When I did Nicholas Nickelby originally, that was a co-production between the new Channel 4, Polygram in Europe and Mobil Oil in America, and I have been involved in working on co-productions for years on both sides of the Atlantic and that's very much at the core of what Playground is doing. So marrying, finding projects that can be co-produced and can be produced using the very best talent from both sides of the Atlantic that's absolutely right at the center of what Playground is doing.

I had read the scripts that Nora Ephron had written as a movie about Mike McAlary. We were never able to make it at HBO because we couldn't cast it properly and when I left I called Nora and said, "Look, I actually think that the movie luckyguyindustry has changed. It's very unlikely that you'd be able to make this as a movie. I actually think it's a play."

I think people want the intimacy in the engagement of sitting in a theater with people and seeing something happen live and engage in that. I think that could be a very powerful experience.

I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.

Each audience seems to have a life of its own, which is why watching the show regularly is so exciting, because it's always a different experience.

I think that the marketplace has changed in many dramatic ways but actually in some sense it's remained the same because the challenge of creating quality programming is the same, and I've always thought that if you follow the great material everything else will fall in to place.

I think where Playground is heading is deeper into that marriage between stage, film and television, with the increasing number of people in the film business working in television, obviously something that we were very influential in starting and doing at HBO. And I think that that's the focus of where I see the company moving forward, continuing to explore that intersection of all that talent.