So the story of its creation begins as a purely personal confession and then shifts toward cinema. Hackford asked Collins to write a song for the film Against All Odds, and Collins went back to that old, abandoned song and adapted it to fit the movie. According to another version of the story, the song had been left off not only Face Value but also his second solo album, until Collins, while on tour with Genesis, looked again at the demo, finished the lyrics so they would match the tone of the film, and recorded it in just two days with producer Arif Mardin. So this is not a song written from scratch for Hollywood. It is a song that already existed as a wound and suddenly found its moment through a cinematic commission.