I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

It's a funny show. The characters are surprisingly likable given how ugly they are. We've got this huge cast of characters that we can move around. And over the last few seasons we've explored some of the secondary characters' personal lives a bit more.

It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago we could write our male characters funny and flawed but not the women. And now thankfully it's completely different.

When I was a little kid I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there and a mummy. When they were all hassling him this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

I think romance is friendship and attraction sort of meeting together and that does influence what I'm writing a lot. I try to establish the attraction obviously but I also think it's important to show the characters having actual conversations about things other than their feelings for each other - and to develop their friendship on the page.

006 was such an interesting character and the film really explored his friendship with Bond and how it all went wrong so it was a very personal journey for both characters.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems needing freedom trying to find a way to cut themselves loose but failing to rid themselves of conscience a sense of sin the whole bag of tricks.

I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties.

I've been very lucky in the characters I've chosen. Up until last year I was a nobody. I did jobs I booked because I needed to put food in my mouth.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary sloppy reflection of who I am.

Normally I name my characters after famous comedians.

None of my characters are rich or famous and the situations they find themselves in could happen to anyone.

I'm not comfortable being around too many people. I don't like being out in public too much. I don't like going to bars. I don't like doing celebrity stuff. So most of the characters I play are people who don't always feel comfortable beyond their small circle of friends.

I don't want to be reincarnated that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon pass.

There is a common theme though in the stories I have told which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

For my own family I would always choose the makeshift surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena Queen of the Jungle.'