I think it's quite extraordinary that people cast me as if I'm Warren Beatty: until I met my present wife, at the age of 35, you could name two girlfriends.

I like playing strange characters. Some people might say it has something to do with a hidden part of myself, but I think it's a lot simpler than that: normal people are just not very interesting.

And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There's still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It's quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.

People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It's not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.

They said: "Make it in this amount of time and go for it now..." Which is why I was suddenly ambushed and we all found ourselves doing it. I suspect this wasn't quite recognisable in its genre to give people the confidence just to throw money at it.

It's hard to get yourself into a position where someone will trust you to direct a film anyway, whatever sex you are. Certainly in England, the film set is a very male preserve. There's a lot of very rough looking men pushing equipment around that don't want the gaffer to be a girl.

No matter how much technique you draw on or how much training you have, acting is a mystery.