Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a film director, born into the magnificence of Imperial Vienna at the beginning

of this century, his early ambition was to be a musician, but inspired by the work of men like Eisenstein

and Stroheim, he chose the cinema instead, and in

1929 emigrated to the United States.

His career since then is a living history of Hollywood.

He's won five Oscars and worked with all the great

names from Spencer Tracy and Grace Kelly to Vanessa Redgrave and Sean Connery.

His 21 feature films include some of the most popular and durable ever made,

films such as High Noon, from Here to Eternity, Oklahoma, and a man for all seasons.

He is Fred Zinnan. Do you feel those films, Mr. Zineman and so many more

the Nunn story and the Day of the Jackal, do you feel there's still very much a part of you or are they just labels

that people pull out with your name? They are part of me of course, but it's a

distant past. At my age and 83 it's all very far away really.

Do you have them all on tape? Do you watch them?

I don't watch them if I can help it. I sometimes look out of curiosity when I played on the TV.

But you don't have them, recordings of them tucked away in a cupboard somewhere.

I have two or three. I have, uh, I have a high known because somebody gave it to me and have Oklahoma because they like the music.

But by and large I don't spend too much time on reminiscing.

But of course you might never have been a film director as I was saying you you might have been a doctor or a physician indeed if your parents had had their way.

That's right, yes. The reason for that was that in Vienna you have to have the title of

...