Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on infinite loop, so that if at first you don't meet, you are drawn back together for another try.

Bill Hicks wasn't just a comic, he was a crusader against humanity's relentless capacity to underachieve

Unfortunately the necessity to promote a film sometimes works against it, in that you are forced to reveal information [about it] that in an ideal world you would hold back.

When you meet people that you know from other films - as often happens to me, and as tends to happens to you when you're an actor, you constantly meet people that you've seen in other films. But when it's people who've kind of had a seismic effect on your life, it's quite extraordinary.

Nira Park, who is my longtime producer and friend - I've know her since we did Spaced, the TV show - she gave me this script the last day of filming The World's End. She said, "Take a look at this. It's filming in London next year, and you might like to look at Jack." I trust Nira implicitly.

I lived in the cultural equivalent of Tatooine when I was a little boy. I didn't live in London, I didn't live right in the middle of where everything was happening, I lived on the very edge of it.

We've kind of grown up in a post-Star Wars era, and what Star Wars did to cinema, in terms of an explosion of that kind of blockbuster culture. It's thrown up a generation of geeks. With the evolution of computer games and the Internet, that's all impacted on us as a generation, and affected the creative element of that generation enormously. So whereas the different schools of filmmaking...