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Usually, when you get early versions of scripts, they are not very good. I found 'Borgen' amazing from the very first read-through because of how fast-paced and gripping it was. It felt more international because of the way it didn't dwell on the characters' personal lives as many Danish shows used to, but still, nobody thought it would travel.

I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.

'The Borgias' is quite good because it does stick quite steadfastly to historical fact, so a lot of people who are interested in the historical element will love watching it, but they were also a ridiculously dramatic family.

I'm not really that keen on mainstream; I'm not interested in doing the normal films. I do tend to go for the quirky, different scripts.

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

I'll look at the script and I'll try to find as many books, movies, and pieces of music that I think are going to feed each scene or the character as a whole.

There are plenty of genre-crossover books, films, and games out there, but to do the job well, you have to do more than just smoosh a couple of 'in' concepts together, and hey presto, instant millions.

I read a lot of scripts and so many are clearly a knockoff of one familiar genre or another.

I really enjoy working in genre series, because you really have to create the characters.