(ominous music) - I was intrigued by the prospect of how we get that person in their mid-50s.
The chain of events that take him to there.
What I found fascinating was that in the books you do have a very specific, very kind of a dark character, really.
The great thing about starting with books is that it all exists in your imagination.
So there's a freedom there, you know.
Rather than replicating what another actor has done.
That's obviously with a huge amount of respect.
So when we first began to discuss it, we all agreed that to do a carbon copy would be like dissatisfying both for me and for everyone else, but also for an audience as well.
Then I began to see the benefit of having never seen them.
What I would like to achieve is to please the audience that already exist and know those stories, but also for me to create something new and to create a new audience who, like myself, perhaps did not know the original series.
So all of those things were on my mind and we kept having dialogue and discussions about them.
And so I did have a sense of where he ends up.
And I think most important thing is that, like in the books, he's got, it seems to me, his relationship with women is a very interesting one.
And I was curious about where that begins.
If you dig away in the books, it tells you where his mom died, when he was 12 years old, of cancer.
The mom and dad had already split up.
His dad had moved on with somebody else.
And so then as he's just about to reach puberty, he has to go and live with his dad, who he doesn't have a great relationship with, and this woman, who again, he doesn't have a great relationship with, which he's a sensitive guy anyway.
It turns him in on myself.
But I think one of the most important things is that this kid has seen his own mom die and couldn't do anything to save her, which I think drives him throughout the rest of his whole life, really.
So his personal relationships with women are kind of interesting, as a result of that.
And also this idea of the femme fatale, him being like easy prey.
I was kind of interested in all those things and I know we all were as a team.
It's kind of fertile ground, as well, I think, to be able to tell stories in.
