Dali adapted easily to the technical aspects of animation.

JH: I thought I’d shoot this one scene because I thought it was so astonishing. It was an appearance of the female character, the ballerina, and it was an empty field with just a white ball floating on a field and then two turtles, one approaching from the left and then the right, and I used sliding fills because I didn’t have an animator that I could use. But we pulled these slides across and then when they met, the negative space turned into the ballerina and the ball was her head. And I thought, yeah, I can show that to Walt. He may just go ahead with the thing anyway.

BD: So this was the 15-second sample that survived?

JH: But it was very surprising and I thought it would interest him. And it did interest him too but he put it aside, though. Years afterward, whenever Walt and I talked about Dali, he always said we should have made that thing anyway.

BD: What were your meetings like with Walt and Dali?

JH: Well, in our meetings we discussed the idea of one form morphing into another and when it was right, quit tearing it up so that it remained a double form.

BD: What was their interaction like? Was it hard for them to communicate?

JH: No. No, I think that — a term like morphing and they understood that and what it could lead to and I interpreted some of the meanings of things, which they wouldn’t know. For instance, the hummingbird represented poetry because the hummingbird takes only the essence of the flower and Dali claimed that poetry takes the essence of the idea and things like that had to be explained.

BD: Do you remember any specific ideas that Walt introduced?

JH: Well, they had a Roman god and, uh, it represented a blockage to a labyrinth, but the hummingbird opened it and it became a passageway. I don’t know if people got that or not.

Dali would paint principle scenes such as this, and then Hench would find a way to connect the images.

BD: So that was his idea?

JH: Yes.

BD: So you were pretty much on the same wavelength in using very abstract imagery here?

JH: Oh, yes, everything had some meaning and most of it was to the story of the destiny of love. They kept it pretty much to the theme, only I think the way the morphing was done when one animates to another was very skillful. You were conscious of a flow.

BD: I understand the baseball sequence was very difficult.

JH: Well, yes, because it became a ballet.

BD: Only a fragment of that survives in the finished film.

JH: Well, that’s all that seemed to be needed. Though it was kind of an original idea treating baseball as ballet. Which it is when you think of it.