It's a funny thing - the reality is I have no feelings about school. It's long gone. Funnily enough, the bad memories - of which I don't have any left to be honest, I can just remember a sense of tedium - have faded. And teachers that I liked have remained quite vivid. There are three or four left.

The last thing I would attempt to do is to buy clothes for a child I didn't know well.

It's an unknown quantity. It's actually almost a cliché to say it, how hard comedy is. What's that famous quote? "Dying is easy, comedy's hard." I think the broader it gets, if you miss by a millimetre, you've missed completely. It's a very hard thing to do.

I was gearing up for it. I took some singing lessons. And I opened my mouth, and Atom promptly said, 'That's not going to happen. We love your voice, but maybe we could use some of your English wit.' He had doubts about it from way back. For starters, we weren't going to be doing the Italian-American crooning thing.

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

When I visited coffee farms in Ethiopia, the farmers could not believe we spend a week's wages in their country on a cup of coffee in ours, because they see so little of the profits. Oxfam's fair trade campaign helps right this wrong.

Some people come up to be directors by coming through the camera department and there's not a lot of women in the camera department. The ones that are have to kind of prove they're one of the boys, I think. I don't want to get into trouble with generalisations but I think it's a fair observation.