[In the following essay, Burrill—one of the producers on Polanski's Tess—describes the process of bringing the film through production to release.]

Roman Polanski first approached me with the idea of producing an adaptation of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 1977. He got in touch while I was in New York and asked if I could work on the film. I'd helped produce his Macbeth and we'd got on very well. So I flew back to Paris and met Claude Berri who wanted to finance Tess with his company Renn Productions. Berri and I were mutually suspicious at first, sizing each other up like dogs, but once we observed each other's quality, we hit it off and have worked together non-stop since.

We felt that Tess would be an ideal Franco-British co-production, but it was clear that if Roman went back to the UK he would be extradited because of American charges against him for having sex with a minor. In France, however, he was safe (the charge was not one the French authorities considered worthy of extradition), so we accepted the fact that we would have to shoot in Northern France.

The film was started in quite a rush. We wanted to get going with enough time to get all the summer in and Polanski was keen to start on a new film at that crucial point in his career. We even paid out ＄50,000 for the rights of the Hardy book, which was still in the David Selznick estate (Selznick had bought it up in the 40s intending to make a film adaptation) and would come out of copyright only six months after we started filming. That hurt. It went against the grain to pay out so much.

The script was completed only a couple of weeks before shooting began. Tess of the D'Urbervilles was a difficult book to cut, but the writers (Roman Polanski, Gérard Brach and then later John Brownjohn) were very economical. I remember noticing a scene at the beginning of the book in which the Durbeyfield horse is speared by the shaft of a mailcart and thinking Roman's bound to put that in the screenplay, and it'll cost a fortune. But, to my relief, he didn't. John Brownjohn was asked to join the team when Roman, who initially co-wrote the script in French with Brach (his long-time writing partner), needed a translator. He asked me to find one, but I couldn't think of anybody who had the ability to be totally bilingual and also make a creative input. So I looked in a list of interpreters and Brownjohn was, by chance, the first name. He lived in the village of Marnhull in Dorset, which was (by some extraordinary coincidence) the village on which Hardy's Marlott was based. So I drove down, met him and liked him enormously. He spent a lot of time in Paris working directly with Polanski and Brach and it was a marriage made in heaven. He created dialogue which was effectively West Countryish.

Crucial to the film was the casting of the central character, Tess. From the start Roman was determined that Nastassia Kinski play the role, but there was a problem. British Equity rejected Kinski and said we must use an English girl and that if we didn't they would black the film. Mary Selway, the casting director, looked around and said she couldn't find any English girl who could play the part better than Kinski. We were at loggerheads. I found myself in a battle with the Department of Trade and Industry, which was responsible for formally authorising the co-production, and I went there and said, “Look this is lunacy, that this film should be stopped when there's so much work that's going to go to British actors.” And so they rejected the Equity claim. Later when the film was shown to the general secretary of Equity he had the grace to come up to me and say, “You were absolutely right.” Kinski was extraordinary, and she worked incredibly hard, coming to London to work on her accent with dialogue coach Kate Fleming at the National Theatre, and to Dorset where she worked on a farm and learned how to milk. The rest of the cast too were marvellous (Carolyn Pickles, Leigh Lawson, Peter Firth) and there was a wonderful entente cordiale between the British actors and the French crew.

The translocation of shooting from England to France was surprisingly effective. Because of the style of farming in Britain nowadays, the very small fields of Hardy's time, no longer exist in Devon and Dorset. But they do exist in France. So the countryside in Tess is infinitely more accurate than it would have been had we shot it in the British West Country. There was, however, no French replacement for Stonehenge, the site of the final scene in the book and film. We built a new Stonehenge, an absolutely accurate representation of the circle as it would have been in the nineteenth century. Designed using archival pictures, our circle was made to scale out of polystyrene. In the end, we only shot one scene in England: the train scene. That was filmed at the Bluebell line by second-unit director Hercules Bellville, with Billy Williams lighting. We couldn't find a decent station in France.

The production went well over budget. We had endless problems which were only partly caused by Roman's inability to keep to the schedule (he was enormously meticulous and would spend hours over shots). There was a strike which made us stop shooting. We'd done a deal with the Societé Française de Production (a studio just outside Paris) and were due to use it at the end of the summer. They were a publicly owned company and were often in dispute with the government. So by some bad luck, we found ourselves affected by a strike which had nothing to do with us. They wouldn't let us into the studio and there was nothing we could do. We had to shut up shop, and of course that cost a fortune. Then there was poor Geoffrey Unsworth, the cinematographer, who died half-way through filming. That was agony, but Polanski kept on shooting almost immediately. We took on Ghislain Cloquet for the rest of the film, and the marvel is that you can't tell who shot what. You would think there was only one cinematographer on the film.

Tess was hugely successful in the end, but there was a moment when we had failed to find distributors in Britain and the States and I was still owing lots of money, and someone said to me, “Just sell it to the BBC and get out.” In those days only two people were responsible for booking the films for 90 per cent of the cinemas in the US—George Pinches for the Rank circuit and Bob Webster for ABC. Both rejected Tess and it seemed we were doomed. It was Charles Champlin of the LA Times who saved us. He raved about the film and persuaded Frank Price at Columbia to see it. Price liked it very much and put it on in two cinemas in time for Oscar nominations. Thankfully it was nominated for six, and won three awards for Best Costume Design (Anthony Powell), Best Cinematography (Cloquet and Unsworth) and Best Art Direction (Pierre Guffroy and Jack Stephens). After that, we were made.