Sean Langan

You might need that shot.

Leave that in so people know I've walked out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

By the way, will it ruin your continuity if we now keep filming outside?

What's funny, actually, the bird sound, that was the sound I remember most in Ukraine.

Yeah, so the literary mythology, you know, birdsong is...

linked to World War I in the trenches, there was no bird song.

They only hear the bird song after guns fall.

And there I was in eastern Ukraine, and it's like being back in the summer.

It's the weirdest, most disturbing place I'd been to.

But what surprised me most, and where these literature movies have got it wrong, the birds didn't go full silent in their barrages and their artillery shells.

I mean, the sound was so disturbing because your whole body... But the bird song, really weird anyway.

The most worrying part for me was there had been no negotiations for weeks, months of dealing, which is why I was terrified because...

If there's negotiations, you know they want money.

And that was when they were checking the security.

How on earth had I got so close to them?

Then negotiations, we were told, had started and hopes were raised.

That's when I realized, going back to earlier points, the need to batten down the hatches because when you can see light at the end of the tunnel, it's really dangerous because when it doesn't happen, you collapse.

And so when they told me negotiations were starting,

I raised my hopes.