Issue No.26

Was there a point when, before you wrote
Labyrinth, your first big blockbuster, the
idea was just in your head, when you
suddenly thought - I'm going to do this, a
sort of a Eureka moment?
To start with, I fell in love with the place,
then the history. We bought a tiny house in
the shadow of the medieval city walls of
Carcassonne in November 1989, when I was
expecting our first child. For three months of
my maternity leave with my daughter in
1990 we were based there and, two years
later, we did the same thing when our son
was born During these early years, I was
always reading about the astonishing history
of Carcassonne - particularly about the
religious wars of the 13th century and a
group of so-called heretical Christians, the
Cathars, and I was hooked. Little by little, I
started to realise that the images I had in my
head were actually not scenes from history
at all, but rather imagined characters set
against the backdrop of the history I was
coming to know so well. Then, in the late
1990s, we went to one of the key sites in the
Cathar story, Montségur in the Pyrenees. It
was March, the time of year in 1244 when
the siege of the citadel came to an end, and
some two hundred Cathars were brought
down the mountain by the Catholic soldiers
to be burned at the pyre.
As I climbed the mountain on my own -
leaving my husband, mother-in-law and our
children building a snowman beside the
memorial to the Cathar martyrs at the foot of
the mountain - I thought about how it was
the key end point really of the Cathar
Crusade, the moment at which the
independence of the Midi came to an end. It
was really cold and there was a heavy mist.
And then suddenly I was up and through the
cloud cover, where the sky above was an
intense blue.