"Me and Paul Fraser were writing a different film when this came to us. I think we were in Wales or maybe Ireland, I can’t remember, the Tia Maria was so brutal. We used to go away for two weeks to write and we’d spend the first week playing mini-golf and getting hammered. Midlands is not my favourite film, but it was the reason I made Dead Man’s Shoes, so for that I’m eternally grateful. By the second draft I knew it was going wrong, and there was one moment when the insurance company told us we had to lose 25 pages of the script, when I should have said, 'Close it down.' The reason I didn’t was because my dad and lots of people I knew locally had jobs on it, so I thought about them rather than the next five years of me hating it.

"I’d like Midlands more if I could go and re-edit it and put on the music I originally wanted to use. Clayhill's score for it made it feel really different, but it was taken off because they were always trying to make it into a rom-com. It’s never going to be my best film but maybe when I’m having a quiet year I could do a director’s cut - a proper director’s cut, not one of those where they’ve made it a bit more boring because they’ve put an extra scene in that probably shouldn’t have been there. It’s probably a pipedream, but I’d love to go back and make it feel more like part of the family."