Exton, who was an experienced television screenwriter, and the other by John Bowen, who was primarily known as a novelist and playwright, but also had extensive television experience, including adapting The Treasure of Abbot Thomas earlier in the series. Filming Lawrence Gordon Clark had made his name as a BBC documentary director during the 1960s. The Stalls of Barchester was the first dramatic production he directed. Clark recalled in an interview for the BFI's DVD release in 2012 that "the BBC at that time gave you the space to fail, and generously so too. They backed you up with marvellous technicians, art departments, film departments and so forth." I was itching to move into drama and knew I had exactly the source material I wanted. I'd discovered M.R. James at boarding school and loved him. So I met with Paul Fox, who was at the time Controller of BBC1. I brought a copy of M.R. James's Ghost Stories with me, with a bookmark stuck in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral". The fact that period drama always has been very popular at the BBC probably helped. Clark recalls that "Paul Fox gave us a tiny budget ... and we set out to do a full-blooded drama on location. Budgets were really tiny, and we shot for ten days and brought the film in for about 8,000 pounds." Unusually for a BBC television drama of the 1970s, each instalment was filmed entirely on location using 16 mm film. As a result, the cameraman John McGlashan, who filmed the first five adaptations, was able to make use of night shoots and dark, shadowy interiors, which would not have been possible with the then-standard video-based studio interiors. Clark notes that McGlashan, and the sound recordist Dick Manton's contribution to the series "was every bit as great as mine, In an interview in 1995, Lawrence Gordon Clark stated that the stories "focus on suggestion. The aim, they say, is to chill rather than shock. Partly because television is not best suited to carrying off big-screen pyrotechnics, but mainly because they want to keep faith with the notion of a ghost story in its literary rather than cinematic tradition." Helen Wheatley notes that the best adaptations maintain the stories' "sense of decorum and restraint, ... withholding the full revelation of the supernatural until the very last moment, and centring on the suggestion of a ghostly presence