Ben Wheatley: Cannes was the first time with a proper festival audience.

I think you have to protect yourself, kind of psychically, so you don’t think about it at all.

And then it’s just happening and you go ‘Oh’ and then it’s finished and you go ‘Oh, okay’.

And then afterwards you process it.

Maybe a month afterwards. And you go ‘Ah, well that was good, that went really well’ because If you invest too much in the moment, if it went badly then it could be too bad, too crushing and weird and horrible.

There’s all sorts of things that can go wrong, projector can fail or just goes badly and no one likes it.

What’s nice is in the same way that a horror film is interesting when you watch it with an audience and you can tell when they’re all upset and stuff, when people are laughing it’s a great feeling and when they keep laughing. It’s really, really good.

And you can tell, you can really tell from the screenings that people have really enjoyed the film.

It’s been good, you know, because there were moments after Kill List when I thought, 'Oh God, why, if it’s your job making entertainment, or making movies, why would you want to make people feel miserable?' And with this, it’s nice hearing people laugh.

Alice Lowe: It was also the point at which people knew genuinely nothing about the film.

It was so hot off the press literally. They’d had to race to finish it in time for Cannes.

No one knew even what the plot was. A lot of people are seeing it now and they’ve got an idea about what it’s going to be about but the best way to see it, is not to know anything about it. To genuinely be responding for the first time.

In Cannes, we got a standing ovation at the end.

I thought it was a joke. I didn’t understand what was going on, but that was really mad. It was cloud nine type of experience.