I’ve been asked if it was entirely fair to cast the Russians as the bad guys in ‘Budapest’. It’s true that the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a conflict fought against the Soviet Union – not Russia – but the Hungarians referred to them as “the Russians” and my dialogue reflects this. It might not be entirely accurate, but that was the perception.

When fresh troops were sent in to stamp out the initial, successful uprising, the 8th Mechanized Army was under the command of an Armenian, Lieutenant General Hamazasp Babadzhanian… but the man in the street (who was probably armed with a petrol bomb at that point) wouldn’t have bothered making a distinction between Russians and the Soviet Union.

Strangely enough, this photo was taken on Erzsébet Körút (Elizabeth Boulevard) and Erzsébet is also the name of my heroine. Just a coincidence, but a nice one. I can imagine her taking a picture like this one, in the lull before the fighting resumes in earnest. In her time – in fact from 1950 until 1990 – it was Lenin Boulevard, courtesy of the communists.

Now I’m imagining some Soviet equivalent to John Cleese appearing, to challenge the revolutionary’s grammar…