It’s a big complex here. Anyway, I enjoyed working with Jean-Claude, and I enjoy doing that kind of action, and trying to do it differently. I’d seen martial arts films dating back to Bruce Lee, and everyone was in love with slow motion and all that stuff, and I wanted to do the opposite.

I thought the script, the actual story [for Timecop] was really clever. I remember Universal came up with a phenomenal ad line for the film, which was “His wife was killed ten years ago. There’s still time to save her.”

I just thought that was so intriguing. The film that I’ve just finished with Jean-Claude, [Enemies Closer], I’m kind of proud of. It was done on a very low budget, and in a very short amount of time, and I think this is a Jean-Claude Van Damme no one’s ever seen. He plays an absolutely, flamboyantly, lunatic, evil person who… I think you’ll have to see it, but he’s funnier than you’ve ever seen him, he’s nuttier than you’ve ever seen him on screen, and there are no curves. So he’ll be one way, and then at a 90-degree sharp angle, he’ll do something that is so cruel and so violent.

I thought, to create that kind of character, with this really unexpected persona for Jean-Claude, would be really interesting.

He can pull off these really good performances, can’t he, as we saw in JCVD.

Yeah, when I saw JCVD, I saw that he could be funny. And in this one, he’s truly funny, and truly deranged, and quite, quite lethal. I said when we started, “I want this guy to be a mix of JCVD and Hannibal Lecter”.

Does he still do a lot of martial arts, or should we expect a more low-key thriller?

Oh, he’s quite savage. There’s not a lot of martial arts, but there’s a great deal of fighting. But it’s not balletic. It’s really violent, really vicious.

Well, I look forward to seeing that. You once said that filmmaking is a process of failure, because you always find blemishes in your work. But with a greater gap of time, isn’t it easier to appreciate what you got right about your earlier films?

No. It’s harder, and gets harder all the time. Because you raise the bar, and you expect more. You can see better, so to me, the gulf between where I am and the people who I admire is widening, not narrowing.

Peter Hyams, thank you very much.

Enemies Closer is due out in spring 2014.