Annie Griffin on Festival

Relaxing into a leather armchair in a back room of London's Soho House, Annie Griffin prepares for yet another grilling. Or gentle probing, in this case. The American-born creator of the acclaimed Channel 4 series The Book Group has left her adopted home in Glasgow to promote her debut feature, Festival, an exuberantly dark snapshot of the Edinburgh fringe festival and the colourful performers it attracts.

Unlike many British films intent on making us laugh, Festival eschews saccharine romance or sitcom spin-off humour and emerges as an intricate character drama about comedians. So what led to this assured movie debut and what did British cinema do to deserve it?

"I came to Britain thinking I was going to be an actor and go to RADA, join the RSC and all that, but I hooked up with a fringe company," says Griffin with a faint smile. "We kind of directed each other, and I found that really interesting. One year I spent two or three months doing a show in Los Angeles which I'd done at the Edinburgh Festival. A producer had seen it and invited me to LA. Coming from the East Coast, I thought LA would be full of flaky people and that I wouldn't like it. LA is such a movie town and I'd always gone to movies and loved movies, but I had been in this experimental theatre world for ten years and thought of myself as an 'art' person. It just rekindled my interest in films and got me excited about them."

Next page • Invited to direct short animated inserts for MTV Europe in the early 90s, Griffin caught the filmmaking bug