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.

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.

[Allied] got the attention of (director) Bob Zemeckis and Marion Cotillard. I'm glad I waited. If it had been made 15 years before, who knows how it would have looked, but it's got the best possible cast, director and everything. It's been fantastic. It was worth waiting.

There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.

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 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.

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.