What attracted you to Chicken Tikka Masala?
I’m originally from Preston, but I left Lancashire because there was nothing happening there for me. I went to study in London and then Paris, acted and produced a lot of work, so one of the attractions was to go back to Lancashire and do some work there. And secondly, the story was funny, so it was nice to do a comedy in Preston, and use a cast of actors that I’d previously worked with. It was a low-budget movie, so presumably things were very tight for you… Well, we had five weeks to shoot the whole production, which was very tight indeed. For a first feature, it was one hell of an experience to try and shoot in that time. It was good for me, really, because it sharpens you up and you have to really be on the ball all of the time. And the fact that we had a crew who were not all experienced in filmmaking, a lot of them were new to it – that kind of gelled us together. There were about three or four who had done television before. When we first met, I had a chat with the whole crew
