The Last King of Scotland cost around five million pounds, your latest film is rumoured to cost over 80 million dollars. Presumably you wont be shooting on the hoof this time.

I don’t know. I am hoping that the Director of Photography and I can find a way of having a certain spontaneity and we both agree that we never want to use cranes and be hand held most of the time. Certainly it is different from The Last King of Scotland in that here you can have whatever you want. And so I don’t know what effect that is going to have. I am curious. The important thing for me is you have to retain a certain degree of anarchy. But I am not sure how easy it is to retain anarchy when you are working with that amount of money!

Have you tasted the apple in the Garden of Eden? Will you ever go back to low budget British films?

I would like to carry on doing everything you know. For me doing this Hollywood film is really an adventure but I am not sort of embracing a Hollywood career at present. But if somebody says to you, ‘Do you want Ed Norton and Helen Mirren and to do a movie for a huge amount of money in a studio and we will build a huge set?’ I said, ‘Well of course, who wouldn’t.’ You would be mad not to try it once wouldn’t you? So that’s the way I see it. And we will see what happens.

Are you nervous?

No, because it’s all magic and it is out of your control. My grandfather used to say that you build the best nest you can and have to hope that the magic is going to come and flutter down and reside in the nest that you have created. You can prepare as much as you like and it can all go wrong.

How did the magic come about with The Last King of Scotland?

I read Peter Morgan’s script and got very excited and saw the way to mix fact and fiction and a way to make a film that is both, you know, horrific and comedic. You get a surge of excitement when you get the feeling you know how to make it work or you understand the tone of something and it is an indefinable thing. You kind of grasp what the story is to yourself without putting it into words. The producer Lisa Bryer had been battling for ages to make it and it was fully supported and nurtured by Film4.