This should be fun. Michael Winterbottom has just released Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Although I'm not a big film-goer, I relish the combination of a good novel and a good director. And since Winterbottom's 9 Songs was banned here when released some years ago, I'm even more determined to make the trek to the cinema. I'm on holidays next week, so hopefully they'll be screening it in Maroochydore.

"We just couldn't get anywhere with the script when we were thinking about only filming the book," Winterbottom says during a moment of quiet on the street. "The more we looked at the book it seemed that Sterne was playing around with the reader a lot, and the only way to deal with that was play around with the viewer by showing the problems of making a film.

"So we came up with the idea of Steve kind of juggling his girlfriend, the baby, the script, his obsession with the height of his shoe heels, the agent, his co-stars, even a tabloid reporter. It was a version of real life. You try to focus on important things, but all this other stuff is always going on, too."