Welles said he would not have gone to South America without the studio's guarantee that he could finish editing "The Magnificent Ambersons" there. "And they absolutely betrayed me and never gave me a shot at it. You know, all I could do was send wires ... But I couldn't walk out on a job which had diplomatic overtones. I was representing America in Brazil, you see. I was a prisoner of the Good Neighbor Policy. That's what made it such a nightmare. I couldn't walk out on Mr. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy with the biggest single thing that they'd done on the cultural level, and simply walk away. And I couldn't get my film in my hands."