I love the fact that they [girls ]are into Superman and Green Lantern and Batman and everything, and they really do have all those toys as well, but I don't want all their role models to be men.

She was like John Rambo meets Polly Pocket; Dakota Fanning crossed with Death Wish 4.

What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.

Maybe in this Star Wars world maybe subconsciously I was preparing myself. But I've just found all of my ideas I've been coming up with are big sci-fi things, and I wanted to do a big epic, a big space opera, and this is it. This is mine.

The glass is always completely full-half air and half liquid.

I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling.

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.