East India Company weren't an evil organization that went around deliberately oppressing people, but they were driven by profit, and how familiar is that now?

With FX in particular, they've been fantastic and were really hands off. I mean, it helps that you've got Ridley Scott on your side.

Suddenly, after years of television being the poor relation and film being everything, it now feels like film is a conjuring trick. It's like, "Oh, my god, how are you going to do that in 90 minutes, as opposed to eight hours?! I've got so little time to do this!" It becomes an art form, in itself. Doing both helps you do each one.

I wanted to take a damaged individual in a damaged society with damaged relationships between nations and take a look at how this individual survives amongst them, and that for me as a writer is the connection that you needed to get inside the skin of the main character and wonder how he's going to cope with all this.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

I always thought it would never happen. And then, it became possible. In between commissions, I wrote it as an original screenplay [Allied].

I think the East India Company represents what we would think of as a very modern approach to the world where everything was counted, every penny was counted.