I found that it sorted the men from the boys. When I sent out emails for it I definitely had a lot of respect for the people who turned up. You realise who your friends really are when the response to you scheduling a Flash Gordon screening with Timothy Dalton in attendance is that 50% of the people go, "OH MY GOD!" and then the other people don't respond at all. You're kind-of thinking, "I will never speak to those people again," the people that weren't impressed by that as a concept!

Doing that series was amazing and it was quite ironic in a way that because the strike in LA has pretty-much crippled the town, while I'd already agreed to do it I just had more time on my hands to actually put some effort into it in terms of getting the guests together. Timothy Dalton hadn't seen Flash Gordon in 27 years and he was bemused I was showing it, as he's always been bemused when I've talked about it!

Someone emailed me the other day to say they were showing Grindhouse at the Prince Charles [in London]. I thought, That's brilliant! And then I discovered they weren't, they were just showing the two films as a double bill. So I got in touch with The Weinstein Company and Momentum to say, "Just give them the print!" There is one in the UK because I showed it to the crew of Don't in the summer. Hopefully I've arranged that they'll get to show it at least once, but I don't know why they don't just show it properly.

I think the unfortunate thing is that there's a difference between a film being moved and a film being pulled. Grindhouse was supposed to come out in June and you had every magazine covering it, and then it wasn't on. And then when it comes back, it's in two pieces. Momentum-wise, that just confused people. People that weren't geeks didn't necessarily know what the separate parts were or what it was supposed to be and people who did know what Grindhouse was were pissed off that it had been split up and they weren't getting the extra stuff. It was unfortunate all round, really.

I know they wanted to do the split with the best of intentions and Quentin told me that my trailer wasn't going to be playing when it was split up because they wanted Grindhouse to retain some sort of mystique that it would eventually be released on DVD and hopefully start playing in rep. I hope that'll happen; if not now, then next year they'll start playing Grindhouse in rep cinemas as it was supposed to be seen.

I don't know, actually. I wanted to do a trailer with the Andys from Hot Fuzz done as if it was a really scuzzy cop-film directed by Lindsay Shonteff or some sort of Michael Winner-style cop-film with Rafe [Spall] and Paddy [Considine]. I think there's definitely more legs in the Andys. We talked about it at the time and I was saying there should be a spin-off trailer called Maximum Tache!

At one point I wanted to do one that was like a sixties morality thing; a swinging-sixties Reefer Madness type of thing. A take on all those films about the perils of London!

The idea with the casting came very early in terms of having stars in every part. It wasn't a case of, "Oh we can get these people so let's get this person playing the town doctor," the idea was that you'd watch the film thinking, "Why have they got Billy Whitelaw playing that hotelier? That's kind of a nothing part!" And most of the cast have played baddies in other films and that was the way we approached the casting in some respects - that these people had a presence so that when you're confronted with them as a team it looks like the ultimate Top Trumps spread of baddies.

And usually with films that are star-studded, people come in and out and do two days on them, but pretty much everybody was on there for the whole shoot. You've got scenes like at the Church fete where everybody is in the scene. Billy Whitelaw and Paddy and Jim and Simon and Nick, they're all there. Dalton is there just in the background saying, "Splat the Rat!" And it's all important.