If you look back on the period, the 1980s has never been seen as cool. You think of the music, and it always has a kitsch quality to it because everyone looks so ridiculous. Even the Nineties, with The Stone Roses and other bands, was cool before the Eighties. It really missed the boat! The Sixties was always cool, even then. That was my Dad's era and I was always jealous of that. But now, as an adult, looking back, we were part of this mental time. It was the most enormous amount of tribes that could have ever existed in one place.

I suppose my dream was always about existing outside of London. Obviously the film world 10 years ago, when I first kicked off, was a very different landscape. Meeting anyone for a job on the crew, and on the cast, always meant a trip to London for me. But it's changed quite dramatically. You can't completely exist outside of what's down there, but things have changed massively.

In London, there must be thousands of people in the business of making films, whereas in Nottingham or Sheffield, you're probably talking about below a hundred. So there aren't thousands of people scrapping for the same money and for the same jobs. I went out in Nottingham the other night and there's a really beautiful community of people who are really supportive. It's not this back-stabbing thing, high-rent, high-cost, high-tension. Up here we are independent filmmakers and there's a lovely sense of camaraderie.

Every kid comes to a point in his life, where you listen to your Dad, but then you go into the street and you start listening to the views of other people. You're looking for role models. It's like that moment when you step out.

As a director, your job can range from having to lean on someone to get a performance out of them, to someone being so built for the part that all you have to do is make them feel confident and comfortable and assured of what they're actually doing, and you just wind them up and watch them go.

In the Sixties, it was mods and rockers, and hippies and casuals, whereas in the early Eighties, there was Goths, punks, mods, skinheads, New Romantics, casuals, metal heads... the streets looked completely different. You go into town now and you can't tell one kid from another - you don't know what they're into. You can sort of tell a skateboard kid because his trousers are half way down his legs, but that's about it. Back then, people wore their hearts on their sleeves. It was a really bold time.

I'm obviously first and foremost a British filmmaker on a global scale, but when it comes to narrowing it down, I really feel like my voice is in the Midlands and outside of London.