I like to relish words and sentences, and phraseology, and there's not much facility for that [playing Maigret].

I'm as poor as a church mouse, that's just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.

I like to relish words and sentences, and phraseology, and there's not much facility for that [playing Maigret].

The good thing about those original credit card commercials was that they were very "filmic", they were like little movies, so it wasn't a big step to think well maybe we could make a big movie using this character, which we eventually did.

It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film.

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.

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