“So, Max, where are you from?”

“I’m from London, Captain.”

“London? Whereabouts?”

“Oh, the middle bit, Captain.”

“Yeah, but whereabouts?”

“I come from Knightsbridge, Captain.”

“Knightsbridge! You posh c***.”

It was an interesting opening gambit for an Oscar-winning actor to throw to a 17-year-old boy who he’d never met before. But that’s Russell Crowe all over. He’s the boss, especially when he’s throwing an ‘Officers Mess’ dinner in his penthouse apartment on the sets of Master and Commander.

That boy was me. I’d arrived on the Fox Set, in Baja, Mexico (where Titanic had been shot), two days earlier after finishing my Year Eleven Public Exams the previous week.

After cramming on the Crusades, arriving on the set of a $150 million movie with no previous film acting experience was a bit of a shock. And now I was being called a c*** by one of the world’s biggest and (in my humble opinion) best movie actors.

The standard drill with celebrities is to laugh at their jokes and generally flatter their egos. But I was only 17 and I had just been insulted by an Australian who demanded that I call him Captain! I’d never met a celebrity before or been cussed in such base Anglo Saxon terms, so I didn’t, and over the course of the evening we came away with a 2-2 draw in the insult/humiliation stakes.

Which is why Russell and I got along quite well. Celebs live in a bubble where everyone seems to obey their every whim. So if you really want to get on with a celeb, adopt the persona of an arrogant and idiotic schoolboy and you should be fine.

I liked Crowe. He said what he thought and is as fantastic an actor to work with as he is to watch on screen. He taught me a huge amount and was very generous with his time.

But Russell wasn’t the real hero on set. That was the film crew led by Peter Weir, an Australian cut from a very different cloth. Weir (Gallipoli, The Truman Show) is one of those directors that everyone — from lighting technicians to superstars — wants to work with.

The audition process was one of those overnight Hollywood stories that you dream about. The pinnacle of my acting experience to this point had been playing Celia in a school production of As You Like It, a part played more convincingly by Sienna Miller on the West End last year.

The casting directors for Harry Potter came to my school and asked to see some young actors. I went in, did a screen test and thought nothing more of it. Six months later, I was in a hotel room with Peter Weir, doing an improvisational audition. Three days after that, I got the phone call which anyone who has ever grown up with and loved cinema must have dreamed of at least once.

Peter only gave me two bits of advice: “Try not to look down the lens and learn how to hit your mark for the lights without looking at the floor.”

Peter’s style of direction was more about instilling emotions into actors by creating the right atmosphere for a particular scene than telling us what he wanted. He’d do this by playing music — The British Grenadiers before a battle scene or Abide With Me during a funeral — or getting our energy up by making us shout “Huzzah” until we were hoarse before a take or simply fooling around to make me laugh just before the camera rolled in order to get the exact smile he wanted on film.

He was also a fanatical perfectionist. I remember looking through some sheets of prop paper one day. Every piece was covered in scratchy 19th Century script which must have taken hours to make.

“The camera will never see these,” I said. “But you just have,” he replied.

Our uniforms, designed by Peter’s wife Wendy, were superlative and our hair and make-up were all of the period; I was lucky to avoid the 18-inch ponytail originally mooted for my character. My brothers would never have let me live it down.

The atmosphere on set was mostly brilliant. The 20 or so British actors who formed the cast were all a long way from home and families and we all got to know each other inside out. We still go to one another’s weddings and birthday parties which is, I believe, rare amongst actors who have only worked together once.

Working on Master and Commander was a very special, unique experience for everyone involved. However, nostalgia is a dangerous and addictive drug and there certainly were difficult times, a few dull moments and once or twice the tension boiled over but overall it was unforgettable and certainly not regrettable.

“You’ve come in at the top and been incredibly lucky,” one actor told me shortly after filming started. “It will never be this good again, so enjoy it while it lasts.”

I did.

If Russell ever enquires about my address again, I’ll tell him, “Calcutta, Russell.”

I look forward to his reply.