Siegel liked working with producer Walter Wanger - they had made Riot on Cell Block 11 together - a producer who inspires creativity and doesn't try to direct. Siegel worked on the script with Danny Mainwaring, which was based on a story by Jack Finney - "A damned good one. We just translated it into cinematic terms. There was a real effort to make it completely believable. This is probably my best film and I felt that this was a very important story. I think that the world is populated by pods and I wanted to show them. I think that many people have no feeling about cultural things, no feeling of pain, of sorrow. I thought I shot it very imaginatively, as in the cave I found..." The opening and ending were stuck on (at the studio's insistence), and actually really dilute the film, which would have ended with Kevin McCarthy pointing at the audience and screaming "You're next!"...
Whilst Siegel (in conversation here with Peter Bogdanovich) acknowledges the reference to McCarthy and totalitarianism, he thinks it's not specifically about America but the world in general.
That scene in the mine shaft - with the aliens running over the boards with the couple beneath - does stand out, as does the sequence where they observe the townspeople, seemingly behaving normally, then suddenly are all called to order to disperse pods.
Apart from Kevin McCarthy - who we know from Hotel - I didn't recognise any of the cast names nor the crew. For the record, the cast includes Dana Wynter, Larry Gates. King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, Jean Willes... and Sam Peckinpah!
On camera: Ellsworth Fredericks, music Carmen Dragon, editing Robert Elsen.
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