But he insisted, and who knows whether he was right or not. We had a very short schedule. I think maybe ten days or something like that. When we went out on location to film the scenes of Mars, we went out to Death Valley, and we had to put on our own wardrobe and makeup en route, in the plane, so that as soon as the plane landed, we were ready to work right away. I always felt that we should never have seen any of the Martians, they should have been just shadows.
Imagination is stronger than actually seeing.
But I did think that the red tinting of the Martian scenes was a good idea, and Death Valley turned out to be a good location for us. It looked a bit like what we later found out the Moon was like. I guess they figured they could be pretty freethinking about it. They were a bit crude, all of the Rocketship X-M effects, when you look at 'em today. Osa Massen we don't see much of lately, but for quite a while we kept in touch.