You have to be ill if you want to get better.

It's entirely to do with personality, I think. There are good directors who talk a lot, bad directors who talk a lot, and good directors who don't say much and vice-versa. It just depends on whether people respond to that personality and whether people have a willingness to do something for them.

The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you're in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you've laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.

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.

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.

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.

What infuriates me is that in America violence is judged in context, whereas language is not. So with language there is an arithmetic that says: one f*** is a PG 13, two f***s is an R. They don't say: one bullet through one head is a PG 13, two bullets through more than two heads is an R.