A.V. Club: There’s a point in Submarine where Oliver realizes he isn’t just living a script, that he’s doing things that will have consequences and will shape who he is for the rest of his life.

Richard Ayoade: I think that’s the thing. I think he thought he could say, “Well, I’m about to have my formative relationship, then that will end, and I then I will go on,” and by being able to identify the cliché, he could circumvent its effect on him. But that’s not how it happens. I remember reading something Paul Thomas Anderson said, that you can often feel betrayed by films, because you’ve seen this moment dramatized before in a film, and I guess that’s what the moment in Magnolia where Philip Seymour Hoffman says, “This is part of the movie where you help someone out” is about. There’s no way of putting the genie back in the bottle, that kind of awareness of dramatized moments; you can’t erase it. In the most horrific circumstances of natural disaster, one of the main things that people are saying, “God, it looks like a film.” The moments when you should feel the most connected to things, there’s this awful, dissonant, alienating thing that occurs. I think that’s slightly what Oliver’s suffering from. He almost can’t take moments seriously, because he’s seen them before. To me, that seemed interesting, and isn’t done that much. Scream kind of did it. I think those first two Scream films are incredible, and The Faculty. There’s a real pocket of brilliant writing that Kevin Williamson did in the first season of Dawson’s Creek, which I loved. I really loved Kevin Williamson.