You play with many tropes from romcoms and historical fantasy in the film: the idea and conventions of what love is in those genres is generally rammed down people’s throats in such a boring manner. In Timestalker, the character of Agnes is in a prison of conditioning over the different eras of patriarchal values. Was that something you were actively thinking about while writing? I think a lot of women have this double bind when you’re writing a narrative. You want your female heroine to be empowered and happy and self-actualised by the end, but that isn’t always the reality of life as a woman. So, I wanted to do both. You show someone having their happy ending, but you can choose to watch it in two ways. You can watch it as all a bit of a fantasy, and she doesn’t get what she wants. Or you can watch it as an optimist and a dreamer. It's all about challenging that narrative of romcoms. But also, asking what is a romcom? What’s a romantic narrative? And obviously there’s a history of what romance is and what romantic narratives are, which go back to the 18th century, which obviously is a period within the film. This woman is in love with a guy, but it becomes something more metaphysical by the end. And the point was to shake up that narrative and ask ‘what’s it all about?’ Can we not have narratives that are existential for women? It’s much more unusual. The film’s a bit of a metaphor for how I feel about filmmaking. It’s a romantic dream that you chase, and it can damage you.

Is filmmaking your amour fou? Yes, it is. This film has died a death so many times and been resurrected, it’s quite fitting to the concept. You have to have this evangelical belief in a project to get it made and it is crazy sometimes. The more idiosyncratic it is, the more you have to be insane to kind of pursue it. When you’re genuinely trying to do something new as well and you’re really trying to shake up convention and take risks… I can’t not do that. I try to sell out: it doesn’t work. I try to do something more conventional and nobody wants it because I’m shit at it, apparently!

Can you place yourself back in the mindset you had at the start of your career with those live Garth Marenghi shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, and the hopes and aspirations you had at that time? I’d been offered a job teaching English in Japan for a year for what seemed like a massive salary, and I turned it down. My parents thought I was insane because Richard Ayoade asked me to be in a play. It was like a sliding doors moment. It was only working with those guys that got me an agent and got me TV work. But then I think it’s taken a long time to give myself permission to have creative authority. Especially in that era, because that was the noughties, and I think we are starting to realise how toxic it was. There’s a lot of that in the film as well; there was a revival of romanticism then, because of Pete Doherty and stuff like that. Men were creative in a poetic way, which meant they could do what the fuck they liked, and women could be groupies if they were lucky, but generally they would not be part of the creative process. They could hang around and look pretty. It was a toxic era that disguised itself as being somewhat inclusive. Of course, you had Nuts and Zoo and these really awful attitudes, which was the era when I came into comedy. It dented my confidence a lot.

In Timestalker, there are colourful 18th-century costumes and all those 1980s New Romantic nods. One of the music videos in the film seemed to have a real Kate Bush vibe to it? Kate Bush is such an influence for me. One of the major influences on this film, in particular, is a lack of shame about femininity, that imagination and that softness: what’s wrong with that? We’re not used to seeing inside a woman’s head. Kate Bush is so intimate in what she sings; it ought to be embarrassing but it somehow isn’t because the beauty of it is so powerful you forget about the embarrassment. 

Timestalker is in cinemas from Friday 11 October.