People often talk about whether it's raining, his character, Capt. James Stagg, argues at one point in Pressure, the story of how meteorology saved D-Day. But do they consider WHY it's raining? Or, what actually makes it windy? And how, he asks, can that be boring?
I was doing a play with the writer Suhayla El-Bushra at the National [Theatre], and we were approached about making a film. At the time, the media was full of stories of young people that made that fateful journey to Syria, including Shamima Begum [the London teenager who travelled in secret to Syria to become an IS bride in 2015]. We noticed how those young women were so vilified. They were portrayed as monsters, and nobody was really seeing the experience from their point of view. We felt that that that was really needed.