We’ve seen it time and again: the cast and crew eulogising their latest screen sensation, with the director acting as cheerleader. Never does the godlike director ever deign to mention the awful mistakes made by his team, much more entertaining than the usual hype.

Allow me to tell you what I have learnt from a few awful mistakes I have never, until now, bragged about.

1. Don’t think you can bluff your way through without a continuity person just because everyone in the cast and crew swears they know the script backwards. This pedigree breed is born, not made. It requires equal parts photographic memory and the ability to report instantly to the director any inconsistency during filming. Which is why I am shown wearing trendy Ray-Ban sunglasses in one scene as the jailer during my movie Mystery of Mata Hari – which is set in 1917.

2. Never show actors what they’ve done on camera that day. At the premiere of one of my movies, a famous actor said: “Ken, thanks so much for letting me see the rushes, especially those of the first day of shooting. I realised I was playing my part too seriously, so from then on I lightened her up.” I groaned inwardly, for she had never equalled her performance of that first day.

3. Never give an unreliable member of the crew a second chance. Once my director of photography left because I would not reshoot a scene. But, as we had been a successful team for years, I rehired him for my next film – at which point he left for the second (and last) time.

4. Never use children. They are born fibbers. One talented boy told me he could swim. Eventually the time came for his character to almost drown. Imagine my chagrin when he shouted to me as I prepared to roll camera: “Mr Russell, I’m terribly sorry, I fibbed, I can’t swim at all.”

“No problem,” I shouted back. “We’ll row you out to discuss it.”

I lied. It was the most convincing drowning scene you can possibly imagine.

5. Never hire an expectant mother. The star of one of my biggest films had to disguise her condition by carrying an assortment of objects in front of her, or wearing voluminous cloaks. Even so, the bump was plainly revealed (for three seconds) when she was thrown off a sled careering down a snow-capped mountain. No harm done, though.

6. Never hire an actress on looks alone. She looked lovely in the TV play in which I first clapped eyes on her. Perfect casting, I thought, for running through lyric cornfields and dancing the night away at a court ball. But when she opened her mouth on screen and said, “Pleased tah meet cher majesty, spesh’ly on yer boithday,” you could have heard a pin drop. This was St Petersburg, not the Bronx. But then, in the TV play, she had played a deaf mute . . .

7. Never work with an actor-producer with the power to override the director. One celebrity noticed in rushes that his bald patch was showing, so suggested we reshoot the offending scene, recoiffed. As we had already left the location we had to rebuild the entire set in the studio. His vanity also put us behind schedule.

8. If there’s anything worse than an actor-producer it’s a writer-producer with a couple of Oscars to his credit. Such was the case with the late Paddy Chayefsky on Altered States. After differences that threatened the very stability of the production itself, I had him banned from the set, with the proviso that I would not change a word of his dialogue. I had no problem with that – until we went to Mexico. Here there was a scene in which two explorers complained of the boiling sun and the heat. But the weather was chilly and rainy. Naturally, the dialogue was adapted to mirror the weather conditions.

“You’ve broken our agreement,” Chayevsky fumed. “You’ve changed my dialogue. Go back and reshoot it.” Thankfully, the production company had also had enough and put its foot down. A narrow escape.

9. Never fall out with your costume designer. Following a difference of opinion one evening, one failed to turn up the next day for the filming of a new sequence with fresh costumes, so naturally we went ahead without her. By the next day she had got over our metaphorical punch-up and turned up to see the rushes.

“What did you think of the costumes?” she asked benignly as the lights came up.

“I thought they were absolutely lovely,” I lied placatingly.

“So much for your taste,” she jeered. “You put the f***ers on back to front.”

10. Never trust your own judgment when choosing your next film. This final mistake is the most painful of all, as it concerns choices for which you have only yourself to blame. A long time ago I was offered two features at the same time, so it was up to me to commit to one or the other: The Rose, a brilliant script about the rock singer Janis Joplin, or Valentino, a biopic about the heart-throb of the silent screen. I wonder which subject you would have chosen. The choice I made was the biggest mistake of my career.

Still, unlike most directors, I’m only human.

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