While Daniel Craig, Eva Green and others were lapping up the limelight at the huge press conference to launch The Golden Compass, the screen adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the author himself was at home in Oxford - ironing a shirt, he said, ready for the swanky party that's being thrown tonight. "I don't really want to come," he said, a touch glumly. "I'm viewing it as an anthropological experiment."
Michael Moore, while still retaining a mighty girth, has actually lost some weight - partly as a result, he says, of making his film Sicko, which is about the parlous (as he sees it) state of the US healthcare system. "I have been very fortunate with my own health considering I am one of the two-thirds of Americans who needs to walk around the block a little. Well, I started walking round the block a little. And I started eating those things that you guys refer to as 'fruits' and 'vegetables'. I have lost 25lb in the past couple of months. I am now a fairly skinny person - for the Midwest."
Roman Polanski had a hissy fit and stormed out of a press conference devoted to a collection of shorts by directors including the Coen brothers and Lars Von Trier. "It's a shame to have such poor questions, such empty questions. I think that it's the computer which has brought you down to this level. You're no longer interested in what's going on in the cinema. Frankly, let's all go and have lunch." Never a truer word was spoken. Your correspondent has often felt exactly the same way.
