Why did you pick the countryside as a subject?

It was a very good fusion between a commissioning editor and a director. I’d been toying with making a hunting film, but had never gone far enough into it, then the ban happened and Peter Dale phoned and said, ‘Shouldn’t you get out there now?’ He knew it was a big news story. I went to some posh hunt in the Home Counties. I didn’t like the culture at all, but I met Glynn Pearman and my antenna immediately went out because to me it is all about casting. If you’ve got the right character, then whatever they believe becomes the ballast of the film. I knew from the way he leapt off his horse. He was polite and much shorter than me, so easy to talk to. He said, ‘What do you want to know? I’ll help you.’

At what point did the film change from hunting to a bigger picture of the countryside?

When I went out with Ian [a farmer featured in Lie of the Land] on a flesh run and watched him shoot healthy animals. He said, ‘Oh, it’s just something that goes on in the countryside now, it’s just the way things are’ and I realised there was a story.

What does your film tell us about the countryside today?

I come from a modern, urban life and I romanticise the countryside. I passionately believe that it has got more ballast, more self-belief, more structure to it, more continuity. When I was shooting, what was heart-breaking about the calves being shot and stripped like that was just how any living thing can be so worthless, so valueless.

I’m not an insane church-goer but on quite a religious level it seemed to me deeply immoral that life should be created just to be destroyed, purely because of money. Where do you draw the line? When do you value a life and when do you not?