Andrew Grieve (HH1)

A&E: What drives the story of this film?

ANDREW GRIEVE: The story is driven by Hornblower's character, basically. He's a fascinating young man, not in the mold of most heroes because he's vulnerable, he's sensitive, he's ungainly, he's gawky, he thinks he's not very attractive. Of course he is terribly attractive.

A&E: What brought you to this film?

AG: I wanted to make the movie because I read the books when I was about ten. I went to sea for four years as a result of reading these books. I never imagined that I'd ever get to do it. And then out of the blue I heard they were going to be done, and for about the first time in my life I really hustled. I'm not usually very good at that, but this time I hustled. And it's been fantastic, it's like a dream.

A&E: How bound by the book have you been?

AG: I feel very bound to the books in terms of the characters. In terms of the story, we hope that we've invented stories that Forester would have thought of had he been writing longer versions. The Mr. Midshipman Hornblower is 200 pages, and we've made four two-hour films out of that. So there's a huge amount of invention. We thought, what might have happened to Hornblower, we thought how it might have influenced his life henceforth. There are well-known facts about him coming out about his marriage, about his adulterous affairs, and so on and so forth, and we just thought about the kinds of things that might have happened to him had Forester filled in all the back stories.

A&E: What do you hope the audience takes from the film?

AG: I'd like the audience to get a kind of recapturing of an age when a lot of old-fashioned things prevailed. Things like honor and keeping your word and not pushing yourself forward and things like that, doing good by stealth, are found out by accident.

A&E: How difficult was it to find the right lead actor for this project?

AG: To find someone to play Hornblower took quite awhile and we saw a lot of fine young actors. We were amazed when we started working with Ioan Gruffudd, because we thought how can this young man who's not long been out of drama school have all the talent that he has? It then transpired that he'd done quite a lot of work as a child actor. He's a terrific find. Of course he was in Titanic. So James Cameron obviously saw the potential.

A&E: Is he afraid of being typecast, of doing only sea adventures?

AG: No, he's not going to be typecast doing this because he's doing so much else. He's already doing some Dickens things and he had already done a couple of other things before this. He's really coming on strong, so I don't think there's any danger at all.

A&E: What is it about these stories that make them so compelling?

AG: I think the British and the Americans are drawn to stories about the sea because they're essentially sea-going nations. The East Coast of America anyway, I don't know about the West Coast. But I think that we're maritime nations, always have been, and it's our heritage.