I ask whether he will sign on for the final three films. “I don’t know. I really don’t know what the circumstances will be for the last three. I don’t know if I should be saying this, although if anyone has got any brains they’ll have worked it out, but if Jo Rowling hasn’t finished books six and seven within the next two years, the kids we’ve got at the moment will be too old to play the parts. And they may not even want to. So it depends on the variables. In some ways I would rather get on with something else, but I don’t want to say that because it sounds so f**king ungrateful.”

He pauses, and cocks his head like an owl listening for a mouse in a cornfield. He has heard a motorbike zoom past outside and is enjoying the sound of the engine.

On Ocean's Twelve...