I know what I want. I try and convey that at the beginning and set that out, but within those parameters, I'm very happy for them to experiment and try things and give it a go. To me, it's important.

I learned that I enjoy directing a lot more than I enjoy writing, which is interesting, because writing is lonely and infamous basically.

I like to foster an atmosphere on set of collaboration and openness and risk taking. The beauty is when you have such brilliantly talented people as I did in my cast, you definitely don't want to fetter them in any sense. You want them to be able to go out there and do their thing and feel confident in doing their thing, because ultimately I'm the person who gets the credit which is great.

I don't want to sound arrogant and say that I know everything about directing and I've got it cracked, but it was just all in all a joyous experience. To me, the key to directing, to be honest, is just surround yourself with brilliant people and let them do their thing

It's tough to make funny films. And the truth is, with this process, especially if you write your own movie, then you're giving three years of your life to it. And so, I just have to be sure that when I embark on it that I'm happy to think that in three years' time I'm going to be sitting in a room on the tenth floor of an odd office building at Ginsberg Libby talking about it. So I'm keen not to jump into it too quickly and just make sure it's something that I really want.

I think improvisation is really crucial in terms of making things feel real and authentic.

So, as opposed to getting people in to read the script and read scenes with me, what I wanted to do was sit down and chat to these people and just say, "Okay. Do you share my sense of humor? Do you understand what this film is getting at? Do you know the tone that we're trying to get to?" And it was interesting.