Any idealistic activity outside of my work is something confined to a few field trips with UNICEF in Uganda,

[Is a fiction film particularly well equipped to do the kind of work we usually associate with investigative or advocacy journalism?] No, I don't think it can be, especially if it has to serve a dramatic narrative, ... Everyone asks questions about the polemical side of the film, but for me it's also about a relationship between two people, their openness with each other, or their decision as a couple not to share, thinking they're respecting each other's privacy. People don't always tell each other what they need to know—not because they've got anything to hide, like a love affair, but because they don't want to invade. Our ability to be honest with each other, to say, I want this or I don't want that, it's all a distant cousin of what happens on the level of social policy, and it's who we are, isn't it? Politics starts in the bedroom.

[Is a fiction film particularly well equipped to do the kind of work we usually associate with investigative or advocacy journalism?] No, I don't think it can be, especially if it has to serve a dramatic narrative, ... Everyone asks questions about the polemical side of the film, but for me it's also about a relationship between two people, their openness with each other, or their decision as a couple not to share, thinking they're respecting each other's privacy. People don't always tell each other what they need to know—not because they've got anything to hide, like a love affair, but because they don't want to invade. Our ability to be honest with each other, to say, I want this or I don't want that, it's all a distant cousin of what happens on the level of social policy, and it's who we are, isn't it? Politics starts in the bedroom.

I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.

It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.

You dread that there will be real problems during filming.