Congratulations on making a lovely film.
Thank you very much.

Saw it at the [November '05] SPADA conference in Wellington - what was that screening like for you?
Good, yeah. I was quite nervous - we'd shown it to family and friends up here [in Auckland] and we had a wonderful screening in New York for very close friends and family of [key cast member] Ruby Dee, but this was obviously the first big semi-public kind of screening.

In front of a bunch of industry people…
Yeah and I remain a little aloof from the whole industry I guess. So I wasn't quite sure how it was going to be received, and it was very gratifying to see everyone's generosity of spirit, even before the film started, and then for people to hang around and have some beers and stuff afterwards - it was a really cool buzz.

So you wrote the play in 1999 as a one-person play…
Yeah I definitely began writing it as a one-woman show for Madeleine [Sami] but very much with the idea of wanting to make it into a film at some stage as well. And part of what's great about the one-woman show format is it gives you the opportunity to sort of edit between cars back to the house to the kitchen - chop around scenes really easily, which is not always the case in theatre. And obviously with a woman of her expertise it was a really great opportunity.
But definitely in the front of my mind I wanted to make it into a movie. I'd had a previous experience where I'd optioned a piece of material and regretted doing it, so I was very adamant I wouldn't do that immediately on 'No. 2', partly because I wanted to direct it as well.

I saw the play when it debuted at Auckland's Silo Theatre and thought it was fantastic, and was really intrigued when I heard a film version was being made, because certainly what I came away thinking about mostly was the tour de force performance rather than the story per se. I was wondering whether that was one of the reasons you wanted to make the film - because perhaps you thought the story had got a bit lost…?
No, I don't think the story got lost at all in Madeleine's performance - no, definitely not - but part of my job as a writer of a one-woman show was to make sure it was a showcase for her, you know. So I can't really say much more about that I suppose. But obviously the screenplay required something very different… I really wanted to celebrate the one-woman show format as well - it's part of my job to sit back and let that happen I guess. And all the climaxes were built around physical, rhythmic climaxes as opposed to narrative ones, which is a little true of the movie too I suppose, but at the same time you try and cram the play into a Syd Field narrative structure and it doesn't really stand up to it. But I saw it as kind of a dance - it had to be told in a song form I suppose.

So four years of working on the script - did you keep count of how many drafts you did, or would that have been demoralising?
No, they're all on my computer still, but I have a particularly idiosyncratic way of labelling drafts so [laughs] you don't get too down-hearted about it. But yeah, there were very many drafts and I had some pretty tough times, particularly 2003 I think was quite frustrating. You really begin to question whether you're doing the right thing.
I began writing the screenplay in Fiji - I'd been living there for a couple of months and my wife and I were at the stage where we needed to make some big decisions about how we were going to carry on our careers and personal lives as well. So I decided to concentrate on film but, of course, if you concentrate on any one project you're taking a big risk, so there were moments in 2003, when there had been a lot of drafts and not necessarily much else, when I questioned myself a little bit.

How did you get through that?
Oh I had really good relationships with [producers] Lydia Livingstone and Tim White particularly, who was working on the script a lot at that stage with me. And I definitely had faith in them that the work I was doing on the screenplay was improving it - I never felt I was just writing for the sake of writing. So I always felt the screenplay was making progress and the process of getting to the big screen was going forward; it's just sometimes it went more slowly than others. There was a little bit of gritting your teeth, definitely, and when you've got responsibilities beyond just yourself, you really question if what you're doing is the right thing. But I've got a very supportive family and wife, so yeah, we got there in the end.

At what point did Lydia come on board and then Tim follow?
Lydia came and saw the play when it was at the Silo Theatre and she was involved in helping us get the play performed in places I was really passionate about getting it to, including Chris Blackwell's invitation to take it to Jamaica and Larry Thomas' invitation to take it to Fiji. That was really important to me because I didn't just want to go down the route of taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and then showing it in London and so on, I wanted to make sure we got a diverse audience for it.
And so quite early on I was talking to Lydia about the idea of turning it into a movie and eventually we formed a partnership together. And relatively early - in fact perhaps even before I'd started writing a screenplay - we took it to her friend Tim White, who was at Working Title Australia at the time.
Also, Lydia's got very good relationships with Working Title in the UK so there was always the feeling that Working Title in the broader sense would be interested in it. But Tim really impressed me. It was important for me to feel the material and my desire to direct would be in trusted hands and I definitely felt that about Lydia and Tim, and felt confident they'd be able to convince investors - both internationally and in New Zealand - that I'd be able to direct it, which was obviously a major thing.

Was there ever any pressure to give the script to someone else to direct?
No, that was part of the deal of me owning it. A lot of people were interested in the script in '99 when it was a theatre project, and I did have a few meetings with various producers within New Zealand and Britain as well, but they were all solely interested in the script and the subject of me directing it never even came up, so that was the end of that.

Obviously it would have been a big call for investors, given you'd never directed film before. Had you directed for the theatre before?
No, but the theatre I'd been involved with, we were like little kids who hadn't necessarily done too much theatre, so we weren't really too concerned about job descriptions. And as a writer I was very much involved with all the rehearsals for 'Bare', 'No. 2', 'Paradise', 'Feedback', so I had a semi-directorial role in those anyway.
But yeah, I hadn't directed any film, though I was really confident about directing the performances, the actors, in the movie and I guess that came from theatre.

You're obviously aware of the whole "apprenticeship" approach that tends to be taken with directors in the NZ film industry, where there's the expectation they'll make short films before graduating to features…
Well, I feel really strongly that my "apprenticeship", if you want to think of it like that, in the theatre was an outstanding training ground for a storyteller, especially in long form. Having sat in a couple of audience screenings for 'No. 2' the movie I'm really thankful for the hundreds of times in the theatre watching my plays and learning a lot about the audience especially.

And of course you had your Quentin Tarantino-like learning curve working at a cinema to draw on…
Ah yes - I dunno if it's a Tarantino thing, 'cos he seemed to have broader [viewing] opportunities working at that video store; I worked at [Auckland's] Village 8 on Broadway, which was its own thing [laughs].
Though, actually, it was a good opportunity because we used to have to go in and watch the last five minutes of the movies in order to open the doors for the audience to come out. Just about every movie I saw during the four year period I worked there, I'd already seen the last five minutes, so you're kind of watching it with a real objectivity - you know what the end is going to be like so you're already figuring out the structure… Yes, but good times at the Village 8 - it was an excellent job for a university student and there were many good times at Burger King and McDonald's - probably watching more cricket and rugby than films but. And it's a good way to make friends in the area - very powerful position, being an usher [laughs].

In terms of working with Tim White on developing the script, how hands on was he, and was it a new experience for you having that kind of input?
Well, I've always been really open to collaboration and I think some of the best work I've done - 'Bare' especially, with Michael Robinson who directed that, and 'No .2' with Cath Boniface - has resulted from embracing that input.
Tim especially - but also a whole host of people including Philippa Campbell, Lydia, Lisa Chatfield who was working with Tim for a while - brought really intelligent input to the script. And I was really thankful for the way they would act as conduits for the broader script notes that we'd get from wherever - people in New York or London or Wellington. It was great for me to have somebody listening to that stuff, deciding what the important points were, filtering it a little bit and then giving it to me. But yeah, practically I did a helluva lot of writing on my own through a lot of long lonely nights and then we'd have some very enjoyable script meetings. It was a good process, definitely.

The final film seems to hew pretty closely to the structure of the play and you've certainly maintained the dramatic unity of the piece. How far did it get away from that during those four years?
Initially it went quite a long way away from it. It was always going to be set on one day - there were some key things to do with unity that remained always, and the opening and closing scenes have never changed, which I'm really proud of.
But partly because there are such an eclectic group of characters involved in the film and it's got an eclectic voice - I mean it's got a strong voice but it's made up of a whole bunch of different stuff that needs to integrate - because of that it occasionally it got very eclectic and went really wide.
But that was a very fulfilling process to sort of go very wide with it and then, as you say, bring it all back and arrive at something that feels very much like it has a relationship with the play, although there are new elements. The middle generation of Uncle Percy, Uncle John and Aunty Cat are new, and there are key dramatic moments that weren't in the play - the pig was dead when it arrived in the play and stuff like that - but overall I think it's retained its heart and unity as you say.

The nationality of the girlfriend has changed too, hasn't it - I was sitting there listening to her accent to begin with thinking, "So where's she from now?"
[laughs] Well, the part was written for an English woman and we looked in England for a long time but were pretty under-whelmed really. Then we cast an actress in the role - although she wasn't English - but we ended up losing her after the shoot was delayed for a couple of weeks. But it was a real blessing, one of those happy accidents, that we had the opportunity to find Tuva [Novotny], who did a really engaging mini DV audition in her apartment and sent it out to us and "yes!"
It was a hard part to cast because she has to go toe-to-toe with Nana Maria - you have to see there's a spark of life in her that Nana would respond to and not bulldoze and bully; we've already seen her easily swat away somebody who's not going to meet her requirements. So we really had to find somebody who also had a big heart. Tuva was really cool and a really amazing cast member as well - part of the way we cast the film was to have a mix of experience and inexperience. We really wanted to make it a team and have team members who each had different strengths and could complement others. Obviously the relationship between the characters of Tuva and Xavier [Horan] is really beautiful on the screen and is a testament to how they really helped each other out - especially considering Xavier hasn't done much at all.

So it was a year-long casting process?
Yeah it was a long time, particularly for Nana - we knew she was going to be the key casting point.
The financing was there for a while, while we sort of figured it out. Getting Ruby Dee was quite a long process and the cast within New Zealand as well. But the whole time we knew the Nana Maria character wasn't in place, we had the opportunity to take our time with everybody else as well, you know.

So how close to the shoot did you finally cast Ruby Dee?
I remember speaking to her on Christmas Eve 2004 - maybe two months out [from the shoot]. I think she was having a big family party when she was on the phone to me. And apparently she'd really forced the issue because she said "I couldn't go through Christmas without knowing whether I'll be going to New Zealand in the New Year or not". And yeah, that was a pretty cool occasion.

So was the shoot scheduled at that point?
Yeah, we were tentatively down to start pre-production in the middle of January. We had a really stripped back crew starting on January 4. But we actually had a lot of crew in place in the hope we were going to shoot before Christmas but there were some hurdles that meant we didn't do that. And thank god we didn't, because the weather was terrible before Christmas and awesome after, so we were really blessed with that.
But all the crew we'd spoken to before Christmas were really awesome, they were like, "Yeah, we really want to make this movie and we'll hang out until after Christmas and come on then." So it was awesome to be able to say to them, "We're going to go into pre-production in the middle of January." And that had also given me the opportunity to have some broad conversations with people like Kirsty Cameron and Phil Ivey. Phil and I had already kind of scoped out the house we wanted to shoot at like in August last year, so we had a lot of stuff in place already.

So during all this period how were you preparing to direct?
Yeaaaah ah [laughs] - a bit like that. Well, no, part of my process with screenwriting is to do storyboards a lot anyway, which kind of flies in the face of the wisdom I've been a party to a little. But I think it's really important, even if you're not going to be directing the movie, to use storyboards to visualise it. So I'd done a lot of thinking about the movie visually already.
I'd gathered a helluva lot of visual references, film references, music video references and stuff that I was really into, so I had a big library of resources that was ready to lay on the table when the team all came together. And on a smaller scale the Film Commission gave me the opportunity to do a really, really awesome course in LA with Joan Scheckel, who's come here a few times. Doing it in LA was great as well because I was really out of my comfort zone, and doing it with a bunch of strangers was very cool. So yeah, from a year out I was thinking, "This film is gathering the momentum that's going to make it happen", so I was preparing that whole time.

I understand one of your creative touchstones as far as films go was 'The Leopard'?
Yeah, crazy eh.

What aspect of it in particular?
The classical kind of look of it. I mean, I saw Nana Maria as sort of an ancient, gnomic character and I wanted to use a classical style, largely because the films I've enjoyed the most - 'The Godfather', 'The Leopard', stuff like that - have got a classical style to them. Mostly because it came out of the character of Nana Maria, but also because I didn't want to make a flashy, hip-hoppy kind of movie showing off what I could do as a first time director. Again, what I said about the play, I wanted to let the characters take the glory a little bit.
Also, I like the reference to some kind of Renaissance type paintings that I think 'The Leopard' had as well. They're big references for me, and I think you could probably trace that kind of lineage in some of the stuff in 'No. 2' as well. And also it's part of Nana Maria's desire to have a big feast like they have in Sicily, so that idea of some kind of classic Mediterranean kind of thing was very much in my mind.

Sometime during this period you were also working on the script of 'River Queen'…?
Yeah, well, my involvement with 'River Queen' really began at the end of '99 and the bulk of my involvement was in 2000, before I began work on 'No. 2''s screenplay.
That was a really intense process, a big learning curve, and I learnt a lot from working with Vincent, definitely. He's very much his own kind of man and yeah [laughs] - it was intense.
But you know, we watched a lot of movies I really loved - 'Apocalypse Now', 'Fitzcarraldo', 'Aguirre, Wrath of God', 'The Mission' - and we had a lot in common. I was really anxious about becoming involved in it, for I guess the obvious reasons a story like that suggests, but I've seen it and I'm really thrilled with it, and I'm really happy for Vincent and Al[un] Boll[inger] and everybody who was involved with it. Personally I'm kind of gratified that a certain amount of my contribution has made it to the screen, though as I say it ended a long time ago.

Any tips from Vincent?
Actually, big print, I learnt a lot about writing big print from him, which was something I'd never done in theatre - I'd never write stage directions because I was always going to be there in rehearsal, so I'd only written dialogue for theatre and he really encouraged me to read screenplays by people like Josh Logan ['Gladiator'] and David Webb Peoples ['Unforgiven']. I read some of those and really learnt the value of writing big print that really stands out from the page.
And I learnt a lot about the fact that big print doesn't necessarily have a strong relationship with what happens on screen, it's more about conveying atmosphere and telling a story on the page and making sure the script zings as its own kind of artefact.
Which was a surprise to me - I'd always seen a script as a kind of prescription for what happens on screen, but I learnt a lot about writing it as a kind of a selling tool and something to be enjoyed in its own right.

To be really simplistic about it, cutting right back on dialogue and replacing it with action would be one of the main differences between writing for the screen rather than the stage, yeah?
Yeah, that's something I feel I've learnt - telling a story with pictures and trimming back the dialogue. Especially 'Bare' and 'No. 2', which I wrote early in my career, were very much dialogue based, even for some theatre. So that's a big learning curve and I'm still learning a lot, even just by watching 'No. 2' and seeing the value of scenes that I'd never imaged necessarily would be real big dramatic or plot peaks.

Working with [DOP] Leon Narby must have been great…?
Yeah, Leon was amazing. He came on really late - I think just before Christmas as well - so we didn't have much of a chance of establish much of a rapport before we began pre-production, but he's such an awesome guy that it didn't take long at all. And he was very confident in my visual abilities, and said as much, and that gave me a lot of confidence myself.
I think his personality was really well-suited to telling a story like 'No. 2'; I think he responded to a helluva lot in the story and that was one of the reasons I was really thrilled to work with him. The fact he runs an olive oil business as well as his career as a cinematographer I thought was a perfect balance and passion to bring to 'No. 2'. Definitely that classical style I was going for was something Leon responded to a lot. You know, he's got his personal cinematic passions, which weren't necessarily the same as mine, and I learnt a lot from his passions and vice versa I think - we came up with a visual story we were both really happy with…
It was Leon's idea to go with 16mm - he worked with a short film of Michael Bennett's, 'Kerosene Creek', which we watched in pre-production and I loved.

He'd used a digital intermediate on that, hadn't he.
That's right, yeah. He really wanted to do a DI for 'No. 2', because it takes place on one sunny day in Auckland. And the decision to use 16mm came largely out of that - a budgetary reason I suppose. Anyway, it was a process he'd gone through on 'Kerosene Creek' and found very successful. Also, 16mm gave me the opportunity to burn a bit more film than I would have had if we'd used 35mm, which meant I could say to the actors, "I'm going to let this thing run for half an hour", even though I guess the reels didn't run for half an hour [laughs]. Or I could ask an actor to give me a completely different performance that felt completely wrong but just as an experiment. And a lot of our work in the editing room was to find the tone in the performances that worked best out of the great range of performances. So 16mm was helpful for that. And also, the fact it was a very lightweight, small camera, and the fact Leon was operating, gave me and Leon and the actors an intimacy they really talked about and felt was something that gave them a lot of confidence as well…
The fact we were shooting on the same location was really great too, because we could go back to scenes where we needed to get more stuff with relative ease. We were always doing pick-ups within the shoot - even to just grab one shot out of a completely unrelated scene on a day where we might be waiting for the sun to go down a little bit. That was largely something that the producers really pushed for - Chris Plummer was in the editing room cutting assemblies of a lot of stuff almost from the first day of shooting. So we began to get a real sense of how the assembly was going to turn out and Chris was able to come to the set and suggest a shot for this sequence or whatever.
There was quite a lot of stuff from early on in the shoot that we revisited, partly because I had come to grips better with directing and the kind of style we were going for, and also for some performance issues - it took a little while to settle down into characters - and if you've got the opportunity you may as well take it, you know.

Given the large number of characters, I assume a lot of pick ups would have been reaction shots…?
Yeah, definitely. And often a character who was kind of secondary to the scene would be down the list of priorities in terms of the shots we had to get through that day, so yeah, occasionally we went back to make sure that character was present in the scene.

Did the relationship between Toa the writer and Toa the director remain cordial during the shoot, or…?
[laughs] No, we had to fire that fucking pasty bastard. [laughs] I was very happy to leave him in the room and get some fresh air myself.

Did you find yourself getting ruthless with the script?
Oh, I always am. As I said, I'm really happy to work collaboratively and we had great producers, a great editor, and a great crew generally who were very open to giving suggestions, although very respectful of the etiquette and my responsibilities and position. And we had a cast chock-full of writers and director and people with those skills without necessarily ever having used them.
So I was very open to script suggestions from those guys and I'm always open to cutting stuff, 'cos that's really the best way to write - cut, cut, cut the hell out of stuff. Sometimes probably you go a little bit too far with cutting stuff and occasionally a producer would stick up for a line that I had written, which I'm always a little bit flattered about.
The actors themselves - especially people like Mia Blake and Tanea Heke, I have the greatest respect for them, coming up to me with a red pen, bringing out their sides and saying, "We want to cut this line, cut this line, cut this line." And I'm like, "You're supposed to be asking me to write more lines for you."
There's a scene I'm really proud of - the dishes scene at the end of the movie - that had a lot more lines in it, 12 or something like that, and now it has really just one, and that was largely due to Tanea and Mia deciding they could do the scene a helluva lot better without dialogue.

In terms of corralling cast and crew, how did all that go for you - you know, the loneliness of the long-distance director and all that…
Yeah, yeah, there is a bit of that, but I had a great AD team - Simon Ambridge was fantastic and I was blissfully unaware of anything [laughs] expect my job. So he did his job really well. And obviously having such a range of experience and the community responsibilities we had, he had a real big job on his hands - the whole team did - and so I was very thankful [in not very convincing American accent] for their bodyguard protection.
But in terms of my relationship with the cast, we worked really hard during the rehearsal - we did a little bit of specific scene rehearsal but not very much at all; most of it was talking about the world and our collective task. I think the first day of rehearsal we spent the whole day in the backyard we were going to shoot the film in not doing very much at all, just hanging around together, going for a walk in the neighbourhood we felt a collective responsibility to.
We had this genuine feast at my family's house that the actors were asked to make basically in collaboration with my family members and was very similar to the one in the movie, with the aim being it was a feast to welcome Ruby Dee to the country. And Mia I know, and I think a lot of them, really found that a very valuable exercise. I mean, we chose really, really good, responsible people and they were all very respectful to the responsibility we felt we had to the story and the community and the broader ramifications for it being a Pacific film and a New Zealand film.

How long was the shoot?
I think 35 days over maybe six weeks.

That's pretty short.
Is it? Yeah I'm not sure - I know I was looking forward to the end of it, definitely. [laughs] But yeah, it felt like we could have done with a little bit more time. I mean, we did have the opportunity to do three more days than we had scheduled, which was really good. Again, we had great producers and worked in a disciplined way to make sure that if we needed to have a bit more time and money up our sleeves then we could.

Did you roll into post pretty much straight away?
Yeah, as I say, Chris was editing during the shoot so I took about a week off, slept a lot, and then came back into the editing room. Chris had worked really hard up to that point, so he and I were left alone by the producers to work together, which we did in a really un-intensive manner for the first couple of weeks. I wouldn't really go in for more than two hours a day for the first week at least, because you need to give it that kind of time to gestate and get your head around the difference to the script. I'd only really finished writing it - I was doing polishes up to the moment we started shooting so there wasn't much time between the first assembly and last draft of the screenplay.
But gradually we got back into the groove of editing a little more and it was really cool and actually good timing when my wife called me to say she was going into the hospital with our first baby - Chris and I felt we'd got to the end of the first half of the editing process and felt it would be good to have a week off. So we had the opportunity to close down the editing room while I went away and did the family thing for a little while and then we came back with a renewed sense of story and everything.

Sure, after a while it must be hard to see the woods for the trees.
Yeah, definitely. We'd do different stuff - we'd go to see it at Panavision on the big screen occasionally, or I'd get my friend to bring his projector over so I'd see it on a wall at home, just to get a different perspective on it. After a while, cutting it on a little TV screen can get to you a little bit, for sure.
But it always felt we were going forward and Chris is another great one for literally cutting stuff out if he feels it's dragging, and obviously he'd come off the experience with 'In My Father's Den' when they'd had a lot more material at the beginning of their editing process than we did. And I was a huge fan of 'In My Father's Den'. When I saw it in November I was like, "Man, why the hell haven't we been talking to Chris Plummer?" I was really thrilled to see that movie and really rapt that Chris was able to come and work with me.

The music is hugely important to the movie - did you write to certain bits of music?
Probably none of the songs we've ended up with, except the old school extant Fiji songs, which I had in mind when writing. But I had some big musical references I was keen on and when working with [composer] Don [McGlashan], he was really open to me giving him the opportunity to listen to them.
Some of the music, like the Trinity Roots song, I had always known about and I held it up my sleeve for a long time because it was like a dream to use it and I wasn't sure we'd ever get the opportunity. Then, while we were shooting I was like, "Fuck, I have to lay this on the table, man, because if we don't get this song I don't know what else would work." Chris cut the sequence to the song and we showed it to Don and he was just blown away and loved it. So I was relieved about that.
But the song Holly Smith performs, Don wrote during pre-production so we had a demo during the shoot - I played him a song we'd used in the play and Don really took that big pop, R&B anthem vibe back to its original gospel roots. And then Holly Smith's involvement and Toby Lang and a whole bunch of people who were involved with that really made it into something incredible that I'm really rapt with. And yeah, the musical influences I had in mind when writing the script, we used a lot of them in the early assemblies and they were there for a long time, until they were replaced by Don's really amazing score.

How long ago did you lock off the picture?
Not very long ago at all [laughs]. It seemed like that moment would never come. It was a bit of anti-climax I think, because we anticipated it being a big moment. We did a little tweaking here and there and we'd kept the editing room open for an extra week to give us a bit of breathing space but in the end we said, "Na na, it's locked, it's cool," you know. Which was a big relief of me, because from that point on it felt like it was all fun and games with sound - my Dad worked at the BBC and my Mum used to be a sound technician so, once we got into the sound post, I was like, "Man, solid ground!" [laughs]

In the movie's press kit you talked about waiting - and waiting - for a sense of relief that hadn't quite arrived yet…
Yeah, although I definitely feel a sense of relief now - we've had some great screenings over the past few weeks and along the way I've had moments, like when I showed my wife an early assembly and she really loved it. But yeah, it's little moments for me that are really special, like taking it to New York to show to Ruby Dee and the fact that so many of her friends and family were patting her on the back and giving me and the cast really good raps - a lot of people came up to me asking me to pass on my congratulations to the cast. These are people who've worked in theatre and film in New York for a long time, so I thought that was a real big compliment. And for me, friends and family here in Auckland coming to see the movie and loving it. I've done a few interviews and had a few drinks with some of the cast and crew over the past couple of weeks and we all feel we've put together a movie we can all really feel proud of, and these are people I really respect, so I'm very respectful of their concept that it's a great movie [laughs] - if that makes sense.

And it's coming out almost exactly a year after you started shooting.
Yeah, which is really cool, because it's definitely that kind of summertime film - hopefully people will come out of the movie wanting to have a big party in their own backyard. It's one of the universal elements of the story - especially for New Zealanders - those backyard BBQ memories or dreams.

Is that your pitch to potential audience members then?
Well, it's become that over the past 24 hours [laughs]. Somebody saw the play in Islington in London and wrote a really beautiful review of her memories of her family parties in the Coromandel so, yeah, I suppose so. It's definitely something everybody dreams of - having a big feed in the sunshine, man.

I understand you're about to direct a music video?
Yeah, I'm going to direct the music video for 'Bathe in the River', which Holly sings in the movie.

You do realise that people tend to do it the other way round - music vids first and then a feature…
I know, [laughs] so the pressure's going to be on to make a really good music video, otherwise everybody'll say, "Fuck, if he'd made that…" [laughs] But yeah, I'm definitely going to do that, and I'm looking forward to going back and doing some writing.

For theatre or film?
Both - there's definitely some theatre stuff I want to finish that I've had to sort of put on the backburner. And there's some film stuff I want to do.
At the same time, over summer I want to chill out a bit and take it a little bit slowly and really enjoy this time, because for the past four summers - during November and December - I've been sitting there thinking, "The clock's ticking, it's going to be Christmas, if it's not nailed by then we're not shooting this summer." So I'm definitely going to feel happy about that.