Nic Roeg inspires me. He’s one of the greatest British film directors. His work is bold, challenging, cinematic and full of mesmerising ideas. - Olly Blackburn

The pure emotion, from a very early age, of seeing a film and feeling it take you over like a high... At first it was all the things I loved as a kid -- James Bond films and Spaghetti Westerns and things like that (which I still love). Then I started discovering the masters and finding out which films spoke to me and when they did -- the total immersion, the experience of being taking to another world for a couple of hours, opening your mind to new things and ideas on such an emotional level. How could you not fall in love with that?

The core idea was to be as realistic as possible and we wanted people to identify with the characters.

I suppose my mega heroes are the films of Michael Powell and Sam Peckinpah. I would have loved to have looked over their shoulder. I’m a bit of a cinephile. I love cinema. It’s an amazing medium. I can go and watch anything from very, very arty films to huge Hollywood spectaculars and everything in between.