In fact, the ground breaking CGI techniques used on 2012 convinced Emmerich that his team could convincingly, and cost effectively, recreate an historically accurate 400-year-old landscape on the screen.

The director made a first, tentative, attempt to get Anonymous (then called Soul of the Age) off the ground some six years ago – but the cost of building accurate period sets and filming on location with historical buildings meant that the budget would have rocketed and wasn’t, at the time, feasible.