When you're doing a big movie, you're gone for 10 months to a year.

What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be.

You step forward and make it real for a start. You choose a sensible moment in history. Funnily enough, England was bankrupt and the moment is the death of Richard The Lionheart... Richard takes an arrow in the neck collecting a small debt from a small castle on his way home from the Crusades because he's penniless.

As I'm getting older, I want to make sure every film I do really counts.

Films like Harry Potter and Narnia, I'm sure they'll do another one. The biggest audience of course is the youngsters.

I do a pretty good job at casting actually.

Usually, when special effects get in the way, it's because the story isn't strong enough. If you don't start with a strong screenplay, it's easy to fall back on special effects, thinking it's going to carry you. But it never works. It's just tiresome.