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At college, I wasn't passionate about anything I was studying.

I was pretty anti-academic, and I wasn't much of a student. I had a really short attention span and did not get a lot out of high school academically. I think college was a little the same way.

I wasn't tempted to go into academia for a second.

I spent two years working on building sites, working on the railways as a guard and in a racing stable, exercising racehorses. I learnt to build relationships. The experience of not being stuck in some middle-class bubble taught me things that being at university hadn't.

I kind of lost interest in school. I was never really that interested anyway. I was never academic. I didn't really go to school as much as I should have.

At first I wanted to go to university, but I really didn't dare to. I was too self-conscious, being a working-class kid. It was really difficult. I was going to study history, but the professor asked me some questions I didn't understand, and I didn't dare to ask what they meant. I left university and went to work in the Post.

I was quite academic, quite geeky when I was a kid. I was more interested in going to school than I was in becoming a film star or something.

I got expelled from high school, and then did my exams from home. I decided, through that experience, that I was going to expediate my plan and didn't go to university. Instead, I went to a community college and studied the theory and history of film with the idea that I wanted to write and direct.

I left school at sixteen - I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn't have Latin, and so couldn't go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.

I never even graduated college. I never finished learning, as it were, and I have a psychological need to be in a learning environment at all times.