King Arthur is, by anyone's standards, an epic movie. 'Normally big battle-scene shoots last a week at most. We were filming battles here continuously for 12 weeks,' says Kenny Crouch, who, as costume supervisor, had to organise large chunks of it, and get a couple of thousand actors and extras on set every day.

All of them had to be costumed, made-up and ready by the time shooting started at first light each morning. Bussing the extras in from Dublin began at 4am. 'We had a quarter of a mile of rails to store all that armour on,' says Kenny, 'and we had to get all of it onto the extras by 6am. None of them could get into their armour by themselves. We were putting a thousand actors and actresses through the costume tent per hour. We developed a buddy system, as in the real army – you buckle your mate into his armour, he buckles you into yours.’

The Dark Ages were smelly, and the film shoot recreated even that, too. ‘The Woads had blue tattoos all over their bodies and on their faces. The stuff we used washes off. So we did a deal with the extras playing the Woad army – if they didn’t wash all week, we would pick them up at 5am instead of 4am. We saved ourselves and hour’s make-up time on each of them every morning, and they got an extra hour in bed. We gave them tracksuits to try to keep the smell in when they weren’t on camera, and we let them take a shower on Friday afternoons.’