Bain and Armstrong's Sundance diary

In the Guardian, a diary kept by comedy writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong on a recent trip to the Sundance Festival where Four Lions, the film they wrote (with Chris Morris and Sam Blackwell) was being shown.

Jesse: The screening goes well, but I find it excruciating. Sometimes when I'm scared of flying, I have this feeling like it's taking my full powers of concen­tra­tion to keep the plane in the sky. It's the same at the screening – as little pockets of laughs emerge here and there, I'm examining them for tone, timbre and implications. In my head I'm a sheepdog – circling the room wanting to shepherd people to draw the right inferences, go the right way.

Afterwards, I try to make a frank assessment of how the film has gone down. If it's possible for something to go rather well while simultaneously taking you repeatedly to the brink of throwing up throughout, that's what it felt like.