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I had acting teachers, and one of the things that was encouraged was to keep it fresh, to be spontaneous. That's the magic of film often.

I took up drama and did so much extracurricular work, like the National Youth Theatre and Guildhall's Saturday school. Acting is where I felt most comfortable and how I wanted to express myself.

I'm relaxed about my career. I've been making movies for over 20 years, so I've earned at least the right to relax.

I found school quite tough, but Saturday night was movie night, and I started to empathise with the characters on screen. I started to get more involved with what these people were experiencing. Film inspired me to do better.

The only way I survived at school was by doing impersonations of teachers and pupils. That led to me winning a talent competition when I was 16; the prize was three or four gigs in working men's clubs. I was just showing off: at the time, I thought that's what acting was.

Once I came to acting, it was almost a thing where there weren't enough hours in the day to work on stuff because I was so passionate about it.

I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

Because I could dance, my folks went through hell so I could be in movies. But I didn't dance in pictures. I cried! At one point I had polio, which I believe was a result of the stress I felt in the studios.

I had done a lot of plays, particularly at my own theater in LA, and it was the first time in my theatrical life where I didn't feel that my role was also to keep everybody else working hard.