To criticise a person for their race is a manifestly irrational and ridiculous. But to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom.

It was the challenge of that that I found daunting, but also engaging and interesting [to play Maigret].

Get that right, then- if you get the quality right, then the marketability or whatever; your ability to sell videos or your ability to earn money or whatever, will follow naturally. But try to be creatively lead rather than market lead. And that's important to me.

One of the conventions that I always liked was Doctor Zhivago, where everything that's written on the screen is in Russian but everyone speaks English. That seemed to me to be quite a good convention to follow.

Your services might be as useful as a barbershop on the steps of a guillotine.

Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something - this side of it, if you like, doing interviews - is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.

I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple, that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I'm not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I'm certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.