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The shows are either 11 or 22 minutes and they move pretty quickly, and that's part of the charm of them - so it was just trying to keep that in mind and keep the energy of the story moving, even though we were dealing with a longer format.

Television news was expanding to an hour, and producers did not know how to fill the space and time.

That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

I believe that given the audience attention level, we could do an even more compelling 90 minutes.

After I directed for the first time, I wanted to call every director I'd ever worked with and apologize. In television you are tasked with shooting 42 minutes, or whatever, in eight days. That's not a lot of time.

It all depended on the cut. Some of them were really on the ship. Some were really on the set. Like if they had the stars for a week, the stars coming off, that was usually on the set, except if we were on location for that particular show.

This was almost two hours of factual documentary. In our audience ratings, barely no one left the programme. The whole of his life is so fascinating and people kept watching for that reason.

I don't think they knew exactly where they were going with the character, but they lay those stories out ahead of time, so they had some idea where they wanted it to go.

A show needs time to find an audience, and they're very quick to pull them off the air now.

I definitely think there was some overacting on the part of the customers and the wait staff. The people who came in during the shooting were clearly there to have a moment on television, and that's fine.