Whenever I see a cut of a film and something is gone, I don't notice it unless it obviously should have been kept.

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.

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.

The story [of Allied] stayed with me, like a stray dog outside the office, waiting.

In other words, when you have someone [like Ridley Scott] with that authority, then you tend to be left alone. But they were good and they're really good people, and I'm a big champion of the BBC and I think that like minds find each other and I think that FX and BBC is a perfect match.

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.

When you're watching, I find two things happen. You either watch a film and it's really good and then you think, "Why can't I do that?" Or you watch a film and it's not good, and you think, "Why am I doing this?" So either way, it feels like being at work.