Yann Martel

I mean, and I'm sorry, the banality of a relationship falling apart is as excruciating as being in a battlefield.

The rawness, the lostness, the losing of everything to me is very martial, is very warlike.

So yes, I take the grand epic

which, as I said earlier, despite it being a granite, is very personal.

You have wounded men emotionally who are trying to cope with it.

Yes, there are fantastic fighting scenes where limbs are cut off, skulls are crushed, but that's the entertainment.

The real strength of the Iliad is when they're not butchering each other and they're talking about their fates.

You see the origins of Greek philosophy in the Iliad.

The Greeks are questioning people.

They ask questions.

I don't know what people were doing in the year 1000 before BC and the rest of Europe, but just picking their noses, I presume.

But the Greeks were actually thinking and asking themselves questions.

So it's those questions that are really illuminating.

And so I wanted to have that reflected in a more modern war.

And to me, a good one was a relationship falling apart.

And Harlow does the same thing Agamemnon and all the Greeks does.

He leaves his homeland hoping to do good.

They were hoping to have a quick little war, like in 1914, a little summer jaunt over there, beat these enemies, come back, be better for it, and all that.

Well, Harlow does the same thing.

He's hoping that going... First of all, who would refuse a fellowship to Oxford?