Stanley wanted me to speak with a New York accent. He said: ‘Listen, a friend who’s a jazz impresario, Norman Ganz, has a really perfect sound.’ So he put this tape on, and it was hysterical. You heard a voice, speaking too loud, saying with a lisp, 'Hi there, Stanley, this is Norman. Jesus Christ, this is a whole script, for God’s sakes, I mean, you really do ask for some strange things.’ Then you hear some rustling of paper, and he starts reading the Lolita script. And that’s where Quilty came from.

Quilty was a fantastic nightmarish character, part homosexual, part drug addict, part sadist, part masochist, part anything twisted and unhealthy you can think of. He had to be horrifying and at the same time funny. I had never met anyone at all like this so I just had to guess, to construct an imaginative idea for myself of what such a person must be like. When I saw myself on the screen, I thought 'This time you’ve done it – no one will ever believe this.’ But then in the U.S. I actually ran into a couple of people who might almost have been role models for the character and I began to think, 'Oh, well, perhaps you weren’t so far out after all.’