‘A major part of my film education were the great 70s US political thrillers like All The President’s Men, The Parallax View, and Three Days of The Condor and as it seemed like there were no genre equivalents on this side of the pond, I was fired by the challenge of creating a British political thriller. I knew my hero had to be an unprincipled newspaperman who eventually sees the light (Nick Mullen, superbly played by Gabriel Byrne), so spent a few weeks sitting in with the reporters at the Daily Express and Daily Mirror to give authenticity to Mullen’s world’