James Watkins

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“People like to see their lives mythologized in some way.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”