I am not Bruce Robinson

Bruce wrote The Killing Fields and directed Withnail and I. You can find more about him on his Wiki. Or better still, buy ‘Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson'. The title is awful, but the book is great. The author rightly decided to just pitch up and let Bruce talk.

What I like about Bruce is despite all his success, he’s quite open to talk about things when they go wrong.

For Bruce, this means his scripts and films . When you write anything for Hollywood, everyone from the head of the studio on down will submit 'notes' on how to improve your work. And If you do anything creative for a living you can expect the same thing to happen because:

• When people spend money, or more importantly, other people's money, they play safe. Hollywood, advertising, television, it doesn't matter, safe sells. Safe is easy to understand, easy to enjoy and easy to forget if it doesn't work. Every film, TV show and advert has a thousand lives relying on its success. Three guys and two girls in a New York flat bellowing 'oh my gawd' is an easier sell than a sitcom about two losers who share a flat and hate each other*
• People are inherently suspicious of paying money for something creative. It's the old 'I can write, draw better than that,why am I paying this idiot?' argument. And the scary thing is sometimes they're right.
• Often what you think is shit hot, is actually rubbish. It's ill-thought out, boring or derivative, which is a big word for boring. The world is full of shit books, films and telly that every one of their authors thought was 'great'.

But criticism and failure are good things. You learn from your mistakes and you learn to defend your work from points one and two and how to watch out for three. The interesting stuff usually makes no money, unless you're lucky, willing to wait or end up being dead (in the case of art).

To find out more, click on the new 'I'm not...' It's Alex Cox, a film maker who certainly put with more than his fair share of people saying 'no, do it again'.

This would be Peep Show, so proof that the cream rises to the top, eventually