BOOK dealer Kazanian is attacked—first by cats, and then by rats.
the small size of the rats for the Cen- tral Park sequence, so they did some research and found out that there was a breed known as the Chinese Fight- ing Rat (or something like that), which were big and vicious. They decided that this was the rat species they wanted, so they imported 1,500 of them from Asia! They were huge with slim noses. I was on the set that day with French actor Sacha Pitoëff. There was Lamberto, Dario and Mario hold- ing the rats by their tails between their fingers ready to let them drop on Pitoëff’s body. The details were done at INCIR–De Paolis, as well as the un- derwater scene. It took ages to get a response from Pitoëff, so in the end, Lamberto told everyone to leave the set. And then they heard this enor- mous scream from Pitoëff, but Lam- berto refused to tell anyone how he managed it. It was better not to ask! Some of the rats escaped and then,
ever had. He would say, ‘If you don’t do this, I’ll kill you!’ I remember a story from the time when we killed the gimp in the park. We shot only the close-up in Rome; we had shot everything else before in New York. When we were in Rome, this actor [Sacha Pitoëff] was drinking all the time, and never acting very well; it was very disappointing. We were shooting the scene where the butcher runs across and kills him with the knife. It was Take One, Take Two, Take Three . . . and Lamberto was grum- bling, ‘This cocksfucker [sic] . . . !’ I told him, ‘Lamberto, he’s terrible; we may have to get a stuntman to do this, be- cause this actor is just too drunk.’ Lam- berto told me, ‘Dario, leave the set for a while. Go to the bar or something, leave this to me.’ I went to a bar in the middle of the square, and as I was sitting there, I heard ‘Aaaaaarrrrrggggh!’ I ran back to the set and Lamberto was standing over the actor, telling him, ‘This is going to be the last shot of the picture!’ and he hit him as hard as he could on the head. The man was screaming for real! It was good, it was good . . .” 4 Roy Bava has his own memories of this sequence: “Dario and Mario hated
