Ridley Scott talks about ''Kingdom of Heaven''

Were you upset that Crusaders didn’t wear armor? It was always a disappointment. I thought I could sneak in some iron suits, but we were way before that. The chain mail was pretty formidable — a real suit of chain mail weighs almost 60 pounds.

Liam Neeson’s character says he once ”fought two days with an arrow through my testicle.” What was your most painful on-set experience? Smashing my meniscus in five places [after slipping on an icy roof during G.I. Jane]. That actually gave me a gamy leg, which affects the other one. So that hurt.

When you’re staging such massive battle scenes, do you ever feel like a general yourself? I would imagine it’s identical, in terms of the pre-planning, conserving the troops, knowing when you’ve pushed it far enough. When you turn up every morning with 3,000 people saying ”What are we gonna do?” — yeah, there’s a definite identification.