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.

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.

There's more to come. Series 4 [of Peaky Blinders] is coming soon. But I'm proud of making my hometown, which is considered to be completely unfashionable, slightly fashionable. People actually know where it is now.

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.

[The Girl in the Spider's Web] can't be anything other than a sequel, but a couple of books have been skipped, so it is different, in that sense. It's really taking a very strong central character and thinking, how do you execute this? It's quite different.

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.

I didn't direct [the Taboo episodes]. I wrote all of them.