In 1968, he went to America to conduct an interview for BBC-TV with the legendarily crusty director John Ford. At first, Ford (whose dislike of interviews was well-known) refused to appear before cameras, claiming he had assumed it would be an interview for radio; then he sat Jenkinson on his deaf side; then he replied as briefly as possible, or else pretended that he couldn't remember anything about his films; then he became aggressive and attacked Jenkinson for being English, and the English for their actions in Ireland fifty or sixty years earlier. When the interview was finally shown - some two years later - it was most noticeable that there was relatively little footage of Ford, with the time padded out with many extracts from his films. Jenkinson nonetheless said that he and Ford had ended up good friends.
