Welles was given some degree of creative control. He worked on the general rewrite of the script, wrote all of the scenes in the drugstore, and wrote scenes at the beginning of the picture that were shot but subsequently cut by Spiegel and executive producer William Goetz. Welles had endeavored to personalize the film and develop a nightmarish tone. There is uncertainty about how much of this material was actually shot and how much was removed. Some scenes elaborated on Meinike's flight through Latin America, shadowed by an agent named Marvales and his wife, a woman in distinctive gold earrings who is murdered by savage dogs kept by the Nazis-in-exile. A brief vestige of the sequence remains in the final release version. In a 1982 interview, Nims said 32 pages of the script were eliminated at his suggestion, including the first 16 pages.