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.

And anyway, it's only movies. to stop me I think they'll ahve to shoot me in the head.

I spend a lot of my time just developing material; or the company does. That material can come from a book, can come from a newspaper, can come from a discussion and sometimes it can come from a script that got passed over and is floating around.

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

I think if I'm going to do a science fiction, I'm going to go down a new path that I want to do.

Audiences are less intrigued, honestly, by battle. They're more intrigued by human relations. If you're making a film about the trappings of the period, and you're forgetting that human relationships are the most engaging part of the storytelling process, then you're in trouble.

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