It's not easy to take a sit-com and turn it into a feature.

What directors of television drama constantly tell you is 'Don't act it. Don't try. Don't emphasise that word'. Whereas with someone like Blackadder, even though he's a relatively low key character in a way, he did relish the lines that he had and the words that he was given, with a lot of inflection.

My personal problem is that I take the business of film-making so seriously that I find it very difficult to relax.

I want to express myself in a different way. I have a performing inclination.

When I was doing Bean more than I’ve done him in the last few years, I did strange things - like appearing on chat shows in character as Mr. Bean.

I find his films about as funny as getting an arrow through the neck and discovering there's a gas bill tied to it.

Monty Python crowd; half of them came from Cambridge, and half of them came from Oxford. But, there seems to be this jewel, this sort of two headed tradition of doing comedy, of doing sketches, and that kind of thing.