You can muscle your way to the top as long as you’re part of the production, which I am. I’m knitted into the money, so it’s very hard to extricate me from the decision-making dynamic.
If an actor commits properly to a role, they do a bit mad during a shoot. If they’re going to do that, they should balance themselves by doing a role as a yoga teacher.
The reality of any location in Britain being used in a TV program of a film is that something bad is going to happen! That’s the nature of drama. Most of the things that get made or basically grisly detective shows about murders, accidents or medical dramas.
I’m very superstitious about going on other people’s sets. You have to ask permission of the director; you shouldn’t just turn up and skulk about in the background. It’s very rude. You have to ask them personally. It’s like a vampire being invited into a house.
I like that confusion when people are speaking in the same language but still can’t understand each other. It’s also usually my experience of being in America – when I speak no one can understand what I’m saying.
Film is more of a dream when you’re younger. I found it almost impossible to see how you would get into the industry having no connections, nobody in the family being anywhere near it and never meeting anybody that had been on a set.
It’s part of developing the whole state of how cinema is; everyone is looking out and engaged rather than it being just a financial thing or sitting back, waiting for scripts to turn up.
If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you’re missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.
Lots of crime films are about work. Free Fire could have been about a company of plumbers doing pipe-fixing and stuff. But the plumbing film is not so exciting.
There’s no way you can shoot low-budget stuff on lots of locations. It’s just a practicality thing because every time you move, it costs time and money.
