Kevin Connor, director

Amicus were a kind of second-string Hammer Horror in the 1960s – my first film for them was From Beyond the Grave. By the 70s, they were trying to move in a different direction and do productions that could compete with Hollywood.

Amicus had got a deal with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ estate to make three or four movies based on his books. Producer Milton Subotsky handed me a script for The Land That Time Forgot, about a crew of first world war sailors who discover an island inhabited by dinosaurs and prehistoric men. The adaptation was co-written by the fantasy writer Michael Moorcock and smoothed over some of the novel’s more Victorian attitudes.

We had a slightly bigger budget – about $250,000 – but we still had to be really inventive about the special effects. The production designer, Maurice Carter, suggested doing all the dinosaurs as hand puppets. They were about 2ft tall and the guy who made them, Roger Dicken, had his arm up inside them, while their arms were on tiny sticks, a bit like the Muppets. We could go in quite close, they were so beautifully made. We front-projected the forest backgrounds we had shot on large-format VistaVision.

‘All the dinosaurs were hand puppets – worked by the guy who made them’ Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Shepperton was empty at the time, so we had the run of the studio. We built a full-size submarine exterior and flooded it - but it was only three feet deep. We recreated the landscapes of Caprona, the prehistoric island, in an overgrown clay pit in Reading – we didn’t even have to do that much to it, just put in the odd palm tree.

Handling actors was a bigger problem, because I didn’t have any stage training. Our American distributors insisted on Doug McClure, who was a bigger draw than the actor originally cast. He’d done so much action stuff that he made the fight sequences easy. He knew how to throw a punch in relation to the camera. But maybe he was frustrated with those kinds of roles, because he was drinking a lot. He’d also just split up with his wife. He was a big pussycat with me, but he got into a few fights. One lunchtime he punched a hole clean through the producer’s wall because his private car wasn’t available. The producer had the hole cut out and framed.

It was a big hit in the UK – the 14th highest-grossing film of 1975 – but it didn’t do so well in the US. You don’t expect the kind of philosophical ideas it has about evolution from that kind of Saturday-morning entertainment. Kids’ films were relegated to a lower stature at the time; you weren’t supposed to spend too much money on them. But that’s exactly what Spielberg started doing – making intelligent kids’ films that mum and dad could see as well. The British film industry missed a trick there. Twenty years later, when I saw the big dinosaur reveal at the start of Jurassic Park, I thought: “Oh, my goodness!”

Susan Penhaligon, actor

The Land That Time Forgot was a fork in the road for me. I was in my mid-20s, and I thought I needed to do another film, as a way into Hollywood. I turned down Miranda in The Tempest with the Royal Shakespeare Company to do it – and from then on I very much had a commercial hashtag over me.

I thought we might go to somewhere exotic to film it, but I ended up in a clay pit in Reading. My character was supposed to be a biologist, but there wasn’t much preparation required. You always get slightly frustrated with the script in action films. But you have to learn completely different kinds of skills, like acting with monsters that aren’t there in front of you. We often did this with projected backdrops, the 70s equivalent of green screen.

My character ended up running around after Doug McClure and screaming a lot. He was very protective of me as all the action stuff was new to me. He knew exactly where to stand when the volcanoes were going off, with bits of cork flying everywhere. One stuntman got burned when they recreated a crack opening up in the Earth with flames coming out.

‘I spent years thinking I’d made a mistake’ … Susan Penhaligon with McClure in the pit. Photograph: Allstar/AIP/STUDIOCANAL

I don’t know why I wasn’t asked to be in the sequel, The People That Time Forgot. Maybe they wanted someone more glamorous in that instantly recognisable American way than me. But the film raised my profile, and I ended up being cast in the series Bouquet of Barbed Wire, which came to be seen as a turning point for TV.

I spent years thinking I’d made a mistake doing Land and I should have gone to the RSC. But I’m beginning to reassess it now. It’s kind of cool to be in a cult film. What’s interesting now is that the commercial and classical worlds have converged and actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch move between the two.