Or should you be living your dream or at least working every single thing out to the best possible results?

This is a difficult question. I like to work out. I work a lot. I always have been. I think I’m probably one of those people who have done nothing but stand around in the studio and take a lot of credit for everything I do in my life. I had a great experience at university being in filmmaking, so I really wanted to do something that was different from what I’d done before. But I was doing everything. I’d done things that my friends had done in London. I’d taught something in the BBC.

One thing I did was take my two cats, one male and one female, and take photographs. He would sit outside the studio and watch with me. That’s how I knew where the film was going and I knew what they were doing. I’d take photos and work until six o’clock at night after a long day of shooting. Then I’d go home and have supper and have a bed. I had absolutely no idea what it was like to be in the middle of shooting on a sunny day or an evening in winter with nothing to do.

A little over a decade later, I think I came out of it because I had all these images under my nose as if they were my own work, or things I was doing to produce a finished feature which I could show to people at conventions. It kind of taught me to just do what you do. I’d do a scene for one day, then I’d go on to something else.

It’s nice to say you’ve got this wonderful passion about what we call ‘the camera’. But it’s very much about the process behind it as you can tell. Is it really just about getting more images taken than before?

I think there’s an element of that, certainly in the sense that a lot of my shooting is done on location. Now I’ll be doing it a lot of the time when I’m working in television and feature films. I’m not a cinematographer, so there aren’t very many of those, but I do the sound work, I do the layout and everything I do has something to do with the camera and the way it moves around the frame. Whether I like it or not, I do it because I like to see.

How many films have you worked on before getting the call from Twentieth Century Fox?

I don’t

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