TRAGEDY The horrors we saw got worse and worse... we hoped that by showing them to the world we could help bring peace but that’s a long way off

good with Jamie because when someone is playing you it is a bit like, ‘Well I don’t do that’. So I just said, ‘Let’s go to the bar’. After a few days it was, ‘Yes, you’ve got me’. We’ve become good friends.”

Paul, who laughs a lot considering what he has been through, went on: “I was a bit scared of doing a film because it was Marie’s legacy. There was so much to think about.

“But I met Ros and she was just so dedicated to getting it right, it only took me an hour to go from feeling a bit nervous to, ‘Yes, I’ll do it’.”

As the main consultant on the film, Paul worked very closely with Jamie and Rosamund on location in Jordan and London, where Marie was based, joking: “I was only supposed to stay for a week; I ended up staying on set for the whole film.” Marie, a middle-class American Fleet Street icon, known for her hard-drinking and straight-talking, suffered from PTSD, an issue explored heavily in A Private War.

Two years after losing an eye in the civil war in Sri Lanka, she reported on a mass grave of Saddam Hussein’s victims being dug up in front hysterical relatives in Iraq.

Paul was alongside her. It was the first time they had worked together and the start of a powerful, if unlikely, pairing chasing stories which made the world sit up.

Paul sees sharing the horror he saw with Marie in Syria as his way of coming to terms with the unspeakable things he witnessed.

Within moments of arriving at the front, he met a mother screaming: “Help my baby, help my baby!”

Paul looked at the bundle in her arms, and it was clear the child was long dead. Paul shakes his head in had been driven i shelling and death.

“And it all got w thought was that if w we could change wh

“I have thousand dead children, but o really brings hom happening.”

Tragically for Pau hundreds of thou innocents killed in work did not cha was about to happe the war rages on.

Paul lets out a sigh: “People sometimes ask me what I