Casting today

Tell your friends you spent the day in an editing suite, on a set, or cracking a great idea, and watch them stifle the yawns.

Mention you spent the day casting models, however, and all of a sudden they're green with envy.

But, once the initial schoolboy excitement of "I'm going to be spending long periods of time in a room with exceptionally beautiful women" wears off (not, admittedly, as quickly as it should), I think there are few more tedious parts of the job.

Because, once you get past "I like/don't like her look" and "I think/don't think she's right for the part", it's really hard to say anything intelligent or useful.

There are few areas that are more purely an exercise in taste. And like anything else, the more opinions get taken into consideration, the more bland and compromised it becomes.

So New Year's resolution: from hereon in, I'm going to leave it up to my partner as much as possible.

Not only does her AD's eye she mean she has much better judgement about these things, she's also much less likely to suspend it because a candidate smiles sweetly at her.