Jon Voight and John Schlesinger wrapped filming in Texas and Voight noticed how red the director's face was. Voight thought Schlesinger was having a heart attack and asked him if he was okay. "He looked up at me and said, 'What have we done? What will they think of us?' After all, we had made a film about a dishwasher who lives in New York and f*cks a lot of women," Voight told Esquire. "In the moment he'd finished it, he was shaking. All of a sudden, he saw it as banal and vulgar. He's having an anxiety attack and I grabbed his shoulders to shake him out of it. I said, 'John, we will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece.' He said, 'You think so?' I said, 'I'm absolutely sure of it.' The only reason I said such an extravagant thing was because I wanted to get him out of it and nothing would take him out of it but that. But the statement turned out to be true."