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I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.

I didn't have a normal academic career. I never studied cinema. I learned from life.

I did theatre all my life and then went into the film world. I then kind of segued into TV land, which is a different experience.

I did my first film when I was in the final year of my graduation. At that time, I was still a kid, and I couldn't read the industry very well.

When you're a writer, you pull your life into your work. My first love is cinema. That's where I want to be judged.

I was fortunate because my mum shared my love of film with me, so we would go to the movies twice, three times a week, and we would watch movies at home. As a teenager, instead of going out, we would have these huge movie nights in. But I almost failed drama at school. I hated it. It was all about the history of theatre.

I was supposed to go to drama school and then go to New York and do theatre. But I grew up on all those fabulous movies and had read all the bold Hollywood books, and I thought I just had to take a look.

Then I became interested in drama, and almost by accident, I drifted into film.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

There was never anything else I wanted to pursue. It was always theater, and movies are a fairly new thing.