I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.

For film and games, there is now a fantastic method of actors portraying characters which don't necessarily look like themselves. And yet you've still got the heart and soul of the performance.

When you start to do research into gorillas or any kind of apes, if you're going to play them, that's one of the biggest misconceptions. And when I did Kong, you're not doing gorilla movements, you're not doing ape movements, you're looking for a personality. It's like saying okay I'm going to do human movements.

Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.

That's why I ended up going to Lancaster University, because they had a visual arts course, and in the first year it was like a broad visual arts course in sculpture, painting, graphics - all of that.

Motion capture is exactly what it says: it's physical moves, whereas performance capture is the entire performance - including your facial performance. If you're doing, say, martial arts for a video game, that is motion capture. This is basically another way of recording an actor's performance: audio, facial and physical.

I've been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.