“I always wanted to make a portrait of Elizabethan London and the first time we had planned to build huge models of London and huge models are big money and it just didn’t work,” says Emmerich.

“And then when we were making 2012 for the first time we had totally digital environments and I realised how good they are. So I talked to Marc and Volker and said ‘do you think it’s possible to build Elizabethan London in a computer?’ And fortunately they said ‘yes..’”