man trying to escape from perception of all kinds – from all perceivers, even divine perceivers. There is a picture [on the wall] which he pulls down. But he can't escape from self-perception. It is an idea from Bishop Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and idealist: "To be is to be perceived" – "Esse est percipi." The man who desires to cease to be must cease to be perceived. If being is being perceived, to cease being is to cease to be perceived.

...[There are] the two perceptions – the extraneous perception and his own acute perception, that is, the eye that follows that sees him and his own hazy, reluctant perception of various objects. Boris Kauffman devised a way of distinguishing between them. The extraneous perception was all right, but we didn't solve his own. He (Kauffman) tried to use a filter – his view being hazy and ill-defined. This worked at a certain distance but for close-ups it was no good. Otherwise it was a good job.

In his book, Entrances, Alan Schneider discusses working with Beckett: "Sam was incredible. People always assume him to be unyielding, but when the chips are down, on specifics – here as well as in all his stage productions – he is completely understanding, flexible, and pragmatic. Far from blaming anything on the limitations and mistakes of those around him, he blamed his own material and himself."

Alan went on to say of Film: "I was once told that the British director Peter Brook had seen it and said that half of it was a failure and the other half a success. I'm inclined to agree with him, although I'm not sure we'd both pick the same half. In fact, I change my mind about which half I like every time I see it."

We showed Film at the New York Film Festival and at many other international film festivals, garnering a number of awards along the way. Perhaps we spent too much money and we got almost no theatrical income, but at least today Film is available on videocassette, as is Schneider's and Mostel's fine TV production of Waiting for Godot. Today's audiences can form their own opinions.