In order to achieve the feeling of horror in a scene where a gathering of female prisoners are harassed and psychologically tortured in the nude, director
Michael Cacoyannis decided to appeal for volunteers rather than professional actors, asking both his associates and friends. Cacoyannis interviewed women of different nationalities, including English, French, Americans and Greeks. Most of these women had never even seen a film camera, let alone undressed before one. Money was never an incentive for them. Cacoyannis said, "I explained that their inexperience in acting was an advantage, that their lack of artifice, the spirituality of their spontaneous reactions, would transcend physical realism, the way certain paintings can." At first he was not too successful "recruiting" volunteers, but soon found the women he needed. One was a well-known author, another a journalist, three were college professors, others university students, secretaries or just housewives. The shooting of this sequence was completed in five very stressful hours, and the reactions were neither planned nor rehearsed. At the end of the shooting day, their eyes still full of tears, some of them expressed their gratitude for what they called "a unique experience".
