‘I could sit back and just admire watching you work. It reminded me of so many things I realized I needed to reconnect with Passion for the work. A hunger to push against your limits. I flew back full of joy, like I’d been given a second chance. I sat down – Antonia will tell you, she watched me do it – and I wrote a list of everything I hadn’t done that I’d once wanted to. Books I love, plays to take forward. I was pulling books off shelves, childhood reading, with a hunger to do better again. To be more than the cliché of a complacent producer finding more pleasure in the attentions of a young actress than in the work. The work is harder by far, but it’s what nourishes you in the end. I’d forgotten that.’

She remembers the first letter she wrote him asking for a job. It was his passion for story she had seen shine through in everything he produced. She had wanted the same for herself.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘And then everything caved in. As you know. And I realized that maybe there would be no second chance after all. And with its loss would go … your film, your hopes. Antonia’s. My children’s. My reputation. Friendships with DB and a few others. I’d indulged in the hubris of trying to convince a lover that she is not loved, even as we made love – and the price to be paid for that was everything.

‘I’ve fought it with everything. I have tried to protect you, and my family, and my employees, and myself.’

‘So much to take on.’

‘I don’t wish Amber ill but I wish to God she’d step forward and take it back. But of course she won’t. Because I broke something between us with such cruelty. And so of course she hates me.’

‘Hate is such a strong word …’

‘If I could disentangle the rest of you from this, I would. I hope you know that. I’d take my punishment. But that has proved impossible. So now I have to work to atone, where I can, and protect the ones I love, if I can.