‘The lances were made of balsa wood and filled with uncooked spaghetti – so that when they broke, there’d be an explosion of what looked like splinters’

I wrote and directed the Mel Gibson film Payback but got fired during post-production. It was my first film as director and I thought my career was over. It was during this downtime that I wrote A Knight’s Tale. I loved the idea that jousting tournaments were medieval sports, but I had never figured out what to do with it. I thought about the ideas underpinning it: a peasant who wants to be a noble was like a screenwriter wanting to be a director. It’s a guy trying to be something he has no right to be.