Suddenly, the world I had scrutinised for so long was all around me, as if I had leaned forward and climbed into the television like Alice through the looking-glass. I had no idea just how deep the rabbit hole would go.
I do get very angry at things. My wife has to count to ten because if she gets annoyed at me being annoyed, then I get annoyed at her being annoyed at me being annoyed.
I think that the joke and the ghost story both have a similar set up in that you kind of set something up and pay it off with a laugh or a scare.
When you go into a movie and you're surprised by it - these days with brand recognition being such an important thing and essentially trailers, the way trailers have evolved encouraging people not to see the film unless they've already seen the film which is kind of the paradox of marketing these days anytime that you enjoy genuine sense of wonder and surprise in the movies it's priceless.
It's a fun world to exist in, and I relish doing those movies as much as I do the smaller ones. They're always immense fun. I don't know if I am - unless we do a Benji film, I don't think I am an action hero really.
As a kid, I was a huge fan of movies and acting. My mom was in the sort of community theater, and I always hung around down there, and I was a massive fan of everything I'm kind of involved in now. But fairly ordinary and cheeky.
I hesitate to say I was the class clown, but that was kind of how I interacted with other kids in school, and I very much appreciated the responses I got. The validation of laughter is often a very heavy psychological balm.
I lived in the cultural equivalent of Tatooine when I was a little boy. I didn't live in London, I didn't live right in the middle of where everything was happening, I lived on the very edge of it.
When you meet people that you know from other films - as often happens to me, and as tends to happens to you when you're an actor, you constantly meet people that you've seen in other films. But when it's people who've kind of had a seismic effect on your life, it's quite extraordinary.
Sometimes you just wish you could make a film and then have it on DVD so you can see your mom. But, no, I've never really had that moment. Not really. Not seriously.
I realized that if I went snowboarding, you can't think of anything else when you're snowboarding. You can't hesitate or think about anything other than not falling off and breaking your neck. If you want a holiday where you're not gonna think about work and you're not gonna think about anything, snowboarding is the best way to do it. Or skiing, I guess. I don't ski, so I don't know.
Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.
We realised that it was important to embrace this popcorn logic, that it works, that it's funnier when you fire 20 rounds from one tiny pistol. Then it becomes the joke, it's funnier when you pay less attention.
Having done Spaced, I can't even remember it being that difficult on Spaced, but we know what the end's going to be like. We know why we're putting in this amount of work, or why a shot might be particularly tricky, because we know that what we do is create a whole package. It's the writing, the performances, and the style of camerawork, that's what we're working toward, and we're prepared for that.
Like behind the car or in the pub, to do a scene, a proper nice dramatic scene, it's always a treat. And they're usually shot as one, so you've got a big chunk of dialogue to learn, and you feel like you're working.
This idea of popular culture became something that belonged to us rather than something that we looked at from far away. We realized we could be part of it and create it, instead of just being consumers only.
There are some incredible television shows. It seems a sort of succumbed place to be. At the moment, I'm quite happy sort of flitting from place-to-place. I wouldn't want to relocate from where I am right now in terms of where I live.
We've kind of grown up in a post-Star Wars era, and what Star Wars did to cinema, in terms of an explosion of that kind of blockbuster culture. It's thrown up a generation of geeks. With the evolution of computer games and the Internet, that's all impacted on us as a generation, and affected the creative element of that generation enormously. So whereas the different schools of filmmaking...
Films that rely on their cast to be funny are often episodic and feel like a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a satisfyingly structured script.
When men write women, they tend to write women the way they want women to be, or the way they resent women for being. They don't really - they seldom nail it. It takes a woman to write a really good female character. I like that.
Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about... whatever. Now we're walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk had a fight with a robot.
It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.
The simple fact is that what you see on the screen is pretty much real.
I've only played two sort-of slackers, in Spaced and in Shaun Of The Dead. They're different people, but they have the same kind of everyman quality, particularly as a twentysomething.
It's hard, really, to make any physical movement that hasn't been done in another film. If you grab someone's hand, it doesn't mean you're referencing other films with grabbing hands...
