Sir Ian McKellen

and you're at his service.

And that's a very happy position to be in as an actor because he's very confident of what he wants and he lets you know if he's got it or if he hasn't.

That said, he's not eager to do much preparation with the actors in advance.

The script is there and you're expected to have prepared it somehow on your own and just arrive and be ready to film.

And that's not how I've worked in the past.

And I said, I do need a bit of preparation, a bit of rehearsal.

So he lent me the...

Ed Solomon, the screenplay writer, and Michaela, and he came round to my house next door and sat around the table for a week talking about the script and reading it and amending it, adding bits and removing bits.

And at the end of the day, this work was sent over to

the director for his approval, which invariably we got.

And so that's how we prepared.

But the actual filming was down to work straight away.

And if he got what he needed, and he knew, because he was holding the camera and moving it around with the actors,

There was no need to repeat it a second time, and it's usual when you're making a film to do it at least once or twice or three or four times.

I remember on Lord of the Rings with Peter Jackson, Christopher Lee saying to me, good Lord, he said, I had to do that scene 10 times.

I said, that's nothing, I did a scene yesterday 28 times.

But with Soderbergh, no.

Once, and you're off.

Home at three o'clock in the afternoon, and he goes back and edits, literally, the day's work, cuts it in his mind, and in fact,

So by the end of the film, he has completed basically his work on it, which is extremely unusual.