Not really. Trying to overcome the last flick is kinda like bringing coals to Newcastle – that’s a British thing…you just try to do something completely different…

Is it difficult to work with a bigger budget? No it’s never that difficult, it doesn’t matter what the budget is, 250 grandor 250 bucks my job is always the same. It’s like you write the script and rehearse the actors and make sure on camera they give the same performance you heard in your head when you were writing it so…it just means there’s more money for the party afterwards.

Why did Dogma take so long to get made (it was mentioned in the Clerks credits)?

We wanted to wait so long because we weren’t technically proficient enough…If you look at Clerks it’s a terrible looking film…[the bad look] wasn’t intentional, if I had more talent I’d have made a better looking movie. When asked about asking Robert Rodriguez if he could make Dogma: I called him up, I was getting very scared as we got closer, I said, “Robert, do you have any interest in directing the movie?” and he said, “No, you should do it, it’s your movie,” and I said, “I don’t think I’m good enough. Did you see the flicks I’ve done? They look terrible.” And he said, “Yes, you’re right but you should try to do something better next time round.”

Do you lack confidence in your art or are you just realistic? I think it’s more realistic, and the pessimism doesn’t hurt as you’ll start with the lowest expectations possible so when something good happens you’re like, “Oh well, that’s nice”…I hate to be overconfident because it seems like so many people in my line of work are. You watch a lot of people when they talk about their stuff…and it’s like “Wow, they created the world, didn’t they?” And then you see the movie and it’s crap.

How was it working with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck?

It was great. I mean, I’d worked with them before…Ben’s a good guy to work with, and Matt’s okay too. I like Ben, but he’s one of these guys that always tries to make up dialogue in the middle of the film. He’s always ad-libbing, which I hate, I can’t stand it cause I like to stay to the script…He comes in and he makes these little jokes and I’m like, “Cut. Don’t bother because we’ll leave it on the floor,” and he’s like, “Leave it in, it’ll be genius,” and I say, “If you want to say your own lines put it in your own script.” And he did and it won an Oscar.

What did it feel like when they didn’t mention you in their acceptance speech?

I was sitting there like, “If I could fire them I would”. We were shooting at the time and I was watching it with my producer Scott Mosier, and we were like, “Ok, here it comes, Kevin, Scott”. And it didn’t happen and they didn’t say it, and they had to come back to work two days later. And they came in very sheepishly, and they were like, “Gee, shucks, we forgot to mention your name in front of a billion people…”

Have you got a lot of celebrities queuing up to be in your films?

I haven’t heard of anybody lately, on the last movie it certainly helped out a bit. People would call up Miramax and say, “Oh, we saw Chasing Amy, liked it,” or have read the script for Dogma, and we pretty much called together that cast. People like Britain’s own Alan Rickman, who is a watcher of the show…he lends an air of credibility to our film, without him it would have been a B-movie at best…we needed a British voice in the movie and it just lifted it up to a whole other level, added another star to those reviews we probably would have gotten…