What I wanted to do [in Allied] was get two characters who fall in love for real, across the barricade, and then it transcends the war.

[Woman Walks Ahead] is from me being a very bizarre child. From the age of about 8 to the age of about 15, I was obsessed with Native Americans.

When I was probably about 10 or 11, and I found it was simply something I could do. When you're at school and you do something and you get praised for it, you think, "Oh, right, well I'll do that." From then on, I always thought I'd be a writer. I thought novels at first, and then I sort of naturally drifted into TV.

I visited the set [of Allied] a few times, and it was a great set to visit. A lot of it was in West London, in an old Gillette factory. You'd go into the factory through the security, and then there were a lot of camels and goats. Most sets are really dull, but this was fantastic.

Obviously, television is a writer's medium, so you get a lot more power and authority. With a film, the discipline is having a beginning, middle and end, and having it work in a specific space of time.

It's such a gift when you know who you're writing for and you know that that actor is capable of so much that you can relax a bit.

Just the idea that someone is married and they've got a kid, and he reports for work one morning and his boss says, "You're wife is a spy. Shoot her." In the real story, he just went back and did it, which would have been a short film. Therefore, I had to spend some time exploring what you would do.