The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it.

I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.

Martin [Campbell] is very energetic and precise. He'll on the set like four hours early with a flashlight and I thought, well, I'll certainly try to be very neat about my script like Martin, which I wasn't, but I'm not going to do that bit with the 4AM and the flashlight. I'd love to be able to say I was nervous, but I wasn't. The only time I ever had anxiety it turned out to be asthma.

You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.

I started out as a writer with an hour removed from Kingdom of Heaven. You have to make one print for the entire world, and that's something that influences the theatrical cuts of pictures to an enormous degree. It's a reality. You can't have one cut for the Sunni, and one for the Shia, and one each for Tories, Whigs, vegetarians, one cut for the Cineplex, and one for literary intellectuals.

The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it.

If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.