JAMES WATKINS

There are a lot of horror films out there that are nasty, but what's nasty isn't necessarily scary.

In Zagreb, the Old Town really could be Prague. You go two hours to the coast to Opatija, and you really could be in the South of France, in the Croatian Riviera. And then you head down the coast towards Split, and you get into more Turkish architecture, so you can double Istanbul.

Where previously the international underworld was a world of local, often-warring mafia territories, it has become globalised. The criminal has become corporate, and the corporate has become criminal. Organised crime has become very organised indeed.

Chemistry's a weird thing. You can see actors who are friends in real life but have no screen chemistry. Then there are actors who don't get on but have great chemistry.

'The Godfather' is the talismanic giant that hangs over everything in the gangster genre.

If you look at 'The Sopranos,' there's this notion of a criminal element on its last legs.

The opportunity to be able to tell long-form character stories is something that TV affords and is therefore a terrain that a lot of filmmakers are interested in exploring.

It helps for actors if you have one director.

For action to work, you need an awful lot of coverage. Because if you do a fight sequence, you really need to be able to creed the energy in the edit or augment the energy in the edit. So you need to really, really cover it.

As a screenwriter, you are so used to things going in directions that you wouldn't have taken, so to be able to say, 'This is how I intended it, this is how I want to shoot it, and these are the decisions that I'll live by,' I think directing is a logical conclusion of mine.

If you look around in London, there is a lot of dirty money. People see it as a safe haven: a bolthole to rely on if they are criminal or politically exposed in their own country.

Directing is an act of interpretation.

There's nothing worse in television than what I call 'poor man's Jerry Bruckheimer.'

We think criminality is something that exists in somehow another world to us. But actually, there is an invisible criminal web in which we are all enveloped.

People like to see their lives mythologized in some way.

Rather than a horror film, a ghost story is different because a ghost is what you can't quite see.

We want 'McMafia' to be a tense gangster story but also a family story. It's a collusion of those two worlds.

I've got lots of friends who would just think, 'Horror movies - they're crap, aren't they?' I think there's a cultural snobbery more than an institutional one.

The first series of 'McMafia' is very Alex Godman-centric and could continue to be, but we haven't even begun to explore the Middle East or Africa or even South America in detail. One of our ambitions would be to drop into some of these other places and, by doing so, bring the audience into a world that they wouldn't necessarily have been in.

If you think about the traditional mafia stories we grew up on, it is always about the death of criminal organisations - things like the 'Sopranos' - the last vestiges of once proud families subsumed by the modern era.

A lot of the best stories are now being told on television.

Living in London, you feel the sense of how it has developed into a service city. People come here from around the world - both to launder their money and launder their reputations.

I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent - it feels fake.

Filming in India was very special. The chaos, the noise, and the sensory overload was all really wonderful. It was a new world to me, and being able to capture that was incredible.

Television is ever more ambitious, more akin to the Victorian novel with multiple narratives and more discursive material.